News Media

The push for open government and open data by federal officials, as well as authorities across many states and cities, can seem an unmitigated good. Talk to journalists, however, and there are myriad areas where they believe government at all levels is still being less than transparent — and less than helpful in revealing facts that the public is entitled to know.

The word “crisis” often comes up when talking about journalism in the U.S. and throughout the world: Dropping ad revenue, falling circulation, failed efforts to retool old models to fit a changing media landscape. As the blogosphere and Twitter rise, more opinionated kinds of media coverage push back against the longstanding ideals of impartiality and objectivity, and even the once sacrosanct authority of mainstream journalism is called into question.

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:

In December 2014 the Knight Foundation and Carnegie Corporation announced continued funding for an effort to reform journalism education. Below, John Wihbey of Journalist’s Resource reflects on the progress of the initiative in the context of wider media trends.

During much of the second half of the 20th century, Americans got their news and civic information primarily through a few dominant sources, usually a newspaper that had a relative monopoly on local information and one of three major television networks. With the rise of the Web, there was a sense that things were changing, and many hoped that citizens would be better informed by a broader, richer and more representative and democratic array of media streams. The number of “filters” would vastly expand.