Shorenstein Center Names Four Spring Fellows

Four new recipients of the Shorenstein Fellowship will join Bob Schieffer—current fellow and former CBS Evening News anchor—at the The Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy.

The four new fellows, who will stay during the spring semester, are Johanna Dunaway, an associate professor of communication at Texas A&M University; Joanna Jolly, BBC’s South Asia editor and a feature reporter; Dan Kennedy, an associate professor of journalism at Northeastern University; and Marilyn Thompson, a deputy editor at Politico. Schieffer will stay in his fellowship through the 2016 election season.

The new fellows—announced Tuesday—are recipients of the Joan Shorenstein Fellowship, an application-based award granted to visiting scholars, journalists, and policymakers each semester. The Kennedy School also invites Walter Shorenstein Fellows, like Schieffer, to work on campus for varying lengths of time.

During his fellowship, Kennedy said he plans to continue researching and writing his book about the future of journalism and financial strategies for newspapers. He said he is focusing on “the rise of a new type of wealthy newspaper owner, and how they might reinvent their papers and thus possibly come up with lessons that other newspapers might be able to follow.”

Kennedy said he will specifically analyze Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon and the owner of the Washington Post, John Henry, the owner of the Boston Globe and the Boston Red Sox, and Aaron Kushner, former owner of the Orange County Register.

Prior to taking up a position at Politico, Thompson worked as a reporter for the Washington Post and New York Times. As a fellow, she said she will focus on studying fundraising for the current presidential election.

“My intention is to research and write about money and the flow of a huge amount of cash into the 2016 presidential race,” Thompson said.

Jolly, meanwhile, has previously covered issues of sexual violence, including rape in India and the murder of aboriginal women in Canada. She said she will continue to focus on these issues and how media coverage affects government policy.

Jolly said the fellowship is “an amazing opportunity and privilege, and coming from England as well it’s very glamorous.”

Dunaway said she will study the “changing media landscape,” and in particular how innovations relate to Latinos and “future Latino political attitudes, turnout, and voting behavior.”

—Staff writer Nathaniel J. Hiatt can be reached at hiatt@college.harvard.edu. Follow him on Twitter @nathaniel_hiatt.