More changes are in store for the Pew Research Center. As Wall Street Journal deputy managing editor and online executive editor Alan Murray prepares to begin his presidential duties there, Tom Rosenstiel, founder and director of Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, is leaving PEJ for an executive director position at American Press Institute. Rosenstiel’s departure was announced on Monday.
Rosenstiel founded PEJ in 1997. He told CJR that he’s “very proud” of the work the organization has done. “At a time when the news business was about to undergo real change, I was able, with colleagues, to create a source of authoritative research that people could trust and that journalists could understand,” he said. Rosenstiel listed PEJ’s “Baltimore Study,” the annual State of the Media report, and The Elements of Journalism as being some of the highlights of his time with PEJ, which he’ll leave in the hands of a “strong team” led by acting director Amy S. Mitchell.
Rosenstiel will continue to do the kind of research at API that he did at PEJ, but he is looking forward to come up with solutions as well. “At the Pew Research Center we’re quite fastidious about saying we don’t get engaged in solutions, we just engage in research,” he said. “Now that the business is in a moment of real crisis from an economic standpoint, I feel a pull to work on solutions.”
With the API merging with the Newspaper Association of America last January, Rosenstiel says, “we have a bigger endowment than we’ve ever had. Given the enormous changes in news and technology, it makes sense that API adapt and refocus its energies to be useful in new ways.”
Sara Morrison is a former assistant editor at CJR. Follow her on Twitter @saramorrison.