Conferences:
FULL-COURT PRESS: FACING & FIXING MEDIA PROBLEMS
MASSACHUSETTS SCHOOL OF LAW ORGANIZES CONFERENCE THAT EXAMINES SERIOUS PROBLEMS FACING THE NEWS MEDIA
Saturday, March 7 & Sunday, March 8
Lawrence R. Velvel, dean of the Massachusetts School of Law (MSLAW) at Andover, is deeply concerned about the country, and is hosting a conference to discuss the serious problems facing the news media, as well as possible corrective actions. One goal of the conference, indeed, will be to determine the feasibility of establishing organizations to promote particular solutions and, if this is feasible, to subsequently seek the creation of these organizations.
Particularly because one of the conference’s goals is to consider and subsequently promote solutions to a most serious problem, we hope that the conference will make an important contribution to the future of news gathering and reporting in this country. We believe we have assembled a stellar group of panelists for this two-day event, which is by reservation only.
*Karen Dunlap – president of The Poynter Institute
*Tyler Marshall – Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent who co-wrote the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism study – “The Changing Newsroom.”
*Lou Ureneck – chair of the Boston University Department of Journalism and former deputy managing editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer
*Chris Hedges – is a journalist and author, specializing in American and Middle Eastern politics and society. He was part of The New York Times team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for the paper's coverage of global terrorism. In 2002, he received the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism.
*Robert Rosenthal – executive director of the Center for Investigative Reporting and an award-winning journalist with nearly 40 years of experience. He has worked for some of the most respected newspapers in the country, including the New York Times, Boston Globe, Philadelphia Inquirer, and the San Francisco Chronicle.
*Bob Giles – curator of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University, who worked for nearly 40 years as a newspaper reporter and editor, most recently as editor and publisher of The Detroit News, which he joined in 1986 as executive editor.
*Rick Edmonds – Poynter Institute media business analyst who tracks the latest industry developments. Worked as a reporter and editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and was an editor and publisher for the St. Petersburg Times organization, 1982-1993.
*Bill Densmore - career journalist, publisher, entrepreneur and director of the Media Giraffe Project at UMass Amherst New England News Forum, and a collaborator on Journalism That Matters.
*Art Howe – chief executive of Verve Wireless and Pulitzer Prize-winning former reporter and former owner of 50 local newspapers.
*Kristina Borjesson – is the editor of Into the Buzzsaw, the highly-acclaimed expose of American investigative journalism and winner of the National Press Club’s Arthur Rowse Award for Press Criticism.
*June Cross – assistant professor of journalism at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism – Emmy Award and DuPont-Columbia Award winner – “I've watched with sadness as the television news industry has buckled beneath the forces of corporatization. I came to the Journalism School because I wanted to train a guerilla army of journalists who would undermine celebrity-driven and shallow news stories.”
*Michael Levine – host of “Expert Witness Radio Show,” which primarily centers around issues of government ineptitude and media complacency - with a particular focus on politics and the intelligence community.
*Robert Ferrante -- brings a wealth of experience in broadcast journalism to his post as executive producer of “The World.” A one-hour daily radio newsmagazine offering a mix of international news, in-depth features, and music from around the globe, The World is heard by more than two million listeners each week on public radio stations nationwide. Ferrante joined The World in 1998, returning to WGBH after a nine-year tenure as executive producer of National Public Radio's “Morning Edition” and seven years with CBS.
*Peter Phillips – director of Project Censored - a media research program working in cooperation with numerous independent media groups in the US. Project Censored’s principle objective is training of students in media research and First Amendment issues and the advocacy for, and protection of, free press rights in the United States. Project Censored has trained over 1,500 students in investigative research in the past three decades. Through a partnership of faculty, students, and the community, Project Censored conducts research on important national news stories that are underreported, ignored, misrepresented, or censored by the US corporate media.
*Jon Sawyer – director of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, who had a 31-year career with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, including 12 years as Washington bureau chief.
*Bill Katovsky - author of the oral history, Patriots Act: Voices of Dissent and the Risk of Speaking Out (2006), and co-author of Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq (2003), which won Harvard's Goldsmith Book Prize.
*John Walcott – Washington Bureau Chief of McClatchy Newspapers and part of a team that won a National Headliners Award for ``How the Bush Administration Went to War in Iraq.''
*Zoriah Miller – freelance photographer, whose New York Times photo of a dead Marine (July 2008) caused Miller to be barred from covering the Marines after he posted the picture and other graphic pictures of dead Americans and Iraqis on his Web site.
*David Cay Johnston -- is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and author. Until April 2008, he was a senior reporter with The New York Times but now works as an independent author and reporter. He is the author of best-selling books on tax and economic policy, the most recently published of which is Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense and Stick You With The Bill.
*Paul Hitlin – is the content supervisor for the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. He co-wrote the study “Journalism, Satire or Just Laughs? ‘The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,’ Examined.”
*Charlotte Dennett – is an author and attorney, who, throughout her career, has been tough on powerful corporations and irresponsible government entities. She spent over a decade documenting the role of Big Oil in destroying the Amazon rain forest and its peoples Thy Will be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon HarperCollins (1995) and has continued to expose the role of Big Oil in shaping and misshaping American policy in the U.S., Middle East, and Latin America.
*Scott Lewis – is executive editor of voiceofsandiego.org, a nonprofit, independent and insightful online newspaper focused on issues impacting the San Diego region.
*Dean Nelson – is the founder and director of the journalism program at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. “VoiceofSanDiego.org is doing really significant work, driving the agenda on redevelopment and some other areas, putting local politicians and businesses on the hot seat. I have them come into my classes, and I introduce them as, ‘This is the future of journalism.’”
*Margaret Wolf Freivogel – is editor of The St. Louis Beacon, a nonprofit, online publication dedicated to news that matters for people in the St. Louis region. Founded by veteran journalists, the Beacon aims to serve and engage citizens by creating a distinctive new news medium.
*Jonathan V. Last - online editor of The Weekly Standard and a weekly commentator for The Philadelphia Inquirer. He wrote a Wall Street Journal Taste Commentary – “Schools for Scribblers - Newspapers dwindle, but journalism graduates keep coming.”
*Louis Freedberg is director of the California Media Collaborative, a nonprofit initiative devising new strategies for improved coverage. He was an editorial writer at the San Francisco Chronicle where his major areas of coverage included immigration, education and children’s issues. He worked at the Chronicle as a staff writer covering education and higher education; as a correspondent in the Chronicle’s Washington D.C. bureau during most of the Clinton presidency; and as a senior writer for the Chronicle's Sunday Insight section.
*Michael Parks is a journalist and educator whose assignments have taken him around the globe, and whose "balanced and comprehensive" coverage of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa earned him the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. From 1997-2000, Parks served as editor of the Los Angeles Times, a period during which the Times garnered four additional Pulitzer Prizes. Parks joined the University of Southern California Annenberg School of Communication faculty in Fall 2000. In Fall 2001, he became interim director of the School of Journalism. He was named director of the school in March 2002 and finished his term June 30, 2008.
*Russ Baker is an old-fashioned muckraking journalist and pamphleteer using the newest technologies. In his reporting and writing he brings the best of mainstream methods (balance and rigor) to the alternative media, and the best of the alternative media (passion for the truth and the larger story) to the mainstream. He focuses on getting past the rhetoric to expose the hidden levers and machinations that shape our world. Baker’s investigative reporting, analysis pieces, features, and essays on politics, power, and perceptions have appeared in many of the world’s finest publications.
* Benjamin M. Compaine has divided his career between the academic world and private business. He is currently teaching technology entrepreneurship at Northeastern University and is a senior consultant for the Innovation International Media Consulting Group. His most recent project (2006) involved creating a strategic plan for a major publishing company in Moscow, Russia.
The preliminary conference schedule is listed below.
FULL-COURT PRESS: FACING & FIXING MEDIA PROBLEMS
March 7-8, 2009
Massachusetts School of Law at Andover
Dean Lawrence R. Velvel
Organizer
Revised Schedule
Saturday, March 7, 2009
8:00 am: Breakfast
9:00 am: Welcome and Introductory Remarks – Dean Velvel
Session #1 – Print News Media Decline in Competence
9:15 am: Cutting costs and buyouts/bureaus closing/shorter stories/beat reporter ignorance/political claims not challenged or verified
2 Panels – 30 minutes each + 30 minutes for audience
10:45: Coffee Break
Session #2 – Newspaper Ownership – family v. corporate
11:00 am: Do family owned newspapers turn out better journalism?/Why are there less family-owned newspapers?/Are corporate-owned newspapers weaker stewards of public interest issues?
11:45 pm: Lunch
Session #3 -- Inadequacy of Broadcast, Cable TV, and Radio News
12:45 pm: Highly paid attractive news readers/FCC rule manipulation/cable TV partisanship/advertising trumps news/entertainment drives out news
2 Panels – 30 minutes each + 30 minutes for audience
2:15 pm: Coffee break
Session #4 – Ideology and government financing of media
2:30 pm: Is ideology playing a greater role in media reporting (Fox News and MSNBC -The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal)?/How well do the BBC, PBS, and NPR report on the government and the powerful? Should the U.S. adopt the BBC model?
3:30 pm: – coffee break
Session #5 – Media gullibility regarding the War in Iraq and the War on Terror
3:45 pm: Feckless reporting of Administration claims/Embedded reporters/Delay in publishing important stories (i.e. NSA spying)/No American war dead photos/No Al Jazeera English on American TV
2 Panels – 30 minutes each + 30 minutes for audience
5:15 pm: Coffee Break
Session #6 – Are the news media reluctant to admit their mistakes?
5:30 pm: Why don’t they inform readers about which reporters and columnists get things right and get things wrong?
6:15 pm: Adjourn
7:30 pm: Dinner
Sunday, March 8, 2009
8:00 am: Breakfast
Session #7 – Satire and News Reporting
9:00 am: Is satire effective journalism?/Borowitz/political cartoons/Stewart & Colbert/”The Onion”
10:00 am: – coffee break
Session #8 – Has the Decline in Media Competence (Especially Print) Reduced Their Role of the Voice of the Poor and Disenfranchised?
10:15 am: Advertisers and profits-seeking want news of interest to the wealthy and middle-class
Session #9 – Should Journalism Schools Change Teaching and Learning?
11:00 am: Are journalism students of the first rank intellectually?/Are the students taught critical thinking concerning the issues they will cover?/Should undergraduate departments (i.e. economics) encourage a minor in journalism?/
2 Panels – 30 minutes each + 15 minutes for audience
12:15 pm: Lunch
Session #10– Can the Internet Be a Corrective for News Media Ills?
1:15 pm: Will newspapers become solely electronic?/Will newspapers on the Web be formatted to replicated the look and design of the printed product?/What is the future of Web-based news gathering entities, such as the Center for Investigative Journalism and ProPublica?
2 Panels – 30 minutes each + 30 minutes for audience
2:45 p.m. – coffee break
Session #11 – Universities and Philanthropies and Media Owners
3:00 pm: Should wealthy universities and philanthropies band together to create a fund(s) to finance creation of high quality news organizations?/How well has the Poynter Institute – St. Petersburg Times model worked?
4:00 pm: Summing Up – Dean Velvel
4:30 p.m: - Adjourn
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