The Banyan Blog is conducted by Tom Stites, founder and president of the Banyan Project and a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. The Banyan Project aims to strengthen democracy through high-quality, Web-based journalism that serves less-than-affluent everyday citizens and engages the civic energy of this huge public, which is ill-served by mainstream journalism.
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 print/Web newsletter, and two on-line publications. 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.
