Duke Professor Named Head of Press Center

Alex S. Jones, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and academic who specializes in covering the media, was named director of the Shorenstein Center yesterday, Kennedy School of Government officials announced.

Jones said last night that he wants to make the center a "quick response" hub for breaking news, such as the Elian Gonzalez custody battle. But he said he wants to combine that approach with deeper academic study.

"My vision of the Shorenstein Center is where [media studies are] done on a lot of different levels," he said. "Very quickly in Internet and case studies, more thoughtful in longer research, and done at its most profound...when the discipline of academic research is merged with the curiosity of investigative reporting."

For example, Jones said, he wants the center to take on major ongoing issues like global warming, trigger locks on handguns and aid to Africa.

The center should find "the money to do the kind of research to take that issue apart to understand how the media behaved, what happened, what didn't happen," he said. "To find out why it happened, what are the interest groups involved, why did they make the decisions they did?"

With Jones' appointment, the Shorenstein Center becomes the first of the three major journalism institutes which have been seeking new directors this year to fill their top spot.

The directors of the Nieman Foundation and the John S. Knight Fellowships at Stanford University also both resigned during last 18 months.

Jones will officially become the center's second director in July, but said he will not be on campus full time until September.

The Shorenstein Center, which is a division of the Kennedy School, focuses on the relationship between the press and public policy, one that Jones said is "very tangled and complex."

"Everyone knows that the media has a huge role--domestically and internationally, but there seems to be a lot of misinformation about how that works," Jones said.

Jones said his goal is "to put some precision into [the definition of the media's role], illuminate this in a way that is as precise as possible."

The end result, according to Jones, would be to "generate authoritative research that says this is what happened, this is what we should be talking about."

He said he also plans to make the center a "bully pulpit on the role of the press," an idea that Marvin Kalb, who directed the center since its founding in 1986 Kalb, emphasized during his 12-year tenure.

Kalb, who is now executive director of the center's new Washington, D.C. branch, praised Jones' selection.

"He blends the real world experience of journalism with the theoretical appreciation of the craft," said Kalb, who did not make the decision but said he was consulted in the search process.

Jones, currently a journalism professor at Duke University, covered the press for The New York Times for nine years and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1987 for a series of articles on the downfall of the Bingham family's newspaper empire in Louisville, Ky.

Jones also formerly hosted a National Public Radio program about the press and hosts "Media Matters," a weekly public television program of media criticism.

Jones' commentary on the media has appeared widely on television and radio and in publications, including Brill's Content and the Columbia Journalism Review.

Jones and his wife, Susan E. Tifft, have written two critically acclaimed books--The Patriarch, about the Bingham family, and The Trust, about the Ochs and Sulzberger family, which has owned The Times for more than a century.

The Shorenstein Center holds seminars on the press and politics and sponsors a fellowship program for academics and journalists who come to the center to conduct research on journalism, campaigns and elections, Internet media and other issues.

It also gives annual awards for investigative reporting and for books and research about the media.

The center also runs the Vanishing Voter Project, a series of public opinion polls that look at public interest in politics.