Keynote Presentation: by Laura Ling
 

Laura Ling is the host and reporter on E! Investigates, a documentary series on the E! Network, which explores topics such as teen suicide and the challenges faced by military spouses.

Prior to joining the E! Network Ling served as Vice President of Current TV's journalism department and created Current's weekly investigative documentary series Vanguard.  Ling also worked as a correspondent reporting on crucial issues from around the world. She has reported from dozens of countries and has covered subjects including slave labor in the Amazon, Mexico's drug war, Internet censorship in China, and women's rights in Turkey.

In March 2009, while reporting on the trafficking of North Korean women, Ling was detained by North Korean soldiers along the Chinese-North Korean border. She and her colleague Euna Lee were arrested and held captive in North Korea for 140 days before being granted a special pardon and returning to the United States.  She has since sought to shine a light on the issue of trafficked women as well as to bring greater attention to the plight of other imprisoned journalists around the world. 

Ling has also worked as a series producer for Channel One News where she produced reports from around the globe.  Ling co-created Breaking it Down, a documentary series on MTV that aired between 1999 and 2001.  Her work has also appeared on ABC'sNightline, NBC, PBS, and the WB. 

Ling is co-author of Somewhere Inside: One Sister's Captivity in North Korea and the Other's Fight to Bring Her Home, that she penned with sister Lisa. 

Keynote Presentation: by Dick Finnegan 

Sponsored by:  

The Recession's Over and I Quit!

Dick Finnegan – President, Finnegan Mackenzie, The Retention Firm and CEO, C-Suite Analytics 

Now that you survived the recession, will you survive the recovery? Recessions take away profits but recoveries take away people. Unless you escape the trends from past recoveries as well as current workforce predictions that many employees are looking to leave, your employee turnover is about to rise.

Join Dick Finnegan, author of "Rethinking Retention in Good Times and Bad", as he presents solutions for keeping your best workers. Dick's book has been praised by BusinessWeek as "fresh thinking for solving the turnover problem in any economy".

Keynote Presentation: by Thad Roberts 

Sponsored by:

Inspiration for the New York Times Best Seller-Sex on the Moon 

Thad Roberts