Geneva Overholser

Homepage: http://annenberg.usc.edu/Faculty/Journalism/OverholserG.aspx

Geneva Overholser is director of the School of Journalism at the USC Annenberg School for Communication. Previously, she held the Curtis B. Hurley Chair in Public Affairs Reporting for the Missouri School of Journalism, where she was based in the school’s Washington bureau.

She was editor of The Des Moines Register from 1988 to 1995, where she led the paper to a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. While at the Register, she also earned recognition as Editor of the Year by the National Press Foundation and was named “The Best in the Business” by American Journalism Review.

She has been ombudsman of The Washington Post, a member of the editorial board of The New York Times, a syndicated columnist for The Washington Post Writers Group, and a reporter for the Colorado Springs Sun. She has been a columnist for the Columbia Journalism Review and frequent contributor to Poynter.org. She also spent five years overseas, working and writing in Paris and Kinshasa.
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Through the Annenberg Public Policy Center, in 2006 she published a manifesto on the future of journalism titled On Behalf of Journalism: A Manifesto for Change. She is also co-editor, with Kathleen Hall Jamieson, of the volume “The Press,” part of the Oxford University Press Institutions of American Democracy series.

She chairs the board of the Center for Public Integrity. In addition, she serves on the Journalism Advisory Committee of the Knight Foundation and on the boards of the John S. Knight Fellowships at Stanford University, the Committee of Concerned Journalists, the Fund for Independence in Journalism and the Academy of American Poets. She was for nine years a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board, the final year as chair, and is a former officer of the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

Overholser holds a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and a bachelor’s degree in history from Wellesley College. She is married to David Westphal, who was most recently Washington editor for McClatchy Newspapers, and they have three children.

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The journalism 'priesthood' destroyed?

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Did journalism's business model distort journalism's social mission?

The famed laissez-faire economist held that business and mission don’t go together, according to Adlai Wertman, of USC’s Marshall School of Business. “And I’m not sure I disagree with him,” Wertman told students and faculty at this week’s USC Annenberg Director’s Forum. “I’m not sure I trust business with anything else.”

This throws a complex light on the collapse of the conventional economic model for journalism – which has consisted of trusting business with this mission so dear to our (and, we hope, the nation’s) hearts. That collapse feels no less catastrophic to those who are losing their jobs, nor to faithful news consumers who see shrinking newspapers and dumbed-down newscasts. And it’s still deeply worrisome when you think about who will have the power, guts and access to go up against big government and big business, so as to keep us informed about the nation and the world.

Still, it is fitting to be reminded of the ways in which the economic model has distorted the mission. More...

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Las Vegas Sun tries innovative path toward online success

It's an interesting effort, for sure. Since 2005 the Sun has been a small daily inserted into the rival newspaper (operating under a JOA), plus a vibrantly innovative website. The print paper is innovative, too: Typically eight attractive, ad-free pages, it focuses on the interpretative, the entrepreneurial, the investigative. "We get to think the bigger thoughts," said Heikes, who at one point entertained the notion of coming to Los Angeles to do an all-Web paper to compete with the embattled Times. More...

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Focus on 'what,' not 'where,' in planning your journalism career

Do what digital pioneer and entrepreneur Elizabeth Osder has done: "I always tried to be about what I get to do rather than where I get to do it."

But the economic models just aren't working for newspapers online, lamented one student attending USC Annenberg School of Journalism Director's Forum.

Not true, said Osder, fresh off consulting work with Tina Brown's just-launched "The Daily Beast" Plenty of people are making plenty of money online. (As if in confirmation, David Westphal, Annenberg's executive in residence, noted that McClatchy right now makes more money online than it costs to pay all the editors and publishers in the company.)

Here's how to think about it, Osder told the group: More...

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Welcome back, to the 'new' OJR

I am the new director of the Annenberg School of Journalism at the University of Southern California. My four decades in newspapering may have helped land me in this position, but it's my gusto for the future of information in the public interest that defines my work now. We hope — here at Annenberg, and here at OJR in its new Knight Digital Media Center home — to help figure out what it is about journalism that is most important to carry forward. And, we hope to do what we can to ensure that it does indeed GET carried forward. More...

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