Is the Media Still Relevant?
What kind of a job do Texas journalists do in covering what the legislature does and what the issue choices are? Who's listening and who's reading?
A film on the 50th anniversary of the Texas Observer kicks off a discussion on the potential -- and the reality -- of the media's role.
Panelists:
Cecilia Balli, Texas Monthly
Bill Bishop, Austin American-Statesman
Lorraine Branham, University of Texas Journalism Department Chair
Cecilia Balli
Cecilia Ballí, a writer-at-large for Texas Monthly, now lives in El Paso, Texas, where she is working on a book about the murder of young girls and women in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.A graduate of Stanford University, she is earning a doctorate in cultural anthropology at Rice in Houston. She has written for The San Antonio Express-News and The Brownsville Herald, and her personal essays have appeared in several anthologies. Her favorite subject is the U.S.-Mexico border.
Bill Bishop
Bill Bishop is a reporter for the Austin American-Statesman, where he has worked since November 1999.Before coming to Austin, Bishop was associate editor and columnist for the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader, where he worked for 11 years. In the last year, Bishop and former University of Texas sociologist Robert Cushing have written a series on political segregation in the U.S.
Lorraine Branham
Lorraine E. Branham has been Director of the School of Journalism and the G.B. Dealey Professor at the University of Texas at Austin since Sept. 2002, a post she assumed after 25 years as a newspaper editor, editorial writer and reporter. Prior to coming to the University of Texas she was the Assistant to the Publisher and a member of the Editorial Board at The Pittsburgh Post Gazette.Prof. Branham was Senior Vice President and Executive Editor of The Tallahassee Democrat for four years, overseeing the newsroom and the editorial board. She also worked at The Philadelphia Inquirer as Associate Managing Editor for Features, Associate Editorial Page Editor, New Jersey Editor and assistant city editor.
Prof. Branham started her newspaper career as a reporter at the Philadelphia Tribune, a twice-weekly African-American newspaper, after graduating from Temple University with a B.A. in Radio, Television and Film. She also worked as a reporter at The Courier-Post in Cherry Hill, NJ, The Philadelphia Bulletin, and the Baltimore Sun. Her first editing job was as night metro editor at The Baltimore Sun.
In 1983 she received a certificate from the Women in Management Program at the University of Baltimore. In 1985, she was one of 12 American journalists awarded a John S. Knight Fellowship at Stanford University. She was awarded a McCormick Fellowship to attend the four-week Advanced Executive Program at Northwestern University in 2001.
Her teaching experience includes teaching reporting and writing at Temple University and teaching in the Summer Program for Minority Journalists at the University of California at Berkeley. She currently teaches news writing and reporting, editorial and column writing and a graduate seminar on professional writing. Her research interests revolve around women in media management and diversity in the media.
She served for three years as a judge for the William Randolph Hearst Journalism Awards Program, the Pulitzer Prize of college journalism and is now a member of its academic steering committee. She also has served on the Board of Visitors at the School of Graphic Arts and Journalism at Florida A&M University.
Prof. Branham is a member of the Association of Educators in Journalism and Mass Communication, the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the National Association of Minority Media Executives and the National Association of Black Journalists.
More about this topic:
- "Searching for truth or self-validation?"
by Liam Julian (FSView, Jan. 5, 2005)- "The 'Media Party' is over"
by Howard Fineman (MSNBC, Jan. 13, 2005)- "Influence Being Peddled!"
by Howard Kurtz (Washington Post, Jan. 14, 2005)- "Mainstream Media, R.I.P."
by Howard Kurtz (Washington Post , Jan. 13, 2005)
