Pitch tank: Pitch our panel of journalists and see if your story sinks or swims

Laura Kiesel, Freelance journalist, Freelance journalist

Doug Banks is executive editor of Boston Business Journal, where he oversees editorial content on the company’s website, multiple electronic newsletters, weekly print edition, and panel and award events. Doug appears as a news analyst on New England Cable News and is a guest lecturer, speaker and panel moderator on issues from regional business and economic trends to communications, journalism and digital media. He previously was publisher and editor of BBJ sister company Mass High Tech and was associate vice president for economic development at the University of Massachusetts. He has also worked as an editor at Fast Company magazine.

Lylah Alphonse is the managing editor for government rankings and news at U.S. News & World Report, where she oversees coverage of national issues from politics and policy to higher education and health care. She appears regularly on WGBH-TV’s “Greater Boston” and “Beat the Press.” She previously worked as a senior editor and writer at Yahoo.com, where she wrote about politics, health, career, and parenting trends and interviewed political notables including first lady Michelle Obama, Dr. Jill Biden, Valerie Jarrett, and others on-camera and off. Before joining Yahoo, she spent 16 years as an editor and writer at The Boston Globe, working in the National News, Living/Arts and Sunday Magazine departments and writing the parenting column on Boston.com. She earned a Bachelors of Science in Journalism from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, and was inducted into their alumni hall of fame in 2000

JoAnna Klein is a freelance science journalist based in Brooklyn. She has published research about how the brain processes emotion in Joseph LeDoux’s lab at NYU. Now she holds up a magnifying glass to the ways in which science intersects with our everyday lives. Klein experiments with form to tell stories in the digital space, including for the Trilobites column at The New York Times Science Desk, the Observatory section of The Science Times, and as a collaborator on The Daily 360. Her stories have appeared in The New York Times, Inverse.com, Newsweek, Motherboard and The Scientist, among others.