Neil Budde - Online News Innovator

Budde joined Yahoo! News in November 2004 as general manager and helped build the site into the No. 1 news site on the Internet, with a 8+ million user lead according to Comscore. He has led the team that completed a major redesign of the site and that produced the company's first original multimedia news offering: Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone, for which Sites has been honored with the 2006 Daniel Pearl Award for Courage and Integrity in Journalism. He was elected to the board of the Online News Association in October 2005 and became its treasurer in January 2007.

Previously, Budde was the founding editor and publisher of The Wall Street Journal Online, the largest paid news site on the Internet with nearly 700,000 subscribers at the time he left. His pioneering work on WSJ.com began in early 1993 when he started formulating the original ideas for an online version of The Wall Street Journal. His self-built Visual Basic prototypes of an online Journal soon found wide favor within Dow Jones and he was asked to form a small team to create an online Journal in late 1993. After a year spent working on a proprietary approach to delivering the product he had envisioned, Budde and his team recognized that the Internet offered a better technology platform for achieving their goals. Work switched to the Internet in early 1995, and the team launched its first site – Money & Investing Update – in July of that year. In April 1996, the team rolled out the full Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition and stunned many observers by announcing that it would soon begin charging for access to the site. It stuck with that business model through the Internet bubble and steadily grew the subscriber base as well as advertising revenue, achieving a cash-flow-positive status in late 2002.