Dayton Duncan was the writer and co-producer of The National Parks: America's Best Idea documentary produced by Ken Burns, and has also been involved for many years with other series by Burns including The Civil War, Baseball and Jazz. For the 12-hour series The West about the history of the American West, broadcast in 1996, Duncan was the co-writer and consulting producer. It won the Erik Barnouw Award from the Organization of American Historians.

He is the writer and producer of Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery, a four-hour documentary broadcast in November 1997. The film attained the second-highest ratings (following The Civil War) in the history of PBS and won a Western Heritage award from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame, a Spur Award from the Western Writers of America, and a CINE Golden Eagle, as well as many other honors. He is the co-writer and producer of Mark Twain, a four-hour film biography of the great American humorist which was broadcast on PBS in 2002. His next film with Burns was Horatio's Drive: America's First Road Trip, about the first transcontinental automobile trip, which he wrote and produced. It won the prestigious Christopher Award and a Telly Award.

Kenneth Lauren "Ken" Burns (born July 29, 1953) is an American director and producer of documentary films, known for his style of using archival footage and photographs. Among his productions are The Civil War (1990), Baseball (1994), Jazz (2001), The War (2007), The National Parks: America's Best Idea (2009) and Prohibition (2011).

Burns' documentaries have been nominated for two Academy Awards, and have won Emmy Awards, among other honors.

Ken Burns was born in 1953 in Brooklyn, New York City, New York, according to his official website, though some sources give Ann Arbor, Michigan, and some, including The New York Times, give both Brooklyn and Ann Arbor. The son of Lyla Smith (née Tupper) Burns, a biotechnician, and Robert Kyle Burns, at the time a graduate student in cultural anthropology at Columbia University, in Manhattan. Ken Burns' brother is the documentary filmmaker Ric Burns.

Burns' academic family moved frequently, and lived in Saint-Véran, France; Newark, Delaware; and Ann Arbor, where his father taught at the University of Michigan. Burns' mother was diagnosed with breast cancer when Burns was 3, and died when he was 11, a circumstance that he said helped shape his career; he credited his father-in-law, a psychologist, with a signal insight: "He told me that my whole work was an attempt to make people long gone come back alive.". Well-read as a child, he absorbed the family encyclopedia, preferring history to fiction. Upon receiving an 8 mm film movie camera for his 17th birthday, he shot a documentary about an Ann Arbor factory. Turning down reduced tuition at the University of Michigan, he attended the new Hampshire College, an alternative school in Amherst, Massachusetts with narrative evaluations rather than letter grades and self-directed academic concentrations instead of traditional majors. He worked in a record store to pay his tuition.

Alfred Lansing (July 21, 1921–1975) was an American journalist and writer, best known for his book Endurance (1959), an account of Ernest Shackleton's Antarctic explorations.

Lansing was a native of Chicago, Illinois. After serving more than five years in the Navy, he enrolled at Northwestern University, and majored in journalism. Until 1949 he edited a weekly newspaper in Illinois. Thereafter he joined the United Press and in 1952 became a freelance writer.

Lansing is best known for his book Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage, the account of the failed expedition of Sir Ernest Shackleton and his crew to the South Pole in 1914. The book is named after the ship used by Shackleton, the Endurance, and it became a bestseller when it was first published in 1959. Whilst researching the book, Lansing spoke with ten of the expedition's surviving members and was granted access to the journals and personal diaries of eight others in order to get a more complete view of the expedition.

When he wrote Endurance, Lansing lived in Sea Cliff, NY with his wife, Barbara, and son Angus.

Paula Newton is an international correspondent with CNN and based in London covering stories in Africa, Europe and the Middle East. Newton is a former reporter for Canadian network CTV from 1993 to 2005. At CTV, Newton worked at various positions including:

Before CTV, Newton worked as:

She has also started filling in for anchors in London. She has been seen doing such shows as CNN Today, Inside the Middle East and World News Europe.