On February 24, 2015, Meredith Artley, editor-in-chief of CNN Digital, spoke to a full house at the Shorenstein Center. Based in Atlanta, Artley leads the CNN’s digital content creation worldwide, and also manages the programming of CNN.com and the network’s other websites.

Written by Kimberly Meltzer, Georgetown University

Journalists constantly face the challenge of explaining why things happened: What were the factors in an election victory? What are the reasons behind housing segregation in a city? What is the explanation for a low-performing school? In daily journalism, we are often content to quote relevant sources or officials, and let them do the “explaining.”

As of 2011, 83% of American adults own a cellphone and 35% own some form of “smartphone.” This equals more than 300 million mobile phones currently in use, up from 86 million just a decade ago.

The Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy hosts a weekly speaker series throughout the academic year, as well as other special events. The fall 2014 semester featured a range of perspectives shared by visiting speakers, who discussed some of the year’s most important issues.

The following are audio and video highlights from the past year: