May 4 Townhall Panelists

Alfred Edmond is a senior vice president and editor-in-chief at Black Enterprise magazine. He is a member of the senior management of the magazine's parent company, Earl G. Graves Ltd. He is responsible for the long-term planning, budgets and editorial content of the magazine and its related media products. He also supervises the magazine's editors and the art and production departments.

Edmond joined Black Enterprise as an associate editor in 1987. He has been the senior editor of MBM/Modern Black Men magazine (1986), an associate editor for the Daily Challenge
(1985) and managing editor of Big Red News (1983-1985). He is a member of NABJ and a lifetime member of the New York Association of Black Journalists (NYABJ). He earned the NYABJ Chapter Service Award in 2000 for his work with the chapter's High School Journalism Workshop.

Walter T. Middlebrook, associate editor for recruitment at Newsday, is responsible for all newsroom recruiting and the paper's internship programs. He also oversees the Tribune Co.'s Metpro/Editing program. Middlebrook joined New York Newsday in 1990 and has held several editing positions, including opening the paper's Brooklyn bureau. He was also involved in two of its Pulitzer Prize-winning teams for local news coverage. He spent two years at the New York Times as editor of Styles of the Times.

He has held editing positions at USA Today, the Detroit News and the St. Paul Pioneer Press. A former business writer/columnist, he has worked at the Minneapolis Star, the Boston Globe and the Memphis (Tenn.) Commercial Appeal. He is a 1983 fellow of the Robert Maynard Institute for Journalism Education's Summer Editing Program. He serves on the board of the Metcalf Institute for Marine and Environmental Reporting at the University of Rhode Island.