Tuesday, March 24, 2009

RECAP: 64th Kalb Report at National Press Club

The last Kalb Report of the 2008-2009 season was taped Monday night at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. It was the 64th edition in the program’s 15-year history.


Moderator Marvin Kalb, a senior fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Center at Harvard University was joined for an hour and half by four national media executives to examine the dire state of the nation’s newspapers. Jon Klein, president of CNN, Tom Curley, president and CEO of the Associated Press, Vivian Schiller, president and CEO of NPR and Alberto Ibarguen, president and CEO of the Knight Foundation provided insight as to the transformation of news reporting and the reasons behind the slow death of major U.S. newspapers.


One of the more surprising comments of the evening came from NPR’s Vivian Schiller her argued that despite the growth of Internet blogging, Wikipedia and Facebook, there is still “no such thing as bad content.” When asked to explain, Schiller replied that the only poor content in her book is “bad content that pretends to be something else.”


While broadcast journalism has been far more insulated from the panic of late, the four media moguls all agreed that the way we consume news is constantly changing and Americans are just going to have to “let go” of hard copy print.


The program is funded by a grant from the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation and is produced by Michael Freedman, a journalism professor in GW’s School of Media and Public Affairs and director of the GW Global Media Institute.


- Jared Pliner

No comments:

Post a Comment