Rehabbing the Fourth Estate

Summary:

A broadcast special from the Neiman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.

Website:

http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/events/conferences/narrative2005/bios.html

Additional Credits and Funding:

This radio broadcast was produced with help from Open Source Media, PRX--the Public Radio Exchange, Mark Kramer, director and writer-in-residence at the Nieman Program for Narrative Journalism at Harvard University, Buck Ewing of Cambridge Transcriptions, WGBH Radio and Ray Fallon.

Tones:

Authoritative, Informational, Thoughtful

Language:

English

Description:

"Rehabbing the Fourth Estate" is a broadcast special from the Neiman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. It is hosted by Christopher Lydon. Every year the Program hosts a conference where a thousand working journalists come to Cambridge for one of the largest annual meetings of the journalist community.

Harvard's annual journalism conference felt different in 2005. It's always a long weekend conference on the craft of narrative writing. This year it wasn't shoptalk or method, it was more of an examination of an institution. A lot of the talk in fact was of a profession in decline, of a media cowed, incurious and ineffective. The old pros and newfangled bloggers both are feeling the slump of an institution gone soft. Many wonder if the standards of fairness, balance and objectivity even apply anymore. Not that they're ready to take the wrecking ball to the Fourth Estate yet--journalists are wondering if the gated community their profession has become can be the scrappy frontier it once was.

The hour consists of excerpts from three talks given at the 2005 conference.

Randy Cohen
Philip Gourevitch
Doug McGill

Here is a link to a page with bios/photos for each speaker:

http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/events/conferences/narrative2005/bios.html

The Nieman Conference was recorded in Boston, MA, December 5-8, 2005, by Cambridge Transcriptions

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