Tom is founder and president of the Banyan Project, which aims to strengthen democracy through high-quality, Web-based journalism that engages the civic energy of less-than-affluent everyday citizens --  people who are the bread and butter of American life but are ill-served by mainstream journalism and too often out of the public spotlight.

He has been named a 2010-11 fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, where he will work on detailed Banyan business planning.  His Banyan efforts led to his winning a 2010 Game Changer Award presented by the annual WeMedia Conference in Miami.
Selected Publications and Speeches
 
      Changing the Game for the Future ot Journalism
                Address to annual WeMedia Conference, University of Miami, March 2010
                http://wemedia.com/2010/03/10/tom-stites-game-changer-acceptance-speech/
 
      Editors -- The Best Is Yet to Come?
                Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, December 2008
                http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/sites/cyber.law.harvard.edu/files/Editors_MR.pdf
 
      Sitting Between the Extremes: Why a Journalist Writes Haiku
               UU World, Fall 2007
               http://www.uuworld.org/spirit/articles/35891.shtml

     Needed: More Excellence in Journalism
               Essay published by Citmedia.org, December 2006
               http://citmedia.org/blog/2006/12/30/guest-posting

     Is Media Performance Democracy’s Critical Issue?
               Keynote speech, Media Giraffe Conference, July 2006
               http://citmedia.org/blog/2006/07/03/guest-posting

     Improvisational Faith: Jazz and Unitarian Universalist Theology
               Cover article, UU World, September/October 2003
               http://www.uuworld.org/2003/05/feature1.html

     How Corporate Personhood Threatens Democracy
               Cover essay, UU World, May/June 2003
               http://www.uuworld.org/2003/03/feature1a.html

 
 
 
 
Tom is an editor, entrepreneur and writer with a passion for strengthening journalism and democracy.
 
As an editor he has supervised reporting that has won an array of major journalism awards including the Pulitzer Prize; as an entrepreneur he has been the founding publisher of two print magazines, a newsletter, and an on-line magazine. His writings and speeches on strengthening democracy and on journalism have won a respectful following.
Positions Tom has held include national correspondent, national editor, and associate managing editor for project reporting at The Chicago Tribune; night national editor of The New York Times, and managing editor of The Kansas City Times. Most recently he served for a decade as the editor and publisher of UU World, the national magazine of the Unitarian Universalist religious denomination, and as a consulting editor for the Center for public Integrity.
 
Tom grew up in Kansas City and attended Williams College. He has taught in the Graduate School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago and conducted seminars at several journalism schools. In 2006 he was a Resident Fellow at Harvard Divinity School, where did research on power and the conscience.
Photo: John S. Mercer
Contact:  tom@tomstites.com