SABEW announces four prominent speakers for annual conference

The Society of American Business Editors and Writers announced that for prominent speakers have joined the line-up for its annual conference, to be held April 26 to April 28 in Denver.

The speakers are Christina Gold, president and chief executive officer at Western Union; Dave Hunke, CEO of the joint operating agency that oversees the business operations of the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News; Lynn Turner, a former chief accountant at the Securities and Exchange Commission; and William Cohan, author of “House of Cards,” a just-published book that tracks the fall of Bear Stearns.

At Denver-based Western Union, Gold oversees a network of more than 350,000 agent locations in 200 countries and territories. Western Union is the global leader in the money transfer business, which immigrants the world over depend upon. Fortune magazine named her one of America’s 50 most powerful women in business in 2003, 2006 and 2008.

Hunke, who is also publisher of the Free Press, has been in the newspaper business for 30 years. He is in charge of this year’s move by the two Detroit dailies to drop home delivery for four days of the week and put more focus on the papers’ Web sites. “Detroit may prove to be a laboratory for determining whether a large metropolitan daily can meld print and online into a successful business model, or eventually become online only,� media analyst John Morton recently told the American Journalism Review.

Turner, who was actively involved in the legislative process that led to passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, served as the chief accountant for the SEC from 1998 to 2001. He has an unusually broad perspective, having been a corporate director, a trustee of both a mutual fund and a public pension fund, an accounting professor, a partner at a major international auditing firm and a chief financial officer. Turner received the SEC chairman’s Award for Excellence twice.

Cohan wrote “The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Freres & Co.”, a 752-page book that won the Financial Times/Goldman Sachs award for the best business book of 2007. He began his career as an award-winning newspaper reporter and then spent 17 years on Wall Street, working at Lazard and as a managing director at JP Morgan Chase.

To register for the conference, go to www.sabew.org.