Perhaps the best thing about turning 50 is that people tend to toss you more than one party. Christie Hefner, chair of CJR’s half-century celebration, has been pulling out all the stops. The latest, on April 11, was hosted by Thomson Reuters in its Times Square aerie (we actually looked down on the ball that drops each New Year’s). Reuters’s Chrystia Freeland ably moderated as her colleague Caroline Drees, GlobalPost editor Thomas Mucha, NBC’s Mara Schiavocampo, and Columbia’s own Howard French compared notes on the challenges of covering the globe in an era of shrinking budgets and short, parochial attention spans. Check out what you missed here.
On May 7 (which just happens to be the 100th birthday of Columbia Journalism School), CJR heads to the Newseum in Washington for a conversation about issues raised in this issue: NPR’s Robert Siegel will moderate “Truth and Consequences: Free Expression and Independent Journalism in a Digital World.” Our esteemed panelists: Columbia President Lee Bollinger; Voice of America director David Ensor; Rebecca MacKinnon, senior fellow at the New America Foundation and author of Consent of the Networked; and CJR’s new BFF, Chrystia Freeland. If you miss the broadcast, please check it out in the C-SPAN archive.
Cyndi Stivers is a former editor in chief of CJR