Tom Rosenstiel is an author, journalist, press critic and executive director of the
American Press Institute. He was founder and for 16 years director of the
Project for Excellence in Journalism (
PEJ), a research organization that studies the news media and is part of the
Pew Research Center in
Washington, D.C. A journalist for more than 30 years, he worked as a media critic for the
Los Angeles Times and chief congressional correspondent for
Newsweek magazine and as co-founder and vice chairman of the
Committee of Concerned Journalists. Among his books, he is the co-author of the popular
The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the
Public Should
Expect. He appears often on radio, television and in print, and has written widely on politics and media. He is the author of
The Next Journalism column at Poynter.org.
A graduate of
Oberlin College and the
Columbia School of Journalism, Rosenstiel began his career as a reporter for muckraking political columnist
Jack Anderson. He worked at
The Peninsula Times Tribune, his hometown paper in
Palo Alto, CA, as a business reporter and
Business Editor from
1980 to
1983. He then spent 12 years at the Los Angeles Times, most of those as a media critic and
Washington correspondent. He left the
Times in
1995 to join
Newsweek Magazine, where he served as chief congressional correspondent and covered the Gingrich revolution.
In
1997, he founded the Project for Excellence in Journalism, an institute that studies the press performance. PEJ is non partisan, non ideological, and non political. From 1997 to
2006, PEJ was affiliated with
Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism Columbia University. In 2006 PEJ separated from
Columbia and became part of Pew Research Center, funded by the
Pew Charitable Trusts, a private organization. PEJ, among other studies, produces the annual
State of the
News Media Report that takes stock of the news industry, the weekly
News Coverage Index that monitors the coverage of the mainstream media and the weekly New
Media Index that monitors social media and blogs.
Rosenstiel also co-founded the Committee of Concerned Journalists, an organization of journalists around the world working in different media concerned about the future of public interest journalism. Rosenstiel directed
CCJ's daily activities until 2006. During those years, Rosenstiel was co-author of CCJ's "
Traveling Curriculum", a mid-career education program that trained more than 6,000
U.S. journalists. CCJ is now affiliated with the
University of Missouri in
Columbia, Missouri, where Rosenstiel is an adjunct professor of Journalism Studies.
In
2001, Rosenstiel co-authored with
Bill Kovach the book The Elements of Journalism, which identifies, explains and traces intellectual origins of the core principles of
American journalism and their role in civil society.[2] Updated in
2007, "
Elements" has been called "one of five essential books on journalism (
Roger Mudd,
The Wall Street Journal), a "modern classic" (
William Safire,
The New York Times) and "the most important book on the relationship of journalism and democracy published in the last 50 years" (
Roy Clark, the
Poynter Institute). Elements has been translated into more than two dozen languages and is the winner of the
Goldsmith Book Prize from
Harvard University, the
Society of Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi Award for research in journalism and the
Bart Richards
Award for Media Criticism from
Penn State.
Among his most recent books is
Blur: How to Know What's
True in the
Age of Information Overload (
2011), also with Kovach, which offers a roadmap for how consumers can determine whether the news they encounter is reliable and an outline for how journalism must change to meet the changing needs of the
21st-century citizen; and
The New Ethics of Journalism: Principles for the
21st Century, co-edited with
Kelly McBride of the Poynter Institute (
Sage,
2013). A new updated third edition of Elements is due in 2014.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Rosenstiel
- published: 20 Oct 2014
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