Erik Bjerager, Kristeligt Dagblad, Denmark, was unanimously elected President of the World Editors Forum (WEF) on 14 February 2011 by the WEF Board for a two year mandate (2011 - 2013). The same day, WEF Board members also elected unanimously the Vice-President, Marcel van Lingen, GPD, Netherlands Press Association, for a period of two years.


The WEF Board currently has the following members (last update on 4 April 2011):

President

 
DENMARK     Mr Erik Bjerager
Editor-in-Chief and Managing Director; Kristeligt Dagblad

Erik Bjerager, born 1958, is editor-in-chief and managing director of the Danish national daily, Kristeligt Dagblad. He is a graduate from the Danish School of Journalism and holds an MA from The American University, Washington, D.C. Before taking his current post in 1994, Mr. Bjerager worked as a journalist in Denmark and abroad.

Vice President

Members:

BRAZIL    Mr Marcelo Rech
Editorial Director, RBS newspapers

Marcelo Rech, 51, is the first general director for Product in  RBS Group, one of the leading media groups in Brazil.  With HQ in Porto Alegre, southern Brazil, the group owns 18 TV stations, 2 community TV stations, 1 rural channel, 25 radio stations, 8 newspapers and 4 internet portals, among other media business.

Some of Rech's  responsabilities are the development of new projects in conventional and new media, the connection between the medias and vehicles, as well the coordination and supervision of editorial operations in RBS.

Marcelo Rech was a former reporter, specialized in internal and international conflicts. In 1993, he became managing editor of Zero Hora, the main newspaper of RBS and one of its flagships. Between 1997 and 2008 ,he was the editor of Zero Hora and the other seven newspapers of the group. Since 2008, he is in charge of media operations in four media platforms, which involves about 1,100 journalists and 800 people from different sectors and regions.   

Marcelo Rech is also the present coordinator of the editorial committee of the Brazilian Newspaper Association.

 
GERMANY     Mr Wolfgang Krach
Deputy Editor-in-Chief, Süddeutsche Zeitung

INDIA     Mr Raju Narisetti
Managing Editor, Washington Post

Before joigning The Washington Post in 2008, Raju Narisetti was Editor of Mint, a national business newspaper and website (www.livemint.com) published by HT Media Ltd. in with an exclusive content partnership with News Corp's The Wall Street Journal. Prior to conceiving and launching Mint in February 2007, Raju, a 13-year veteran of The Wall Street Journal, was Editor of The Wall Street Journal Europe as well as a Deputy Managing Editor of The Wall Street Journal in the U.S., where he also held overall responsibility for European and Middle East/Africa coverage for all editions of WSJ. Raju was named as a Young Global Leader in 2007 by the World Economic Forum and is on the board of Oxfam India.

ITALY    Mr Gianni Valenti
Vice-Director, Gazzetta dello Sport

Gianni Valenti, 45 years old, vice-director of the Gazzetta dello Sport. Together with  this newspaper's director (Carlo Verdelli), he was the chief of the transformation project of the Gazzeta in full color tabloid. Previously, he worked 17 years for the Corriere della Sera, where he covered the role of chief editor of Italian and international news. Also, he was one of the key figures (in  2005) for  the first transformation project of the Corriere della Sera in the full color format. 

MOROCCO     Mrs Nadia Salah
Editor, L'Economiste

Nadia SALAH is the administrator of Ecomedia Group (2 daily newspapers, a radio station, 2 news  magazines, one web site and professional books publishing). She is also chief editor of the Group's main publication: "L'Economiste". After studying economics and political science in Grenoble (France), she entered the Moroccan press: L'Opinion ( 10 years), then "La Vie Economique" (1 year), before creating the Ecomedia Group in 1991.

NORWAY   Mr Harald Stanghelle
Political Editor, Aftenposten

 

PAKISTAN    Mr Imtiaz Alam
General Secretary, South Asian Free Media Association

RUSSIA     Mr Vladimir Sungorkin
Editor-in-Chief and General Director, Komsomolskaya Pravda

SOUTH AFRICA     Mrs. Ferial Haffajee
Editor-in-Chief, City Press

Ferial Haffajee is the editor-in-chief of City Press, a leading national Sunday newspaper, a post she assumed in July 2009. Previously, she was editor-in-chief of the Mail & Guardian, the country's leading investigative weekly newspaper. In 2008, she was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. She sits on the board of the International Women's Media Foundation and GenderLinks, and is an alumnus of the Africa Leadership Initiative

TURKEY     Mr Ertugrul Ozkök
Consulting Editor, Dogan Media Group

Former Director and Editor-in-Chief, Hürriyet Gazetesi

UNITED KINGDOM    Mr George Brock
Professor and Head of Journalism, City University, London

Former president of the World Editors Forum, George Brock is also former Saturday Editor of The Times. He has been the paper's Managing Editor, Foreign Editor and Editor of the Op-Ed page as well as bureau chief in Brussels in the early 1990s. He is the co-author of two books and is a regular speaker and broadcaster.

UNITED STATES     Ms Gloria Brown Anderson
Vice President, International and Editorial Development, The New York Times
 

UNITED STATES     Mr Andrew Nachison
President and Co-Founder at iFOCOS - the Institute for the Connected Society
 

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