Jay Harris turned his journalist's eye for detail to the introductions he gave to the panelists joining him for the session.

Robert Rosenthal, known as Rosey, has been with us since last fall when he joined the San Francisco Chronicle as its managing editor. Most people in journalism began at the bottom and worked their way up. When Rosey was a news clerk at the beginning of his career, he worked on the Pentagon Papers. Most news clerks work on getting coffee and paper. Working for The Boston Globe and New York Times, he has been a foreign correspondent covering Africa and the Middle East, and rose to the position of executive editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer and was at the Inquirer during a period in which that paper won an unprecedented 17 Pulitzer Prizes.

Mary G. F. Bitterman is a fourth-generation Californian, and a native of San Jose. Before she was appointed to the leadership of The Irvine Foundation in 2002, she embraced the city as the president and CEO of KQED. KQED was on the brink when Mary arrived. She brought it from the valley of the shadow of death to something that is probably appropriately devised in the third part of Dante's great work where you reach the level of paradise. KQED is one of the leading broadcast centers in the nation, and it operates the most watched public television station and the most listened-to public radio station in the U.S.

David Lyon is actually the only person who knows what's going on in this state these days. David is an expert in so many fields, including the California economy, population growth in our state; and he worked for many years at the Federal Reserve Bank as an economist and was a vice president and an officer of the Rand Corporation. Since he took over the Public Policy Institute of California, the institute has put out a series of consistently objective, informative publications which have helped all of us, regardless of our particular point of view on a subject, have that sort of factual, non-partisan base on which to base informed opinion.