January 13, 2015 — The Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School is pleased to announce the appointment of their Spring 2015 Fellows.
“The line-up of Shorenstein Fellows for the spring semester is a group of all-stars – every one of them,” said Alex S. Jones, the Center’s director.
Shorenstein Center Fellows spend the academic semester researching, writing, participating in events and interacting with students, faculty and the Harvard community. Since 1986, the fellowship program has welcomed more than 250 accomplished journalists, scholars and politicians from around the globe.
The Spring 2015 Fellows are distinguished leaders in political and investigative reporting, digital governance and technology.
Joan Shorenstein Fellows
William E. Buzenberg is the former executive director of The Center for Public Integrity, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative news organization based in Washington, D.C. He stepped down from the Center in early 2015 after eight years. Previously, he was vice president for news at National Public Radio, as well as NPR foreign affairs correspondent and London bureau chief. He was also senior vice president of news at American Public Media/Minnesota Public Radio (1998-2006). In 1997, Buzenberg was a Fellow at Harvard’s Institute of Politics (IOP). He is co-editor of the memoir, Salant, CBS, and the Battle for the Soul of Broadcast Journalism. While at the Shorenstein Center, Buzenberg will explore journalistic collaboration in the digital age.
Jackie Calmes joined The New York Times as a national correspondent in August 2008 and covered the presidential election, the financial crisis and the first five years of the Obama administration. Today she has a broad mandate to cover politics and policy. Formerly, she worked at The Wall Street Journal for 18 years. Calmes covered Congress, elections, the Clinton and Bush administrations, and often focused on fiscal policy. She was chief political correspondent at The Wall Street Journal from 2005 to 2008. In 2005, she received the Gerald R. Ford Journalism Prize for Reporting on the Presidency. While at the Shorenstein Center, she will write about partisan media.
Michele Norris is an award-winning journalist and NPR host and special correspondent. Norris also leads “The Race Card Project,” an initiative to foster conversations about race and cultural identity that she created after publication of her 2010 family memoir, The Grace of Silence. In 2014, The Race Card Project was honored with a Peabody Award for excellence in electronic media. Prior to joining NPR in 2002, Norris spent nearly ten years as a reporter for ABC News. She has also worked as a staff writer for The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times. While at the Shorenstein Center, she will lead a series of study groups on the role of race and cultural identity in politics, policy and pop culture.
David Weinberger is a philosopher who writes about the effect of technology on ideas. He has been a philosophy professor, journalist, strategic marketing consultant to high tech companies, internet entrepreneur, advisor to several presidential campaigns and a Franklin Fellow at the U.S. State Department. He was a gag writer for the comic strip “Inside Woody Allen” from 1976-83. Formerly, he served as the co-director of the Harvard Library Innovation Lab. He is the author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined, Everything Is Miscellaneous, Too Big to Know and the co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto. At the Shorenstein Center, he will write about news media through the lens of open platforms.
Walter Shorenstein Media and Democracy Fellows
Aneesh Chopra is the co-founder of Hunch Analytics, an open data and analytics company serving the healthcare and education sectors. Chopra was appointed as the first U.S. Chief Technology Officer by President Obama in 2009. In this role, he was charged with promoting innovation to address urgent national priorities. In 2012 he left the White House and ran for lieutenant governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia in 2013. Chopra is the author of Innovative State: How New Technologies Can Transform Government. At the Shorenstein Center, he will be periodically in residence and work in partnership with Nick Sinai to drive an ambitious program on data as public infrastructure.
Nick Sinai was most recently U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer, where he led President Obama’s Open Data Initiatives to increase access to data and encourage innovation and economic growth. Sinai also led the Open Government Initiative to foster federal government transparency, and helped start and grow the Presidential Innovation Fellows program, which brings entrepreneurs and technologists into the federal government. Prior to joining the Obama administration, Sinai was a venture capitalist at Lehman Brothers Venture Partners (now Tenaya Capital) and Polaris Partners. At the Shorenstein Center, he will speak widely, lead study groups, and research the media, policy and economic implications of providing greater public access to government data.
Press contact:
Katie Miles: 617-496-8636 or katie_miles@hks.harvard.edu
