Ben Bagdikian, the
“dean of American media critics” and Dean Emeritus of Berkeley’s
Graduate School of Journalism, is one of the most respected figures in
American journalism. The New York Times has called him “an
exemplar to a generation of journalists.” The American Society of
Newspaper Editors voted him “Journalism’s Most Perceptive
Critic.”
As a reporter and
editor for more than 30 years, Bagdikian won almost every top prize in
American journalism, including the Pulitzer and broadcasting’s
Peabody Award.
While an editor at the Washington
Post, he was a strong advocate for publishing the highly
controversial Pentagon papers.
Bagdikian’s landmark
work, “The Media Monopoly,” is the most famous book among media
scholars in the past 23 years. Ridiculed as “alarmist” when it
first came out, it is today praised as a masterpiece for the unerring
accuracy of its predictions. Bagdikian warned that deregulation of the
media under Reagan’s Federal Communications Commission was leading
to corporate ownership and monopolization of the media. The current
(sixth) edition expands to cover the Internet and the integration of
news and entertainment conglomerates.
Bagdikian has written
five other books including: his latest, “Double Vision: Reflections
on My Heritage, Life, and Profession”; “In the Midst of Plenty:
The Poor in America”; and “The Information Machines.
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Walter
Cronkite, the former managing editor of CBS Evening News, has
been called the most trusted man in America. He was the only journalist to be voted among the top ten “most
influential decision-makers in America” in surveys conducted by U.S.
News and World Report and was named the “most influential
person” in broadcasting. In 1985, Cronkite was inducted into the
Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame.
Cronkite
began his career in journalism as a campus correspondent at the Houston
Post, where he worked part time during high school and his
freshman year in college. His
newspaper work, along with a magazine article he read about a foreign
correspondent, motivated him to quit the University of Texas in 1935
and take a full-time news job at the Houston Post.
As a
correspondent for United Press, Cronkite covered the major events of
World War II – landing with the invading Allied troops in North
Africa and later in the Normandy beachhead assaults. After reporting
the German surrender, Cronkite established United Press bureaus in
Europe, was named United Press bureau chief in Brussels and covered
the Nuremberg trials of Goering, Hess and other top Nazis. From 1946
to 1948, he was chief correspondent for United Press in Moscow.
He
is the recipient of a Peabody Award, the William White Award for
Journalistic Merit, an Emmy Award, the George Polk Journalism Award,
and a Gold Medal from the International Radio and Television Society. His
1996 autobiography, “A Reporter's Life,” was a bestseller.
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Loren Ghiglione is the
Dean of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. He
previously held the James M. Cox Chair in Journalism at Emory
University and has been a professor and director at the Annenberg
School at University of Southern California.
He is the author of
“The American Journalist:
Paradox of the Press” for which he
curated a companion exhibit that opened at the Library of Congress and
then toured nationally. He is the editor of six books on journalism,
including “The Buying and Selling of America's Newspapers” and
“Rodell Revisited: Three Hundred Years of the American Newspaper.”
He has authored and edited dozens of groundbreaking reports, including
“An American in Peking: A Personal Look at China’s Newspapers”
and “Gentlemen of the Press: Profiles of American Newspaper
Editors.”
A former president of
the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE), Ghiglione has spent
most of his career in community newspapers. From 1969-95, he served as
editor and publisher of The Southbridge (Mass.) Evening News
and president/owner of its parent company.
He has been a member of
four Pulitzer Prize juries, consultant to the Freedom Forum’s
Newseum and was a founding officer of the National News Council.
An authority on
diversity in the newsroom, he founded the Task Force on Minorities in
the Newspaper Business and serves on a national journalism educators
task force on leadership and diversity. He chaired ASNE exchange
delegations to Russia and reporting trips to China, the Middle East,
Central America and southern Africa.
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Felix Gutiérrez
is a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the
University of Southern California. A former senior vice president of
the Freedom Forum and Newseum, he is now executive director of the
Freedom Forum's Pacific Coast Center in San Francisco.
Gutiérrez was among the first scholars to focus on Latinos and
media.
He
is the author or
co-author of four books and more than 50 scholarly articles or book
chapters. His 1995 co-authored book, “Race, Multiculturalism and the
Media: From Mass to Class Communication,” won the 1996 Gustavus
Myers Award as Outstanding Book on Human Rights in North America.
Other co-authored books include:"Spanish Language Radio in the Southwestern United States,” “Telecommunications Policy
Handbook” and “Minorities and the Media: Diversity and the End of
Mass Communication.”
Gutiérrez’s
work has been recognized by the Asian American Journalists
Association, Association of Education in Journalism and Mass
Communication, Black College Communication Association, California
Chicano News Media Association, National Association of Hispanic
Journalists and National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association.
He
is a member of the Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism
Hall of Achievement and was awarded the Missouri Medal by the
University of Missouri School of Journalism.
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Jay
T. Harris holds the Wallis Annenberg Chair in Journalism and
Communications at the Annenberg School for Communication at the
University of Southern California. He is founding director of The
Center for the Study of Journalism and Democracy, which is located at
the school.
Harris
designed and launched the American Society of Newspaper Editors’
annual national census of minority employment in daily newspapers. It
remains the industry benchmark to this day, and helped earn Harris a
place on the list of the 20th century’s 100 most influential black
journalists.
During
his seven years as chairman and publisher of the San Jose Mercury
News, Harris led the paper to national prominence. He made the Mercury
News a national pioneer in multi-cultural publishing. During his
years as publisher the newspaper posted record profits and built one
of the industry’s most diverse staff and management teams in one of
the nation’s most diverse cities. The newspaper also became known
for its innovative use of the Internet during his tenure.
Harris
is a Presidential Professor at Santa Clara University where he also
teaches. He is founder and president of Deep River Associates, an
organization working to improve the health of communities and
strengthen the vitality of democracy in America. He is a member of the
Pulitzer Prize Board of Directors and the National Advisory Board of
the Poynter Institute, a national media think tank.
Harris
began his journalism career as a reporter and editor in Delaware and
Pennsylvania and later served as assistant dean of the Medill School
of Journalism at Northwestern University.
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An acclaimed television
commentator, Ellen Hume appeared weekly as a media analyst on CNN’s Reliable
Sources and on PBS’s Washington Week in Review. The
recipient of numerous honors and fellowships, she has conducted
journalism and democracy workshops in the United States and in Russia,
Bosnia, Poland and the Czech Republic.
Hume has
more than 30 years of experience as a reporter and analyst, including
Washington stints for The Wall Street Journal and the Los
Angeles Times. She is
author of the prizewinning "Tabloids Talk Radio, and the Future
of.News" and “Journalism and Citizenship” and is a contributor to
“Democracy and New Media.”
Recent projects include “The Media Missionaries,” a report
on U.S.-sponsored media development around the world, for the Knight
Foundation.
Hume served
as Executive Director at Harvard University’s Shorenstein
Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy where she staffed
research projects on U.S. presidential campaign coverage, “Race,
Press and Politics,” and the U.S. press coverage of Tiananmen
Square.
As the founding
executive director of PBS’s Democracy Project she developed news
specials that encouraged citizen involvement in public affairs. She
oversaw PBS’s election coverage, creating PBS Debate Night
and Follow the Money, PBS’s weekly television and Web series.
At PBS, she developed “resource journalism,” a multimedia approach
to news coverage.
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Donald
L. Miller, Lafayette College’s John Henry MacCracken Professor of
History, regularly serves as a consultant and on-air scholar for the
longest-running, most-watched history series on television, PBS’s American
Experience. Miller’s next project for American Experience,
based on his own critically acclaimed book, “City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America,”
premiered January
2003.
His
past American Experience projects include: Ulysses S.
Grant; Abraham and Mary Lincoln: A House Divided; and America
1900 (winner of a Peabody Award).
Miller
is lead scholar and on-air host of A Biography of America, a
video series and telecourse (26 half-hour programs) that aired on PBS
stations throughout the country. It was produced by WGBH Boston in
cooperation with the National Archives and Records Administration and
the Library of Congress.
Miller’s
books have received critical acclaim and been nominated for almost
every major national literary prize. His most recent book is "The Story of World War II"
a revised, expanded and updated version of
Henry Steele Commager’s classic. He co-authored "The Kingdom of Coal: Work, Enterprise & Ethnic Communities in the Mine Fields” and co-wrote a seven-part National Public Radio series based on the
book He is the author of "Lewis Mumford: A Life"
and “New American Radicalism: Non-Marxian
Radicalism in the 1930s.” Miller is also editor of “The Lewis
Mumford Reader” and was recently named a contributing editor of American
Heritage magazine.
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Al
Neuharth built Gannett Co. Inc. into the largest
newspaper company in the United States and started the nation’s most
widely read newspaper, USA Today, which ushered in a new era in
newspaper design. While he was president and then chairman of Gannett,
annual revenues increased from $200 million to $3.1 billion. The
company had 21 years – 85 consecutive quarters – of uninterrupted
earnings gains.
Neuharth
took his first job as a newspaper carrier, later working in the
composing room at the weekly Alpena (S. D.) Journal. He
eventually became a reporter, editor and finally the most successful
publisher in the U.S., culminating in his election as chairman and
president of the Newspaper Association of America.
American Journalism Review named
Neuharth the most influential person in print media for the 1980s.
He
writes a weekly column for the domestic and international editions of USA
Today called “Plain Talk,” which also appears in other
newspapers.
Neuharth was founding
chairman of one on the nation’s largest private charitable
foundations, the Freedom Forum, a nonpartisan, international
foundation that has assets of more than $1 billion. The foundation is
dedicated to a free press in the United States and around the world.
The Forum’s Newseum (Arlington, VA) is an acclaimed museum of
journalism history and educational exhibits.
Neuharth has written seven books, including his
autobiography, “Confessions of an
S.O.B.,” which had a long run on
The New York Times and other best-seller lists. His “Window
on the World” was based on personal interviews with 32 foreign
heads-of-state.
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Pamela
Newkirk is the author of “Within the Veil: Black Journalists, White
Media,” which won the National Press Club Award for Media Criticism.
Critics consider it the definitive work on attempts to integrate
newsrooms in America.
Newkirk
serves as a professor at the New
York University Department of Journalism and Mass Communications. Her
primary areas of interest are race in the news media and African
American art and culture. She is a recipient of the prestigious
“Golden Dozen” teaching award for her classroom work.
Prior
to joining the NYU faculty, Newkirk worked as a journalist at four
different daily news organizations, including New York Newsday,
where she was among a reporting team awarded a Pulitzer Prize for spot
news.
Her
articles have been published in a wide range of publications including
The New York Times, The Nation, The Washington Post and ARTnews.
She is the author of “The Kerner Legacy,” which appeared in the Media
Studies Journal. Her forthcoming book is “A Love No Less: More
Than Two Centuries of African American Love Letters.”
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Geneva
Overholser holds the Washington Reporting Chair for the University of
Missouri School of Journalism. She has
been named “Best in the Business” by the American Journalism
Review, “Print Journalist of the Year” by the National Press
Foundation and was twice selected Gannett’s “Editor of the Year”
while she was in Des Moines.
In 1985, she was
awarded a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University, after which she
took a job at The New York Times as an editorial writer
specializing in foreign affairs and security issues. As editor of the Des
Moines Register she became one of the most highly placed women
journalists in America.
Under
her editorship the Register won the Pulitzer Prize Gold Metal
for Public Service. After leaving the Register, Overholser became the reader ombudsman for The Washington Post
and a syndicated columnist for The Washington Post Writers
Group. She writes regularly for Columbia Journalism Review
about newspapers.
She is a member of the
Board of Directors of the American Society of Newspaper Editors and of
the Pulitzer Prize Board. She serves as a member of the boards of the
Knight Fellowships at Stanford, the Alfred Friendly Press Fellowships,
the Howard University Center for the Study of Race and Media, and the
PBS television show, Media Matters, and is a trustee of the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
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Gene
Roberts has been described as the “dean of American newspaper
editors, the recognized voice of journalism’s universal core values:
accuracy, balance, and courage.”
Roberts became the
executive editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1972. In the
subsequent 18 years, he led that newspaper to national prominence and
its staff to 17 Pulitzer Prizes. He has since served on the Pulitzer
Board and as a judge. He became a professor of journalism at the
Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland,
taking a leave of absence in 1994 to serve as managing editor of
The New York Times. In 1998 he retired from The Times
and returned to his professorship.
He has co-authored four
books, including, “Leaving Readers Behind: The Age of Corporate
Newspapering” and “The Censors and the Schools” and had his
journalistic writings anthologized in four others, including “Black
Protest in the Sixties” and “The White House: The First Two
Hundred Years.” He was editor-in-chief of the American Journalism
Review’s “State of the American Newspaper Project,”
published in 2000.
Roberts
began his career as a farm reporter for The Goldsboro (N.C.)
News-Argus. He eventually joined the staff of The New York
Times where he first headed that paper’s coverage of the 1960s
civil rights movement in the South and then served as its chief war
correspondent in Vietnam.
He
is a board member for the World Press Freedom Committee and the Center
for Foreign Journalists. Among
his awards are the Distinguished Contributions to Journalism Award and
the Fourth Estate Award for Distinguished Contributions to Journalism
from the National Press Club.
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America Rodriguez, the
author of “Making Latino News: Race, Language, Class,” is a
Professor at the University of Texas at Austin in the College of
Communications.
Rodriguez’s
book examines Latino newsmaking as part of a larger narrative about
the cultural productions and conceptions of Latinos. She traces
historical and commercial contexts of Latino-orientated news
production, beginning with late 19th century and early 20th century
Spanish-language newspapers in the United States, examines the
production of contemporary Latino news and postulates future
developments in the field.
Her
work has been praised for its insights into Latino media in the U.S.
and for her skillful exploration of the cultural and economic forces
shaping media and its power to influence an increasingly diverse
citizenry.
Rodriguez
spent ten years as a journalist, most recently as a Los Angeles-based
correspondent for National Public Radio. She recently published
articles on:
the national news systems of the United States, Mexico, and
Canada; the relationship between Mexican and U.S. news production; and
on Spanish-language broadcasting in the United States. She is a member of the University of Texas Diversity
Community.
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David M. Rubin, dean of the
Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, is
co-author of “Media: An Introductory Analysis of American Mass
Communication,” for decades one of the leading introductory college
texts in America.
Prior to arriving at Syracuse
University, Rubin was, for 19 years, a member of the faculty and a
chair of the Department of Journalism at New York University. While at
NYU he was co-founder of the Center for War, Peace and the News Media,
which still assists journalists in covering U.S.-Russian relations.
At Newhouse, he established a
development program that has significantly increased annual fund
giving to the School; added the Knight Chair in Political Reporting;
helped to establish the Gene Media Forum, whose mission is to help
journalists cover the revolution in gene research; and assisted in the
creation of the Center for the Study of Popular Television. He
introduced computer-based, multimedia education into the School’s
curriculum.
Rubin headed the Task Force on
the Public’s Right to Know for the President’s Commission on the
Accident at Three Mile Island. He has served as a Pulitzer Prize
judge. His articles on music have
appeared in such publications as Harper’s, High Fidelity,
Musical America, Boston Review, Connoisseur and Chamber
Music Magazine.
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Michael
Schudson is arguably the country’s most respected scholar writing
about newspapers and their relationship to society, politics and
culture.
He is the author of
five books and editor of two others concerning the history and
sociology of the American news media including the seminal
“Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers”;
"The Power of News";
"The Sociology of News";
"Advertising, the Uneasy
Persuasion"; and "Rethinking Popular
Culture." He co-edited "Reading the
News"
and "Watergate in American Memory: How
We Remember, Forget and Reconstruct the Past."
He is the recipient of
a number of honors, including a MacArthur Foundation “genius”
award (which recognized him as an “interpreter of public
culture”); a resident fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in
the Behavioral Sciences; and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
American Historical Review
judged Schudson’s most recent work, “The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life” to be “innovative, perceptive, and –
especially on today’s culture – controversial.”
Schudson
is Professor both of Communication and of Sociology at the University
of California, San Diego where he has taught since l980. He is
co-director of the school’s Civic Collaborative, a project funded by
the Pew Charitable Trusts to link university faculty and students to
the broader San Diego community.
His
articles have appeared in: Media, Culture and Society, Journalism
and Mass Communication Quarterly, The Communication Review,
Newsletter of the Sociology of Culture, Critical Studies in
Mass Communication, Columbia Journalism Review and American
Prospect.
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