Shorenstein Center names spring fellows

CNN’s Tokyo bureau chief, a United Nations information service director, and the editor of The Hindu are among the fellows this semester at the Kennedy School’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy.

“Our fellows have a particularly strong international dimension this semester,” said Alex S. Jones, director of the Shorenstein Center, “which is appropriate in our very global media world, and we hope to take full advantage of their wide range of knowledge and experiences.”

The 2004 spring fellows are as follows

Ingrid Lehmann is the former director of the UN’s Information Service in Vienna and currently teaches in the Department of Communication at the University of Salzburg, Austria. In her 25-year career with the UN, Lehmann has also served as director of the Information Offices in Washington, D.C., and Athens. She has worked in the UN’s Department for Disarmament Affairs and in its peacekeeping missions in Cyprus and Namibia. Lehmann is the author of “Peacekeeping and Public Information – Caught in the Crossfire” (Frank Cass & Co., 1999). While a fellow at the center, she will compare U.S. and German media reporting on the UN weapons inspectors in Iraq in 2002-03.

Rebecca MacKinnon is CNN’s Tokyo bureau chief and correspondent, responsible for the global news network’s coverage of Japan. Since becoming CNN’s Tokyo bureau chief and correspondent in July 2001, MacKinnon has covered major events in Japan, Korea, Pakistan, and the Philippines. She has traveled frequently to South Korea to cover developments related to the North Korean nuclear standoff, and has visited North Korea five times during her career at CNN. Previously, MacKinnon served for more than three years as CNN’s Beijing bureau chief, responsible for the network’s coverage of China. She joined CNN in Beijing in 1992 as a producer and began reporting on-air for CNN in 1996. MacKinnon will examine the issue of whether new technology and new media can be used to create better journalism.

Seth Mnookin is working on a book about the Howell Raines era at The New York Times and the rapidly changing media landscape (to be published by Random House in late 2004). Previously, he worked as a senior writer on the national affairs staff of Newsweek magazine, where he covered media, politics, crime, and popular culture. He wrote Newsweek’s cover story on the Jayson Blair scandal, and authored a weekly online column about the media titled “Raw Copy.” Prior to joining Newsweek, Mnookin was a senior correspondent for Brill’s Content and Inside.com. Mnookin has written about music and pop culture for a number of publications, including The New Yorker, New York magazine, Details, Spin, The New York Observer, Slate, and Salon.com.

Narasimhan Ravi is the editor of The Hindu, one of India’s leading English-language daily newspapers with a circulation of 950,000. In his career as a journalist, he served as a correspondent, assistant editor, leader writer, Washington correspondent, deputy editor, and associate editor before taking over as editor in 1991. He was the chairman of the Press Trust of India (PTI) – India’s largest news agency – in 1999-2000, and is now a director on the board of PTI. He is a member of the executive committee of the Editors Guild of India, and is also associated with the International Press Institute and the Commonwealth Press Union. Ravi will examine press coverage of the Iraq war across continents.

Barbie Zelizer is the Raymond Williams Professor of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication. A former journalist, Zelizer has authored or edited seven books, including the award-winning “Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory Through the Camera’s Eye” (University of Chicago Press, 1998), “Covering the Body: The Kennedy Assassination, the Media, and the Shaping of Collective Memory” (University of Chicago Press, 1993), and “Journalism After September 11” (Routledge, 2002). “Taking Journalism Seriously: News and the Academy” and “Reporting War: Journalism in Wartime” will be published in 2004. She is also a media critic, whose work on cultural memory, journalism, and images has appeared in The Nation, Newsday, and on the “MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour.” While at the center, Zelizer will be writing a book on “about-to-die” photographs in contemporary U.S. journalism.

Based at the Kennedy School of Government, the Shorenstein Center is a Harvard research center 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.