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.
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.
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.
Frank Rich
Frank Rich joined New York magazine in June 2011 as Writer-at-Large, covering politics and culture. He is also a commentator on nymag.com, engaging in regular dialogues on the news of the week.
Rich joined the magazine following a distinguished career at the New York Times, where he had been an op-ed columnist since 1994. He was previously the paper’s chief drama critic, from 1980 to 1993. His weekly 1,500-word essay helped inaugurate the expanded opinion pages that the Times introduced in the Sunday “Week in Review” section in 2005. From 2003 to 2005, Rich had been the front-page columnist for the Sunday “Arts & Leisure” section as part of that section’s redesign and expansion. He also served as senior adviser to the Times’s culture editor on the paper’s overall cultural-news report. From 1999 to 2003, he was also senior writer for The New York Times Magazine. The dual title was a first for the Times.
Rich has written about culture and politics for many national publications. He won the George Polk Award for commentary in 2005. His books include Ghost Light: A Memoir and, most recently, The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth From 9/11 to Katrina. Since 2008 Rich has also been a creative consultant to HBO, where he is an executive producer of the Emmy-winning comedy Veep, starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and executive produced the Peabody Award-winning documentary Six by Sondheim as well as the forthcoming documentary Becoming Mike Nichols.
In Rutledge’s year-long series covering Wisconsin’s child-care program, she exposed a system plagued by fraud, deceit and criminal activity that cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars and repeatedly put children in danger. Her reporting led to criminal probes and indictments and prompted lawmakers to pass new laws aimed at eliminating fraud and keeping criminals out of the day care business.
Journalism’s Roving Eye: A History of American Foreign Reporting
John Maxwell Hamilton―a historian and former foreign correspondent―provides a sweeping and definitive history of American foreign news reporting from its inception to the present day and chronicles the economic and technological advances that have influenced overseas coverage, as well as the cavalcade of colorful personalities who shaped readers’ perceptions of the world across two centuries.
The Myth of Digital Democracy
Hindman tracks nearly three million Web pages, analyzing how their links are structured, how citizens search for political content, and how leading search engines like Google and Yahoo! funnel traffic to popular outlets. He finds that while the Internet has increased some forms of political participation and transformed the way interest groups and candidates organize, mobilize, and raise funds, elites still strongly shape how political material on the Web is presented and accessed.
David Fanning
David Fanning, FRONTLINE’s founder, served as executive producer of the series from its first season in 1983 until 2015. He is now the series’ executive producer at large.
After 35 seasons and more than 600 films, FRONTLINE remains America’s longest-running investigative documentary series on television. The series has won all of the major awards for broadcast journalism: 82 Emmys; 34 duPont-Columbia University Awards; 20 Peabody Awards; 16 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards; eight Television Critics Awards; and eight Banff Television Awards. In 1990 and in 1996, FRONTLINE was recognized with the Gold Baton — the highest duPont-Columbia Award — for its “total contribution to the world of exceptional television.” In 2002, the series was honored with an unprecedented third Gold Baton for its post-Sept. 11 coverage, a series of seven hour-long documentaries on the origins and impact of terrorism.
Fanning — who was awarded Harvard University’s 2010 Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism and recently received the 2013 Lifetime Achievement Emmy Award — began his filmmaking career as a young journalist in South Africa.
