Shorenstein fall fellows selected

Three career journalists and an educator have been selected as 2001 Fall Fellows at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, a research center based at the Kennedy School of Government (KSG). A scholar focusing on the media’s role in former Communist states has been named Visiting Lombard Professor for fall 2001.

The new fellows include a former president of CNN-US and an investigative reporter from India. All four will spend the semester researching and writing on topics ranging from the evolution of American journalism to the lessons learned from Internet coverage of the 2000 elections.

“The center is going to be especially enriched this fall, with expertise that spans the globe, from journalism in post-Soviet Russia and India to the insider world of Washington, D.C., and the upper reaches of CNN to the historic evolution of news in the United States as a whole,” said Alex Jones, director of the Shorenstein Center. “We are enormously pleased to be able to provide the KSG community with such a powerful human engine for probing media issues.”

The 2001 fall fellows

Kevin G. Barnhurst is associate professor of communication at the University of Illinois, Chicago. His book with John Nerone, “The Form of News: A History” (The Guilford Press, 2001), won the Covert Award for media history in 2001, and his “Seeing the Newspaper” (St. Martin’s Press, 1994) won a Mellett Citation for media criticism and was named a best book of 1994 by In These Times magazine. Barnhurst’s Shorenstein Center project extends research on the redefinition of American journalism.

Andrew Glass has been senior correspondent at the Cox Newspapers since 1997, after serving more than 20 years as the chain’s Washington bureau chief. Shortly after the Cox Washington Bureau was founded in 1974, Glass joined the staff to cover national politics. Since 1980, he has written a weekly column on national and foreign affairs for the Cox Newspapers, which is syndicated by the New York Times News Service. Glass has covered the White House and Congress for the Washington Post, Newsweek, and the former New York Herald Tribune. His research topic at the Shorenstein Center is “The Net Election: Lessons from 2000 and What Comes Next?”

Rick Kaplan was a broadcast journalist for more than 30 years. As president of CNN-US (1997-2000), he was responsible for all news and programming at the CNN News Group. Kaplan joined ABC News in 1979 as a senior producer for “World News Tonight.” From 1979 to 1997, he was executive producer for a variety of ABC News and ABC television network programs, including “Good Morning America” news, “Nightline” (1984-89), “Primetime Live” (1989-94), “World News Tonight”(1994), and ABC-TV special projects. Kaplan was the visiting lecturer in the Lombard Chair at the Shorenstein Center during the spring of 2001 and taught a module titled “Do American Media Meet the Needs of a Modern Democracy?”

Ramindar Singh has had a career in journalism spanning three decades as an investigative reporter, war correspondent, aviation and defense affairs analyst, political commentator, and editor of several Indian newspapers. Until August 2001 he was editor of the Sunday Times of India. From 1995 through 2000 he was the editor of the Times of India, New Delhi. Singh was a Nieman Fellow in 1981-82 and has an abiding interest in issues concerning press freedom and freedom of information, which he intends to pursue at the Shorenstein Center.

The Visiting Lombard Professor for fall 2001 is Ellen Mickiewicz, the James R. Shepley Professor of Public Policy Studies, professor of political science, and the director of the DeWitt Wallace Center for Communications and Journalism of the Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy at Duke University. A specialist on media and politics, especially in the former Soviet Union and Eastern and Central Europe, she is also a fellow of The Carter Center. She is author or editor of numerous journal articles and of seven books. Her most recent book – “Changing Channels” (Duke University Press, 1999) – is a study of the role and impact of television from 1985 to 1999. While at the Shorenstein Center, Mickiewicz will be teaching a course titled “Media and Policy in Post-Communist Societies.” The Laurence M. Lombard Professorship that Mickiewicz will hold was established by the family and friends of Laurence M. Lombard, a director of the Dow Jones Co. for 28 years, to help build a substantial body of knowledge concerning the interaction of media and politics.

The Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy is a Harvard research center, based at the Kennedy School, dedicated to exploring the intersection of press, politics, and public policy in theory and practice. The center strives to bridge the gap between journalists and scholars, and increasingly, between them and the public.