MSLAW Press Release:
Saturday, March 7 & Sunday, March 8
ANDOVER, MA --- Massachusetts School of Law (MSLAW) Dean
Lawrence Velvel is hosting a conference to discuss the serious problems facing
the news media, as well as possible corrective actions. One goal of the
conference 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.
The
conference, Full-Court Press: Facing & Fixing Media Problems, is open to
the public, and will take place at the law school on Saturday, March 7, and
Sunday, March 8. An array of journalism thinkers will participate,
including:
*Karen
Dunlap – president of The Poynter Institute
*Lou Ureneck – 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. “
*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 topics
to be covered include
* Print News Media
Decline in Competence
* Inadequacy of
Broadcast, Cable TV, and Radio News
* Newspaper
Ownership – family v. corporate
* Ideology and
government financing of media
* Media
gullibility regarding the War in Iraq and the War on Terror
* Are the news
media reluctant to admit their mistakes?
* Satire and News
Reporting
* Has the Decline in Media Competence (Especially Print)
Reduced Their Role of the Voice of the Poor and Disenfranchised?
* Should
Journalism Schools Change Teaching and Learning?
* Can the Internet
Be a Corrective for News Media Ills?
* Universities and
Philanthropies and Media Owners
CONFERENCE
INFORMATION FOR MEMBERS OF THE PUBLIC
The
conference begins on Saturday, March 7 at 8 a.m., and concludes on Sunday,
March 8, at 4:30 p.m. Breakfast and lunch are included for both days, and
the law school has reserved rooms at a discounted rate at the Wyndham Boston
Andover hotel, a five-minute drive from the school.
Attendance
is open to the public by reservation only. The admission fee is $36,
which includes all sessions and meals. Students will be able to attend at
a 50% discount. Those who wish to be in the audience should reserve their
place by phoning/e-mailing MSLAW Assistant to the Dean Rosa Figueiredo at (978)
681-0800, ext. 113 or [email protected]. Those interested in registering
online should go to www.regonline.com/facingandfixingmediaproblems.
The Massachusetts School of Law (MSLAW) is located in
Andover, Massachusetts. Its mission is to make practical, affordable,
high quality legal education, and resulting social and economic mobility,
available to capable but less privileged persons who have been traditionally
excluded from the legal profession.
