David Leigh is a British journalist, author, editor, and Anthony Sampson Professor of Reporting in the journalism department at City University London. He has been a prominent investigative journalist since the 1970s and is currently investigations editor of the Guardian. He was educated at Nottingham High School and King's College, Cambridge, receiving a research degree from Cambridge in 1968. He was a journalist for the Scotsman, Times, and Guardian (UK) and a Laurence Stern fellow at the Washington Post in 1980. From 1980, he was chief investigative reporter at the Observer.

Luke Harding is the Guardian's Moscow correspondent. He was previously the Guardian's South Asia correspondent in New Delhi and has reported for the paper from Afghanistan and Iraq.

Ed Pilkington is the Guardian's New York correspondent. He is a former national and foreign editor of the paper and is the author of Beyond the Mother Country.

Robert Booth is the author of Boston's Freedom Trail, which has been in print for twenty-five years, and has contributed to the anthology Salem: Place, Myth & Memory. A graduate of Harvard and Boston Universities, he is curator emeritus of the Pickering House in Salem and serves on the boards of several history organizations. He lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts.

Paul Michael Garcia, an AudioFile Earphones Award winner and former company member of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, received his classical training in theater from Southern Oregon University, where he worked as an actor, director, and designer.