Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom
In Consent of the Networked, journalist and Internet policy specialist Rebecca MacKinnon argues that it is time to fight for our rights before they are sold, legislated, programmed, and engineered away. Every day, the corporate sovereigns of cyberspace make decisions that affect our physical freedom—but without our consent. Yet the traditional solution to unaccountable corporate behavior—government regulation—cannot stop the abuse of digital power on its own, and sometimes even contributes to it.
Nicholas D. Kristof
Nicholas Kristof has been a columnist for The New York Times since 2001. He grew up on a farm in Oregon, graduated from Harvard, studied law at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, and then studied Arabic in Cairo. He was a longtime foreign correspondent for The New York Times and speaks various languages.
In addition to winning the 2013 Goldsmith Career Award, Kristof has won two Pulitzer Prizes for his coverage of Tiananmen Square and the genocide in Darfur, along with many humanitarian awards such as the Anne Frank Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.
In his keynote address, Kristof called for more risk taking in media as well as increased engagement with a global world. The press must experiment with new platforms and find new business models, he said, and journalism must confront the growing mistrust the public feels toward it. “At its best, this can still really play such an important role in any society,” he told the audience.
The New York Police Department, in close collaboration with the CIA and with nearly no outside oversight, developed clandestine spying programs that monitored and catalogued daily life in Muslim communities, from where people ate and shopped to where they worked and prayed. AP’s reporting led three dozen lawmakers in Washington to call for House Judiciary Committee and Justice Department investigations.
The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom
Evgeny Morozov shows that by falling for the supposedly democratizing nature of the Internet, Western do-gooders may have missed how it also entrenches dictators, threatens dissidents, and makes it harder — not easier — to promote democracy.
Going Local: Presidential Leadership in the Post-Broadcast Age
In Going Local: Presidential Leadership in the Post-Broadcast Age, Jeffrey E. Cohen argues that presidents have adapted their going-public activities to reflect the current realities of polarized parties and fragmented media.
Alan Rusbridger
Alan Rusbridger received the 2012 Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism in recognition of his leadership in The Guardian’s five-year investigation and exposure of phone hacking by employees of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. He also led the Guardian’s negotiations with Julian Assange and subsequent publication of WikiLeaks documents. Rusbridger has been instrumental in the Guardian’s “digital-first” business strategy.
Rusbridger has been editor of the Guardian since 1995. He is editor-in-chief of Guardian News & Media, a member of the GNM and GMG Boards and a member of the Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian and the Observer.
Rusbridger’s career began at the Cambridge Evening News, where he trained as a reporter before first joining the Guardian in 1979. He worked as a general reporter, feature writer and diary columnist before leaving to succeed Clive James and Julian Barnes as the Observer’s TV critic. In 1987, he worked as the Washington correspondent for the London Daily News before returning to the Guardian as a feature writer. He was made deputy editor in 1994, when he first started working on the paper’s initial forays into digital publishing.
After a two-year investigation, including the review of 2.9 million records, the Sun‘s five-part multi-platform series identified the preventable infections and injuries taking place in Las Vegas hospitals. Allen and Richards set out to impose transparency on Las Vegas hospitals so they would be held accountable. The multimedia presentation of their findings resulted in consumers having access to quality-of-care data that will help them make more-informed decisions.
“This extraordinary piece of work demonstrates the power of teaming high quality investigative journalism with imaginative and elegant multimedia representation. It is the future of news,” said Alex S. Jones, Director of the Shorenstein Center.
When Politicians Attack: Party Cohesion in the Media
Fostering a positive brand name is the chief benefit parties provide for their members. They do this both by coordinating their activities in the legislative process and by communicating with voters. Whereas political scientists have generally focused on the former, dismissing partisan communication as cheap talk, this book argues that a party’s ability to coordinate its communication has important implications for the study of politics.
What Is Happening to the News: The Information Explosion and the Crisis in Journalism
What Is Happening to News explores the crucial question of how journalism lost its way—and who is responsible for the ragged retreat from its great traditions. Jack Fuller locates the surprising sources of change where no one has thought to look before: in the collision between a revolutionary new information age and a human brain that is still wired for the threats faced by our prehistoric ancestors. Drawing on the dramatic recent discoveries of neuroscience, Fuller explains why the information overload of contemporary life makes us dramatically more receptive to sensational news, while rendering the staid, objective voice of standard journalism ineffective. Throw in a growing distrust of experts and authority, ably capitalized on by blogs and other interactive media, and the result is a toxic mix that threatens to prove fatal to journalism as we know it.
Cycles of Spin: Strategic Communication in the U.S. Congress
Sellers examines strategic communication campaigns in the U.S. Congress. He argues that these campaigns create cycles of spin: leaders create messages, rank-and-file legislators decide whether to promote those messages, journalists decide whether to cover the messages, and any coverage feeds back to influence the policy process.
