Walter Isaacson Receives Goldsmith Journalism Award

The Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy gave its Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism to Walter Isaacson ’74 on Thursday at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum.

Walter Issacson gives the keynote address at the Goldsmith Awards in Political Journalism hosted by the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy on Thursday evening evening. Issacson, who is also a Harvard Overseer, accepted the 2016 Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism. By Lauren A. Sierra

Isaacson is the former CEO of CNN and former editor of Time, and has written multiple bestselling biographies, including those of Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, and Benjamin Franklin. Isaacson is also a member of the Harvard Board of Overseers.

During his acceptance speech Thursday evening, Isaacson focused on the relationship between technology and journalism, and the potential business models for newspapers in the future.

“The two sins that happened was first we allowed and even indulged anonymity,” Isaacson said, referring to when the internet first launched. “The other original sin...is that we made it free when we put everything online.”

The latter, he said, is destructive because newspapers have to obtain their revenues mostly from advertisers, which means some have to prioritize page views above content. Now, newspapers are not only beholden to their readers, he argued, but also to “aggregating eyeballs” for advertisers.

Isaacson proposed that newspapers, instead of allowing the public to view their content for free or opting for a subscription model, use a “small payment system” where consumers can pay for individual articles that they are interested in reading.

The Center also gave the Goldsmith Award for Investigative Reporting—chosen from six finalists—to a team of reporters at the Associated Press, for their coverage of slavery in the Thai seafood industry. Additionally, the Shorenstein Center awarded the Goldsmith Book prizes to two books about journalism: "Political Journalism in Comparative Perspective and Lincoln" and "The Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion".

The Associated Press piece, written by Margie Mason, Robin McDowell, Martha Mendoza, and Esther Htusan, shed light on the plight of slaves in Thailand, “some locked in cages, some no longer living,” according to Thomas E. Patterson, interim director of the Shorenstein Center and Kennedy School professor.

The article spurred international action, ultimately resulting in the freeing of more than two thousand fishermen, including some who had been enslaved for more than two decades, according to Patterson. Since that time, Patterson said politicians have held congressional hearings and introduced legislation on the matter.

The Goldsmith awards, which recognize journalism that “promotes more effective and ethical conduct of government” through reporting first debuted in 1991. the investigative reporting award comes with $25,000 for the winner and $10,000 for each of the other five finalists. The Goldsmith Book Prizes also come with a $5,000 award.

—Staff writer Nathaniel J. Hiatt can be reached at nathaniel.hiatt@thecrimson.com. Follow him on Twitter @nathaniel_hiatt.