Takis Metaxas is a Professor of Computer Science at Wellesley College, studying online social media, primarily related to the propagation of information and misinformation, prediction of political events, and in developing tools that help users evaluate the trustworthiness of information. In particular, with his Wellesley colleagues and students, he has been studying the problem of […]

March 2, 2010 — At a Shorenstein Center Speaker Series event, Greg Zuckerman, senior writer and Heard on the Street columnist at The Wall Street Journal, shared lessons and observations from his book, The Greatest Trade Ever. Zuckerman presented a paradox that “it should have been the experts who saw this coming — the Wall Street […]

April 14, 2015 — David Skok, newly-promoted managing editor for digital of The Boston Globe, discussed the Globe’s approach to digital strategy and organizational culture. As a Nieman Fellow in 2012, Skok took a class from Harvard Business School’s Clayton Christensen. They later co-authored a report, applying Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation – which says […]

February 23, 2010 — The Economist’s American business editor and New York bureau chief, Matthew Bishop, spoke at the Shorenstein Center on the media and the economic crisis. He opened with the statement that on September 15, 2008, the date Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, “capitalism as we knew it ended, and a debate ought to […]

January 26, 2012 — The power of the Internet to influence public policy and economic growth was the topic discussed by a panel of Google policy experts at a special event for Harvard Kennedy School students hosted by the Shorenstein Center, HKS Communications Program, HKS Office of Career Advancement and the HKS student group Tech{For}Change. […]

Despite the flurry of post-debate headlines and statements from politicians and pundits, a new survey from the nonpartisan Civic Health and Institutions Project (CHIP50) finds little evidence that the first presidential debate between President Biden and former President Trump meaningfully shifted voter preferences. President Biden’s performance during the first 2024 presidential debate on June 27 […]

April 3, 2012 – President Obama is less comfortable with exercising power publicly than privately, said David Ignatius, associate editor and columnist for The Washington Post, at a Shorenstein Center event. “As covert Commander-in-Chief, [Obama] has been quite effective,” he continued. While he is “reticent, reluctant to use the public political tools of power, in private…he […]

February 5, 2010 — David Rohde, two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter for The New York Times and a former Shorenstein Fellow, spoke to the Shorenstein Center on “Pakistan’s Role in the Rise of the New Taliban.” Having escaped from the Taliban after seven months of captivity in Pakistan, Rohde argued that the central problem is the […]

In March 2019, two projects at Harvard Kennedy School—the Technology and Public Purpose (TAPP) Project at the Belfer Center and the Platform Accountability Project at the Shorenstein Center—hosted a workshop for Congressional staff to identify and discuss policy approaches to the dilemmas of big tech platforms.