Uwe-Karsten Heye
was born in 1940 and worked as press advisor and speech-writer for the then SPD chairman Willy Brandt.
In the 1980s, he was active as a freelance writer for ARD and ZDF. In 1990, he became the press spokesman for Gerhard Schröder in Lower Saxony, and between 1998 and 2002 he acted as the federal government's spokesman and head of the federal press and information office. He then went on to become Consul General of the German Federal Republic in New York.
Heye has been the Editor-in-Chief of the SPD party newspaper Vorwärts since 2006. He is a founding member and chairman of "Gesicht Zeigen! Aktion weltoffenes Deutschland," an association designed to promote tolerance in Germany.

Cecilia Bäcklander
Cecilia Backlander is currently the Department Head of Adult Education TV and Radio Programming for the Swedish Educational Broadcasting Company.
She has more than 30 years of experience in media production as Manager of multimedia projects and Producer of TV and Radio programs, Concentrating on subjects related to social and economic issues
Winner of many Swedish and international media prizes for documentaries with a focus on cultural and social themes, Ms. Backlander is presently producing for broadcast on National Swedish TV (SVT) a series of programs on racism and xenophobia.

Venelin Petkov
is Producer and Anchor of the Balkan News Corporation, Bulgaria since September 2000.
He is part of the company?s initial news team and is reporting for evening newscasts and in-depth news shows. Furthermore he is producing and directing documentaries, especially on environmental and military topics. Prior to this Venelin Petkov worked as a morning anchor and as reporter for Channel 1, Bulgarian National Television.
Since November 1999 he is also contributing feature packages from Bulgaria to CNN?s international shows as a CNN World Report Contributor.

Eric Markuse
Erik Markuse held positions at the Kieler Nachrichten, BILD and tz München before becoming the deputy editor-in-chief at the Hamburger Morgenpost.
Since June 2001, Markuse has been working at MDR, the main public broadcasting corporation for Central Germany. Markuse worked as a company spokesman there in charge of the communication department's press- and marketing-related activities until November 2006; between December 2004 and April 2007, he was also in charge of new media-related activities (online and videotext). Since July 2006, Markuse has been the head of programming for the recently launched multimedia program MDR SPUTNIK.

Gergely Pröhle
Gergely Pröhle was born in 1965 and pursued studies in German and international relations at the University of Budapest. From 1988 to 1989, he received a DAAD stipend to study in Hamburg.
From 1993 to 1998, Pröhle ran the Budapest office of Germany's Friedrich Naumann Foundation, after which time he was named state secretary in the Hungarian Ministry of Culture. From 2000 to 2002, he acted as Ambassador of Hungary in Berlin. He then moved on to represent Hungary as ambassador in Switzerland. Since 2006, Pröhle has been active as a senior consultant at Roland Berger Strategy Consultants and as a writer for Hungary's second-largest weekly newspaper, Heti Válasz. He is also honorary head of the Protestant Church in Hungary.
Pröhle is married and has four children.

Christoph Lanz
Christoph Lanz was born in Darmstadt in 1959. Since 2002, he has been the director of television at Deutsche Welle, which makes him responsible for managing DW-TV, Germany's state-sponsored international television broadcaster. In 1990 Christoph Lanz started at RIAS TV in Berlin, where he first worked as a host/announcer and then as an editor-in-chief. After the political changes in Germany and the subsequent dissolution of RIAS TV, Deutsche Welle took over the studios and related facilities of RIAS TV in Berlin in 1992 and launched DW-TV. Lanz was responsible for overseeing the relaunch of DW-TV in 1998. Since then he has helped establish the broadcaster's international reputation as a high-quality news, information and cultural-programming broadcaster.