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Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Alex Jones speaks Dec. 4

Kim Chaudoin | 615.966.6494 | 

Lipscomb University’s Nelson and Sue Andrews Institute for Civic Leadership presents Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author and Harvard professor Alex Jones as the 2013 speaker for the Don R. Elliott Distinguished Presidential Lecture Series, on Wednesday, Dec. 4.

Alex JonesThe presentation begins at 7:30 p.m. in Lipscomb’s Ezell Center, Room 301. The event is free and open to the public.  

Jones is director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, a Harvard University research center based in the Kennedy School of Government. His lecture, "Our Gutenberg Moment: The Economic and Political Future in a Digital World," will be based on his current research imagining a digital future by viewing current times through the prism of what happened after Gutenberg's creation of mass communication with compelling parallels with where we seem to be headed now..

Jones, the Laurence M. Lombard Lecturer in the Press and Public Policy, covered the press for The New York Times from 1983 to 1992 and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1987. His most recent book, “Losing the News: The Future of the News that Feeds Democracy,” was published in August 2009.

He is the author of two best-selling books on family dynasties in the newspaper industry.

In 1991, he coauthored “The Patriarch: The Rise and Fall of the Bingham Dynasty,” which Business Week magazine selected as one of the best business books of the year.

In 1992, he left the Times to work on “The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind the New York Times,” which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award in biography.

He has been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, a host of National Public Radio’s “On the Media,” and host and executive editor of PBS's Media Matters. In 2011 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is on the boards of the Committee of Concerned Journalists, International Center for Journalists, Foundation of the Society of Professional Journalists, Harvard Magazine, Nieman Foundation, Black Mountain Institute, the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet, and other professional organizations.

The Don R. Elliott Distinguished Presidential Lecture is designed to expose the Lipscomb University campus and the surrounding community to persons of influence in one or more issues of contemporary debate or discussion, with a preference for issues related to economics or political science. The Elliott Lecture is funded by an endowment established at Lipscomb University by the Don R. Elliott Foundation.

The late Mr. Elliott, a native of Kerr, Ark., and former fundraising consultant for Lipscomb University, was a professor of economics and political science at Little Rock University, Randolph-Macon College and Vanderbilt University. He founded Don Elliott and Associates, a fund raising consulting firm that helped to direct campaigns for Lipscomb, Vanderbilt and Belmont in Nashville, and a host of other colleges and private schools.

The Elliott Lecture was presented for the first time in 2010, featuring Elaine Kamarck as its inaugural speaker. Kamarck is a lecturer in public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and the founding director of the Center for Effective Public Management at Brookings Institute. A second lecture in 2012 was presented by Reagan White House veteran and Fox News commentator, James P. Pinkerton.

For more information visit www.lipscomb.edu/civicleadership.