Los Angeles Times Moderators

Marc Ballon

2A: Business Incubators: Tech Support & Advice for Fast Growth, 1:30 to 2:30 p.m., Sept. 24

4D: Balancing Social Responsibility and Profits, 4 to 5 p.m., Sept. 24

Marc Ballon covers entrepre-neurship and small business for the Orange County Edition of The Times. He has been a journalist for nearly a decade, working at Inc., People and Forbes magazines.

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Pat Benson

Pat Benson edits small-business coverage for The Times Business section.

Sharon Bernstein

1A: Licensing and Marketing Your Medical Ideas, 11 a.m. to Noon, Sept. 24

Sharon Bernstein covers health care for the Business Section. Bernstein, who joined The Times in 1992, has covered politics, media, technology and general news. Her reporting on health-care issues in 1998 won top honors for investigative reporting from the Greater Los Angeles Press Club, as well as the Chapin Media Award.

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Marla Dickerson

1C: The 10 Best/Worst Southern California Cities for Small Business, 11 a.m. to Noon, Sept. 24

2C: Getting Free Media Coverage for Your Business, 1:30 to 2:30 p.m., Sept. 24

Marla Dickerson reports on small-business trends, financing and policy issues for the Business Section. Before joining The Times in 1996, she was a national reporter at the Detroit News and a business reporter at the Rochester Times-Union in New York.

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Ashley Dunn

4A: Y2K Triage: Five Things to Do in Three Months, 4 to 5 p.m., Sept. 24

6A: Stamps.com: an Online Success Story, 11 a.m. to Noon, Sept. 25

Ashley Dunn is a technology reporter, covering the year 2000 problem, networking and Internet portals.

Before joining the Business Section of The Times, Dunn wrote the Mind & Machine column for the New York Times’ online technology section, Cybertimes.

Dunn has been a reporter since 1982, working for metropolitan staffs of the Los Angeles Times, New York Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

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James Flanigan

4C: Top Businesses in the New Millennium, 4 to 5 p.m., Sept. 24

5B: Getting Venture Capital, 8:30 to 9:30 a.m., Sept. 25

James Flanigan is senior economics editor and business columnist for The Times. He has covered national and international business and economics for 36 years.

His column, which appears Sundays and Wednesdays, also is syndicated to such newspapers as the Houston Chronicle and the Kansas City Star and to newspapers in South Korea, Japan and other countries.

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Jonathan Gaw

7D: Top Industry Methods--Tech Coast, 2:45 to 3:45 p.m., Sept. 25

Business reporter Jonathan Gaw covers electronic-commerce issues, policies and trends. He began writing about technology and business in 1994 while at the Plain Dealer in Cleveland, where he helped inaugurate the newspaper’s personal technology section.

Before joining The Times last year, Gaw was a reporter at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis. He was also a general assignment reporter for The Times from 1989 to 1994.

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Stephen Gregory

7E: Top Industry Methods--Exporting, 2:45 to 3:45 p.m., Sept. 25

Stephen Gregory is a freelance business writer for The Times, focusing on import/export issues. He has been a journalist for 10 years, working for a wire service bureau in Mexico City and freelancing for U.S. News & World Report, among other publications.

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Juan Hovey

1B: Little-Known Money Sources, 11 a.m. to noon, Sept. 24

2B: Guerrilla Financing--Early-Stage Capital, 1:30 to 2:30 p.m., Sept. 24

Juan Hovey writes a business finance column that appears every Wednesday in The Times’ Small Business pages. His work has also appeared in Nation’s Business magazine, Risk and Insurance magazine, Independent Business, Life Assn. News, Independent Agent, Professional Agent and Rough Notes.

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P.J. Huffstutter

5C: Business Tools of the Future, 8:30 to 9:30 a.m., Sept. 25

P.J. Huffstutter is a technology writer, covering software and chip manufacturers based in Orange County, and the convergence between entertainment, technology and youth culture. Huffstutter joined the paper in 1997.

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Paul Jacobs

3D: Top Industry Methods: Biomedical/ Bioscience, 2:45 to 3:45 p.m., Sept. 24

Paul Jacobs covers the biotechnology industry. He has written about the race to sequence the human genome, the competition to find the perfect diet pill, the impact of news leaks on biotech stock prices, and the difficulty in financing emerging biotech companies when markets favor Internet stocks.

In more than 20 years at The Times, he has covered medicine, state government and campaign financing.

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Karen E. Klein

5E: Marketing to Minorities, 8:30 to 9:30 a.m., Sept. 25

7F: Top Industry Methods--Retail, 2:45 to 3:45 p.m., Sept. 25

Karen E. Klein is a freelance writer and small-business columnist who writes the weekly Small Talk and Learning Curve columns and coordinates the Small Business Make-Over feature for the Los Angeles Times. She also writes the Smart Answers advice column for Business Week’s frontier section and contributes regularly to BusinessWeek Online.

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Karen Robinson-Jacobs

1F: Women’s Unique Business Strengths, 11 a.m. to Noon, Sept. 24

3F: Top Industry Methods--Manufacturing, 2:45 to 3:45 p.m., Sept. 24

Karen Robinson-Jacobs is the author of the weekly Valley@ Work column that appears in the San Fernando Valley edition of The Times. She covers all aspects of business in the San Fernando, Santa Clarita and Antelope valleys, with an emphasis on real estate, retailing and small business.

Robinson-Jacobs joined The Times in 1989 as an assistant metropolitan editor. She left the newsroom in 1991 to help launch the New Media Department. While there, she served as editor of The Times’ book on the Northridge earthquake. She returned to the newsroom as a reporter in 1997.

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Lee Romney

1D: Business Programs and Resources for Minorities, 11 a.m. to noon, Sept. 24

6C: The Times Small-Business Survey, 11 a.m. to noon, Sept. 25

Lee Romney covers the Latino business community and Latino consumer market for the Los Angeles Times Business Section. She has been a reporter with the Los Angeles Times for seven years, starting at the former San Diego County edition, where she covered U.S./Mexico border issues.

Romney has also covered immigration in the San Gabriel Valley, the city of Santa Ana, the Orange County bankruptcy, and crime and law enforcement. She joined the Business Section in downtown Los Angeles in 1998.

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Bill Sing

Bill Sing is the editor of The Times’ Business Section. Before being named to that position in 1996, he served five years as deputy business editor. He joined The Times in 1979 as a staff writer.

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Vicki Torres

Vicki Torres writes At Issue, a weekly column in The Times examining legal, economic and legislative concerns affecting small business. She is the co-author of Entrepreneurship 101, a series on starting and growing a business that is posted on The Times’ Web site at https://latimes.com/smallbiz. She frequently appears on KFWB’s Noon Business Hour and KOCE’s The Real Orange. Torres oversaw programming and booking as part of The Times staff that created this year’s small-business conference.

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Roger Vincent

7A: RealSelect--an E-Commerce Success Story, 2:45 to 3:45 p.m., Sept. 25

Roger Vincent supervises coverage of commercial real estate and workplace issues for The Times Business Section. Before joining The Times in 1996, he was editor of California Real Estate Journal and real estate editor at Los Angeles Business Journal.

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Debora Vrana

6B: How to Take Your Company Public, 11 a.m. to Noon, Sept. 25

Debora Vrana covers investment banking issues for The Times. She joined the newspaper as a staff writer in 1994 after covering the securities industry for the Los Angeles Business Journal.

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Cyndia Zwahlen

3E: Top Industry Methods--Business Consulting, 2:45 to 3:45 p.m., Sept. 24

5F: Preparing Your Business for Merger or Acquisition, 8:30 to 9:30 a.m., Sept. 25

Cyndia Zwahlen writes the Business Make-Over, Family Business and Mind to Market columns that appear Wednesdays in The Times’ Small Business pages. She also edited “Los Angeles Times Business Make-Overs: Experts Solve the Challenges of Real Companies Like Yours,” a book published by The Times this fall. She is a former assignment editor in The Times’ Business Section. Zwahlen joined The Times after a four-year stint as business editor at Copley Los Angeles Newspapers. Previously, she was a business reporter at the Los Angeles Daily News. Zwahlen began her journalism career at the Los Angeles Business Journal.

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Elaine Zinngrabe

3A: EarthLink--The Success Story, 2:45 to 3:45 p.m., Sept. 24

Elaine Zinngrabe is business editor for Latimes.com. She manages the online content for the Business Section and special projects. Before joining The Times, Zinngrabe was new-media manager for USC News Service. She has also worked as a copy editor at the Seattle Times and Democrat & Chronicle in Rochester, N.Y.