March 6, 2010 — The Gov 2.0 Camp New England went a long way toward proving that “spontaneous” and “organized” aren’t mutually exclusive terms. Described as an “unconference,” the event brought together a wide range of participants, including government employees, contractors, and officials; students from the Harvard Kennedy School, MIT, Tufts, and beyond; academics and […]

A paper by Elisabeth Gidengil, spring 2000 fellow, and Joanna Everitt from the Department of History and Politics, University of New Brunswick – St. John, builds upon the concept of “gendered mediation” to argue that conventional news frames construct politics in stereotypically masculine terms – which has implications for the coverage of female leaders. Content analysis […]

December 1, 2009 — As ProPublica‘s editor of distributed reporting, Amanda Michel differentiated between “networked newsgathering” and “citizen journalism” at a Shorenstein Center brown-bag talk. According to Michel, “the term ‘citizen journalist’ has done a real disservice” to the journalism profession. It has “evoked a platonic ideal of someone who is a substitute good … someone […]

Jacobin contributing editor Daniel Bessner reports on the current risk-averse state of the screenwriting business in Hollywood—discussing compensation trends and tracing the history of its value in the film and television industries through company consolidations, labor movements, streamers’ strategies, executives’ predisposition toward intellectual property-driven content, and more.

The Information Disorder Update: November 1, 2018 With an unprecedented number of Muslim candidates running in the midterm elections, a virulent Islamophobic backlash has erupted in some districts — often laced with online mis- and disinformation. More than 90 American Muslims sought statewide or national office this year, and about 50 made it through the primaries, up […]

Jameel Jaffer, Executive Director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and former Deputy Legal Director for the ACLU, delivered the tenth annual Salant Lecture on Freedom of the Press at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on October 17,  2017, entitled “Government Secrecy in the Age of Information Overload.” Watch the video […]

April 12, 2016 — Shira T. Center, political editor for The Boston Globe, discussed media coverage of Donald Trump, as well as the relationship between Trump supporters and the press. Center described several factors that contributed to the media’s paradoxical coverage of Trump – characterized by an initial reluctance to view him as a serious […]

President Trump ran on the idea of imposing wide-ranging trade tariffs, and immediately upon taking office announced his first tariff plan. Covering tariffs is complicated – what tariffs have been enacted and for how long, which are being contested and how, what are the likely short and long term effects of the tariffs? Hear from […]

March 19, 2007 — Michael Gerson, former policy adviser and speechwriter for President George W. Bush, spoke at the Shorenstein Center’s brown-bag lunch about the moral trajectory of the Republican Party during Bush’s term of office. Gerson, who will become an op/ed writer for the Washington Post in May 2007, recounted that his first self-described […]