Media Center Names Fellows

The chairman of a Vietnamese media group, the Washington bureau chief for ABC News, a University of Southern California communications professor, and the former Miami Herald executive editor have joined the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy as fellows this semester.

Nguyen Anh Tuan, Robin Sproul, Geoffrey Cowan ’64, and Tom Fiedler are the newest recipients of the Shorenstein fellowship, a program dedicated to exploring the influence of the press on politics and public policy that began in 1986 with just one fellow, Clark Hoyt, now the public editor at The New York Times.

Sproul, a 25-year veteran of ABC, will examine the accuracy of exit polling and its economic practicality. As an undergraduate, Sproul studied bacteriology and had no journalistic ambitions. She said she simply “fell into” a position at a radio center upon graduation, where she fell again—this time for the rush of having a front seat to national and international events.

“I love being a part of as they say, the first draft of history,” said Sproul, who plans to return to ABC as bureau chief in January. “To be right in the middle of it and to be a person who helps communicate to America what is happening is a thrill, just a daily thrill.”

For Cowan, whose 11-year tenure as dean of Annenberg School for Communication in California ended in July, the fellowship marks a return to his college stomping grounds. He became interested in journalism as an undergraduate at Harvard where he joined the staff of The Crimson in 1961, writing his first story about those hoping to join the administration of President John F. Kennedy ’40.

Cowan also spent time fundraising for a civil rights newspaper founded in 1965 by two Harvard juniors.

At the Shorenstein Center, Cowan will conduct research on business models for newspapers.

“Right now the newspaper business is in a state of crisis,” he said, noting the widespread staff cuts at many professional newspapers.

“You can’t grow by cutting,” he said. Cowen added that he hopes to convince people that newspapers were not originally designed to be profitable.

Nguyen, who is founder and chairman of VietnamNet Media Group, will also look at the journalism industry from a business perspective. The graduate of Harvard Business School will devote his semester in Cambridge to researching new media in Vietnam.

For Fiedler, the fellowship represents an opportunity to cast a critical eye on traditional media, where he made his career for 30 years as a reporter at The Miami Herald covering political campaigns. His work at the center will look at the ways new media—including blogs, podcasts, and citizen journalism—are reshaping both politics and political reporting.

“The great thing about a fellowship like this is that it’s an opportunity to step out of the pressing concerns of a career, explore, recharge, and if things happen to come together well enough, set off in a new direction,” he said.

In addition to the fellows, Carol Darr, the director of a politics institute at George Washington University, joins the center as a visiting adjunct lecturer.

Shorenstein Center Fellows and Programs Administrator Edith Holway said that the center weighed past career experience and the currency of applicants’ research proposals to select them from the pool of about 50 applicants. Typically fellows are in the middle of their career and have at least ten years of experience.

­—Staff writer Jamison A. Hill can be reached at jahill@fas.harvard.edu.