STAGE CRAFT
MEJOR PERIODISMO
COLUMBIA INK
Theater In America | 3
Cabot Prize Honors Latin
American Coverage | 3
New Selection of
Books by Faculty | 5
NEWS AND IDEAS FOR THE COLUMBIA COMMUNITY
VOL. 36, NO. 04
NOVEMBER 12, 2010
CHARTING THE
PATHS TO GLOBAL
PRESS FREEDOM
FACING
JOURNALISM’S
DIGITAL FUTURE
By Record Staff
I
EILEEN BARROSO
n a season that has seen news of China’s
own Nobel Peace Prize winner suppressed
in his home country, drug cartels murdering Mexican reporters, Russian journalists
brutally beaten, and the capacity of our mainstream news media further diminished by falling profits, what are the prospects and strategies for developing a truly global free press?
That was the basic question posed in a twoday conference starting Nov. 4 titled “A Free Press
for a Global Society.” In his opening remarks, University President Lee C. Bollinger—a First Amendment scholar who served as the conference’s
host—explained that a leading consequence of
globalization is the need for democratic societies
to be informed about developments in foreign
nations. The event brought together many in
journalism and academia—two entities that are
better positioned than others to provide timely
information and deeper understanding. “Everyone here believes in the social value of two institutions: universities and the press,” said Bollinger.
“We are linked and kindred organizations.”
The conference also linked together many
parts of Columbia itself. It was co-sponsored
by the Journalism School, the Law School, the
School of International and Public Affairs, as
Emily Bell, the first director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, answers questions from Columbia’s Facebook community
about the changing news industry. See page 7.
Alumni Reveal Ways to Inspire Creativity
By Chana Garcia
B
efore she won the Man Booker Prize
in 2006 for her novel The Inheritance, Kiran Desai (SOA’99) spent
eight years unemployed, broke and living
in a rat-infested apartment on 123rd Street
and Amsterdam. Her proud Indian family, disappointed by her decision to pursue writing as a career, thought her ambitions of becoming a published author were
foolish. Many wondered aloud why she
wouldn’t just get a job—and with it some
self-respect.
Despite struggling financially and professionally for nearly a decade, Desai considers those early years some of her happiest. Most days were spent lying in bed for
hours reading, behavior that seemed frivolous at the time but helped lay a foundation
critical to her future as a writer.
“I love to read, so that’s what drove me,”
said Desai. “Also, the aesthetic of being a
writer—reading Virginia Woolf’s diary,
reading Steinbeck’s diary, wanting to look
like a writer, wanting to smell like a writer,
wanting to feel my shames and miseries like
a writer, the melancholy of being a writer.
I wanted that so much. It wasn’t distasteful
to me at all. I responded to it. I loved it.”
Hers was just one story at a recent panel
discussion titled “Unlocking Creativity: Inspire, Develop, Contribute,” hosted by the
Columbia Alumni Association and moder-
ated by President Lee C. Bollinger. Desai
was joined by other Columbia alumni—
actor Brian Dennehy (CC’60), short-story
writer Asali Solomon (BC’95) and composer Tom Kitt (CC’96)—who opened up about
their work and provided insight into their
respective creative processes.
Kitt discussed the difficulties he had
rebuilding his confidence after a dreamcrushing failure. When one of his Broadway
productions closed after 10 days, he said
he started doubting himself. To make ends
meet, he taught piano lessons and worked
as a substitute drama teacher, which helped
pull him out of his depression.
“I saw these 16-year-old kids, the inspiration and the passion they brought. It was
watching theater in its purest form,” said
Kitt, who won the Pulitzer Prize for drama
this year for the musical Next to Normal.
“Creativity is about finding your voice, and
then having the confidence in that voice to
see it through—in whatever it is you want
continued on page 8
From left: actor Brian Dennehy and writer Asali Solomon at the Oct. 15 panel on creative processes.
www.columbia.edu/news
“Universities and the
press ... are linked and
kindred organizations.”
well as Columbia’s Global Centers. It was a truly
“global” event with select discussions streamed
live to the University’s global centers in Beijing,
Paris and Amman, Jordan. At issue from a variety
of perspectives over the two days was how to
address the existing obstacles to such information sharing across national borders, including
censorship, journalists’ access to foreign sources,
and the capacity of the press to cover the incredibly fast-moving forces of globalization.
Some of those forces were the subject of the
first panel, which dealt with the evolving media
environment in China. Panelist Peter Herford,
the executive director of the International
Media Institute at Shantou University explained
that Chinese editors receive text messages
throughout the day from the country’s information ministry about what they can and cannot
cover, along with the government’s official positions. Reporters and editors cannot question the
country’s party line, he said, leading to the
underreporting of subjects that can compromise the interests of citizens, such as the tainted
milk scandal of 2008.
Bollinger challenged the participants to defend
the strictures that the government imposes on
journalists. Several panelists, however, disagreed
with his premise. Fred S. Teng, the CEO of NewsChina, said that changes to the country’s media
landscape “are moving faster than expected” but
still need time. He pointed out that a century
elapsed between the U.S. Civil War and Voting
Rights Act, and so no one should expect an overnight fix in Chinese censorship. He said premature crackdowns could cause anarchy and cited
the revolution that inspired Tiananmen Square.
continued on page 8
2
NOVEMBER 12, 2010
The Record
MILESTONES
ON C AMPUS
CHRIS WIGGINS, an associate
professor in the Department of
Applied Physics and Applied
Mathematics at the Fu Foundation School of Engineering
and Applied Science, has been
named to “The Silicon Alley 100:
New York’s Coolest Tech People
in 2010” by Business Insider.
Wiggins was recognized for his
work with hackNY, an organization he cofounded to
help place students in summer internships at New York
City start-ups.
MIKE MCLAUGHLIN
ALAN BRINKLEY, the Allan Nevins
Professor of American History,
was elected the new chair of
the National Humanities Center
board of trustees. The center
focuses on the advanced study
of humanities, drawing from
history, language, literature, ethics
and art. Brinkley is a former
University Provost and former
chair of the Department of History. He won the Great
Teacher Award at Columbia in 2003 and is a member of
the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
SEASON KICKERS
The Columbia women’s soccer team concluded its 2010 season with a 9-5-3 record, the seventh straight season in which the Lions have finished a year
with a .500 or better winning percentage. Junior Nora Dooley (second from left) scored a pair of goals in a 2-0 victory over Princeton on Oct. 16 and was
named the Ivy League Women’s Soccer Player of the Week for her efforts.
Roaring into the Athletics Hall of Fame
USPS 090-710 ISSN 0747-4504
Vol. 36, No. 04, November 12, 2010
Published by the
Office of Communications and
Public Affairs
David M. Stone
Executive Vice President
for Communications
The Record Staff:
Editor: Bridget O’Brian
Designer: Nicoletta Barolini
Senior Writer: Melanie A. Farmer
University Photographer: Eileen Barroso
Contact The Record:
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e: curecord@columbia.edu
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Happening at
Columbia
For the latest on upcoming Columbia events,
performances, seminars and lectures, go to
calendar.columbia.edu
Dear Alma,
I didn’t know Columbia had an
Athletics Hall of Fame. Who are some
of these athlete-scholars?
—Avid Athlete
Dear Athlete,
The most famous member of the Hall
of Fame is, of course, baseball legend Lou
Gehrig, who entered Columbia in 1921
on a football scholarship and played
both sports until he was recruited by
the New York Yankees at the end of his
sophomore year. Years later, when he was
asked how he could leave Columbia before graduation, he noted that his father
was no longer able to work because of an
illness and said, “A fellow has to eat.”
Another legendary Columbia athlete
is Sid Luckman (CC’39), who played 12
seasons for the Chicago Bears and still
ranks as one of football’s leading passers. Luckman stayed out his freshman
year to concentrate on
his studies, but started at
quarterback for the next
three. Tennis player Oliver Campbell (CC1891)
also made the honor roll
this year. While at Columbia, he was the U.S.
singles champion three
years in a row. He was
the youngest man to win
the title, at 19, until Pete
Sampras surpassed him
Sid Luckman (CC’39)
a century later.
In the modern era, this year’s class
includes Erinn Smart (BC’01), who competed in fencing during her four years at
Barnard, winning a spot on the All Ivy
League team. Smart went to the 2008
Olympic Games in Beijing with the U.S.
fencing team, which won a silver medal
in the team foil event. The 2010 class
also includes Aldo T. “Buff” Donelli, who
coached Columbia to its only Ivy League
football championship, in 1961.
The entire ’61 team was inducted including William Campbell (CC’62), the
AVIS HINKSON, most recently
the director of undergraduate
advising at the University of
California-Berkeley, will take
on a new role in February as
dean of Barnard College. An
’84 Barnard grad, Hinkson succeeds Dorothy Denburg, who is
stepping down after almost 18
years as dean. Hinkson has been an active alumna,
serving as fundraising chair for her Barnard class for
almost every year since her graduation. As the new
dean, she will serve as an advocate for students and
oversee the Offices of the Dean of Studies, Admissions
and Financial Aid, Registrar, Residential Life, Student
Life and Health Services.
MICHELLE BALLAN, assistant
professor of social work, has
received the Association on
Higher Education and Disability Recognition Award. Given
annually, the award recognizes
individuals or groups that “act
directly or indirectly to benefit
campus programs for students
with disabilities.” Founded in 1977, AHEAD is an international organization for individuals involved in
the development of policy and in providing services
to meet the needs of persons with disabilities involved
in all areas of higher education.
GRANTS & GIFTS
ASK ALMA’S OWL
captain of the team and chairman of the
University trustees. Donelli, also an outstanding soccer player,
was the only American
to score a goal in the
1934 World Cup and is a
member of the National
Soccer Hall of Fame. He
also has the rare distinction of coaching a college and NFL team at the
same time—Duquesne
University and the Pittsburgh Steelers in 1941—a
feat he managed by
coaching the Steelers in
the morning when classes were in session and Duquesne in the afternoon.
Columbia’s Hall of Fame was started in
2006 by M. Dianne Murphy, who has
been director of Intercollegiate Athletics
and Physical Education since 2004. To
see a compilation of pictures of a few of
Columbia’s Hall of Fame inductees turn
to page 8.
—Ann Levin
Send your questions for Alma’s Owl to
curecord@columbia.edu.
WHO GAVE IT: Institute for New Economic Thinking
HOW MUCH: $476,252
WHO GOT IT: David Weinstein, Carl S. Shoup Professor
of the Japanese Economies at Columbia University
WHAT FOR: To research how changes in financial
institutions can affect outside firms.
HOW IT WILL BE USED: INET will provide funds over
the course of two years for Weinstein to research
the parallels between Japan’s economic crash in the
1990s and the global economic meltdown of 2008.
This will be the first empirical assessment of the
links between the health of financial institutions
and the output of outside firms.
WHO GAVE IT: Environmental Protection Agency
and National Institute of Environmental Health
Sciences
HOW MUCH: $3,953,321 for Columbia University
WHO GOT IT: Columbia Center for Children’s
Environmental Health
WHAT FOR: To research how exposure to environmental pollutants during pregnancy and
early childhood affects children. The hope is that
these findings will result in preventive measures
to protect the children of at-risk communities in
urban areas.
The Record
NOVEMBER 12, 2010
3
By Nick Obourn
P
ut Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony
Kushner, Tony Award-winning director
Gregory Mosher and Drama Desk-winning
actress Tovah Feldshuh in a room, and you have
instant theater history.
But when these theater luminaries came together at Columbia on Oct. 18 for a panel titled
“Theater in America,” it was to discuss a longer view of stage history. Moderator Laurence
Senelick, a professor of drama at Tufts University, asked each to discuss theater traditions.
Noting that his panelists represented the
new guard of theater in America, “what I’d
like to do tonight is create a kind of dialogue between the past and the present,” said
Senelick, who edited the forthcoming book
The American Stage: Writing on Theater from
Washington Irving to Tony Kushner. “When I
was a young actor, I was once told that anything you do in the theater twice becomes a
tradition. Have any of you come across tradition that is helpful or tradition that stands in
your way at times?”
Kushner, a 1978 graduate of Columbia College who won the Pulitzer in 1993 for Angels
in America, came to New York in the mid1970s, “and so I arrived for the glory days of
American avant-garde theater,” he said. “You
had the Wooster Group and Mabou Mines and
Robert Wilson. I did not feel that there were
many rules that had to be obeyed because I
saw so many extraordinary things that simply
defied all the categories.”
Indeed, his award-winning “gay fantasia
on national themes,” as its subtitle describes
it, defied many theatrical conventions and
went on to win a place in the theater canon.
Written as a play in two parts its characters
include the right-wing lawyer Roy Cohn, the
ghost of Ethel Rosenberg and an angel that
comes crashing through the set.
For Mosher, a professor of professional
practice at the School of the Arts and a director of David Mamet’s earliest plays, Kushner’s
sentiments rang true. “I came into the theater
in the ’60s, so the whole thing was to get rid
of tradition,” he said. “In my private life, I was
reading everything, all the 19th-century writ-
“You reach for the
stars you’ll land on
the roof, you reach for
the roof you’ll never
get off the ground.”
ers, and I was trying to learn from them, but
when I would get into the rehearsal room it
was down with Miller, down with Williams,
down with Odets.” Clifford Odets was a famous, popular playwright in the 1930s and
’40s, whose star faded after he moved to Hollywood to write screenplays and testified as a
friendly witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Mosher’s youthful reticence to embrace
tradition clearly faded some time ago. He won
Tonys two years in a row, 1988 and 1989, for
ON EXHIBIT :
Zara Kriegstein
Riding the Rivers of Life
ara Kriegstein, a German-born
muralist, painter and printmaker, is the focus of a new exhibition
at the Neiman Gallery in the School
of the Arts through Nov. 29. “Riding
the Rivers of Life” features a selection of prints curated by Gandalf
Gavan (SOA’05). Kriegstein’s style
of socially conscious realism shows
Z
influences of the German painters
Otto Dix, George Grosz and Max
Beckmann as well as Mexican muralists like Diego Rivera. She founded the Multi-Cultural Mural Group
in Santa Fe, N.M., where she has
lived since 1980. For more information, visit www.columbia.edu/cu/
arts/neimangallery.
revivals of Cole Porter’s Anything Goes and
Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, and earlier this
year was nominated for a Tony Award for best
director for his revival of Arthur Miller’s A
View from the Bridge.
Senelick also asked the panelists to read
passages from essays in The American Stage.
Mosher read from an essay by Kushner on Miller, in which he wrote of the importance of art
to Miller and restates the question that Miller
believed all artists should ask themselves:
“What is the importance to the human race?”
Feldshuh, whose many credits include the
long-running one-woman show Golda’s Balcony, read from “About Nudity in Theatres,” an
essay by the 19th-century actress and women’s
rights activist Olive Logan. In that essay, Logan
argued that tights were a sexist and subjugating
costume for women on stage.
Kushner read a dismissive review of A
Streetcar Named Desire by writer and critic
Mary McCarthy after the play’s 1947 premiere, in which she said the play would have
been better if it had been presented as just
a struggle for the bathroom. Senelick noted
that he included the essay “just to show that
even a really keen intelligence can get something wrong.”
An audience member asked, “What do you
tell a young playwright or actor?” “Take control,” Kushner declared. Said Mosher: “Don’t
ask for permission; just go do it.” For her part,
Feldshuh encouraged young actors to aim
high yet be realistic. “You reach for the stars,
you’ll land on the roof; you reach for the roof,
you’ll never get off the ground.”
The hosts of the event were Columbia’s
Center for American Studies, the Library of
From top: playwright Tony Kushner, director Gregory Mosher,
America and the Columbia Institute for Israel actress Tovah Feldshuh and panel moderator Laurence
and Jewish Studies.
Senelick, professor of drama at Tufts University, on Oct. 18.
Journalists Awarded Cabot Prize for Superb
Coverage of Latin America and Caribbean
By Melanie A. Farmer
R
e ceiving the Cabot Prize is an honor that has
special resonance for Nicaraguan journalist
Carlos Fernando Chamorro.
Each year, the Cabot Prize, which is administered by Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism,
singles out exceptional reporting on Latin America
and the Caribbean. Only once before in its 72-year
history has it gone to a Nicaraguan journalist, and
that was to Chamorro’s father in 1977. As the editor of La Prensa, Pedro Joaquín Chamorro repeatedly attacked the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza,
exposed corruption and was often jailed for his efforts. Two months after receiving the prize, Pedro
Chamorro was gunned down on a Managua street;
his murder is widely regarded as leading to the overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship.
“There is a serious risk that
U.S. newspapers and the
media are actually abandoning
coverage of Latin America.”
Kriegstein’s 1991 three plate lithography print, Club of the Divine & Shallow
“My father’s death meant a lot of things for Nicaragua; it was the turning point for the revolution,”
said Chamorro in an interview before the awards
ceremony. “It meant a lot to me. Not only did it
cause deep pain, but I decided to become a journalist because of that. Now, I’m here receiving this
same award. I want to honor him. He’s my source of
inspiration.”
As his father did before him, Chamorro challenges the current Nicaraguan government as the direc-
Nicaraguan journalist Carlos Fernando Chamorro, son of slain
1977 Cabot Prize-winner Pedro Joaquín Chamorro
tor of the television news programs, Esta Semana
and Esta Noche and editor of a newsweekly, Confidencial. “Now that I’m older, I am realizing that
perhaps journalism cannot change the world as I
thought it could 30 years ago,” said Chamorro, “but
at least it may have some influence on people’s lives,
particularly for those who do not have a chance to
be heard.”
Chamorro was one of four journalists presented
with this year’s Cabot Prize on Oct. 28 at an annual
dinner and ceremony held in Low Rotunda. The other
winners were freelance reporter Tyler Bridges, based
in Lima, Peru, and formerly the Venezuela bureau
chief for The Miami Herald; Norman Gall, founder
and editor of Braudel Papers; and veteran reporter
Joaquim Ibarz, a Mexico City-based correspondent
for the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia since
1982. Each received a gold medal and $5,000. Special
citations were given to Haiti’s SignalFM radio station
continued on page 4
EILEEN BARROSO
Theater Leading Lights Take a Long
View of Stage History at Symposium
4
The Record
NOVEMBER 12, 2010
Columbia Computer Scientist and Slavic Expert
Are Honored As Faculty ‘Teaching Lions’
By Melanie A. Farmer
S
ometimes, teachers get the gold stars.
In its annual tribute, the Society of
Columbia Graduates named professors
Robert Belknap and Kathleen McKeown with
Great Teacher Awards. The honor dates to 1949
and has been given to distinguished Columbia
educators including Jacques Barzun, Mark Van
Doren and Lionel Trilling. Each year, one Columbia College and one engineering professor
have been selected for recognition on the recommendation of students, faculty and deans.
Belknap, professor emeritus of Slavic languages and director of University Seminars,
began teaching at Columbia in 1968. A scholar of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and 19th-century
Russian prose, Belknap arrived at the University in 1952 when he was a graduate student.
This award is special to Belknap because
it highlights teaching, which she says sometimes takes a backseat to academic research
in universities.
“The teaching is just as important as the
scholarship,” said Belknap. “The whole idea
of getting a bunch of people together to celebrate teaching is a great thing.”
In his 50-plus years at Columbia, Belknap
has chaired the Slavic languages and humanities departments, directed the Russian Institute (now the Harriman Institute) and served
as dean of students and acting dean of the
Kathleen McKeown, the Henry and Gertrude Rothschild
Professor of Computer Science
Robert Belknap, professor emeritus of Slavic languages and
director of University Seminars
College. Belknap became an emeritus faculty
member in 2000, but continued to teach in
the Slavic department and also as a senior
scholar in a program that enables emeriti to
teach in the Core and related courses.
He strives to engage students in discussion
rather than lecturing to them. “It’s always
much more fun when the students are asking the questions and building on those questions as you go,” he said.
Former student Sierra Perez-Sparks (CC’09)
had Belknap as an adviser for her senior-year
independent study on works by Dostoyevsky
and Virginia Woolf. “I could not begin to count
the number of times I struggled, for minutes
on end, to express my newest thought, only for
Professor Belknap to effortlessly turn a phrase
of his own, and capture not only my idea, but
also an elegance of expression, which I so severely lacked,” she said.
McKeown, the Henry and Gertrude Rothschild Professor of Computer Science, was
PUBLIC SAFETY OFFICER’S BONE MARROW
DONATION MAY HELP SAVE A CHILD’S LIFE
By Renée Walker
L
EILEEN BARROSO
ast May, Columbia public safety officer Jardiel
Anthony Tavarez began getting frantic calls and
letters from the New York Blood Center and
National Marrow Donor Program. Tavarez had participated in a bone marrow registration drive in 2003
when he was an undergraduate at John Jay College
but hadn’t thought about it since.
The blood center and donor program were seeking a possible match for a 3-year-old boy with leukemia and contacted Tavarez. According to the blood
center, each day about 3,000 patients worldwide with
leukemia or other blood diseases are searching for a
life-saving bone marrow match. “He had an extremely
small chance of finding a match,” said Tavarez. “I knew
I had to do it.”
Columbia public safety officer and bone marrow donor Jardiel Anthony Tavarez
In his work life, the 28-year-old Tavarez handles
many different duties in the Department of Public
Safety including securing the entry to Butler Library
and patrolling the University’s upper campus. Tavarez is also getting a post-baccalaureate certificate in
business through the School of Continuing Education
and performs in theater productions on and off campus. This month he will appear in the King’s Crown
Shakespeare Troupe’s production of Macbeth in the
role of Siward and two other small parts.
Tavarez dropped everything when, three weeks
after taking the blood test, he received confirmation that he was a perfect match. He quickly began
preparing for major surgery, which calls for the extraction of marrow from the bone at the base of his
spine. The recipient likewise had to prepare to receive Tavarez’s marrow by undergoing chemotherapy to completely destroy his own bone marrow. “I
was informed that during this time, the patient has
no immune system. If anything happened to me, or
I decided not to do it, he would die relatively soon
unless another match could be found,” Tavarez said.
“It was a heavy responsibility.”
The surgery, which was a first for Tavarez, was
performed on July 22. Immediately after the operation, the bone marrow was sent via private courier
to the patient. “They literally run out and jump on
a plane and carry the box of marrow on them the
whole way,” he said. “The recipient received the marrow within 24 hours.”
Tavarez describes his recovery as “hard on the
body, good for the soul.” He spent about a month
overcoming insomnia, extreme fatigue and slight
anemia before returning to work in August. He
thanks Columbia, the blood center and Mount Sinai
Hospital for the support and assistance he has received throughout the process.
James F. McShane, vice president for public safety,
is among the many who support Tavarez’s decision.
“I was very impressed when I learned of Officer Tavarez’s courageous act,” he said. “His generous donation
truly embodies public safety’s commitment to service,
and I am proud of what he has done.”
Tavarez says the experience has given him a new
outlook on life. “While I was recovering, I had a lot of
time to think and reevaluate my life and myself,” he
said. “I look at life on a grander scale. It’s a blessing to
be in good health, and I want to stay connected with
this child.”
Donor rules prohibit Tavarez from meeting the recipient of his bone marrow until a year following the
surgery, although he can get updates on his progress
and knows the child is responding well so far.
Tavarez urges the Columbia community to take
part in the University’s many blood drives and to
register for bone marrow donation. “It’s worth the
risk,” he said. “You don’t always get a chance to save
someone’s life. It’s such a blessing to have had this
opportunity.”
“overwhelmed” by the honor. “It is very
meaningful because it reflects how the students feel,” said McKeown, who also is vice
dean of research at the Fu Foundation School
of Engineering. Her expertise is in natural
language processing.
Kristen Parton, a fifth-year Ph.D. student
in computer science, considers herself fortunate to have McKeown as an adviser. “On
more than one occasion, she has stayed at the
office past midnight to help me with a paper
deadline,” said Parton.
Parton also commended McKeown’s support for women in the field as the faculty
adviser to Women in Computer Science, a
student-led group at the engineering school.
McKeown became the first woman professor
in the school to receive tenure in 1989, and
later the first woman to serve as a department
chair. She joined Columbia in 1982 after turning down a research job at AT&T Bell Labs.
She has no regrets. “I really do enjoy interacting with students,” said McKeown. “They
surprise me. At all levels, whether they are
undergraduates or graduates, my students are
what let me make an impact in the world.”
Belknap and McKeown were presented on
Oct. 21 with a citation and miniature statue
of a lion in an academic robe, the society’s
symbol. Their names will be engraved on a
plaque displayed in the Robert M. Rosencrans
Reading Room of the Philip L. Milstein Family
College Library.
Cabot Winners
continued from page 3
Above: Journalist Joaquim Ibarz working in a demolished room of the Hotel Villa Creole in Port-Au-Prince,
Haiti, in the aftermath of the January 2010 earthquake.
and to CNN and its show Anderson
Cooper 360o for their coverage of
the Jan. 12 earthquake that left Haiti
devastated.
“Latin America is not an easy
place to do journalism,” said Joshua
Friedman, director of the Cabot Prizes. “There are a lot of obstacles and
temptations to slant the story one
way or another. Journalists are not
paid well. The people we are awarding had to overcome a lot of these
obstacles and more.”
Columbia President Lee C. Bollinger, in his welcoming remarks to
the awards dinner, raised another
issue making Latin American coverage challenging: newspaper budget
cuts. “There is a serious risk that
U.S. newspapers and the media
are actually abandoning coverage
of Latin America,” he said. “There
are fewer correspondents every
single year.”
At a panel held a day before the
awards ceremony, reporters and
editors covering Haiti stressed the
hurdles they face as they continue
to cover the earthquake’s aftermath.
Some Haitian journalists are still displaced and living in tents.
“It is very tough for them when
they know they are covering a subject and afterward they don’t know if
they’re going to be able to eat,” said
Mario Viau, managing director of SignalFM. The radio station was the only
media outlet broadcasting within one
hour after the earthquake.
Despite such harsh conditions for
journalists, longtime reporters like
Ibarz, whose coverage is widely circulated in Latin America, still describe
the profession as “a daily labor of
love.” As the first European to win the
Cabot Prize, he said, “I have not served
as a protagonist in Latin America, but
I have served as a witness.”
The Record
NOVEMBER 12, 2010
5
Engineering Ways to Turn Waste Into Energy COLUMBIA INK
By Clare Oh
I
n recent years, Nickolas Themelis
has devoted his career to the management of household trash—a fitting occupation for a professor originally
from Athens, where the ancient Greeks
created the first municipal garbage dump
in the Western world near Athens in the
sixth century B.C.E.
The engineering professor has overseen a global consortium of experts
dedicated to waste management and
waste-to-energy research from his desk
on the ninth floor of the Seeley W. Mudd
building.
Themelis founded the Waste-to-Energy Research and Technology Council
(WTERT) in 2003 as part of the Earth
Engineering Center, which he directs, at
Columbia’s Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science. WTERT
offshoots now exist in Greece, Germany,
China, Brazil and Japan, with others
planned in France, Britain, India and
Mexico. The mission of the consortium
is to promote research and innovation
in sustainable technologies such as recycling, composting, waste-to-energy and
landfill gas capture, as well as to share
information among developed and developing countries.
Originally trained as a chemical engineer, Themelis spent the first part of
his career working for private industry
in extractive metallurgy—the science of
processing ores to create metals. He is responsible for what is today known as the
Noranda process—named for the company where Themelis worked at the time—
which led to the world’s first apparatus
for continuous smelting and converting
of copper that minimized the amount of
sulfur emitted into the atmosphere.
It was his first scientific contribution
to industrial ecology, a field of study that
focuses on environmentally sustainable
processes for producing materials.
When Themelis joined Columbia in
1980, he immersed himself in the subject,
which changed his thinking about science and its relationship to the environ-
Landfill disposal and waste-to-energy incineration remain the
two principal options for managing municipal solid waste.
ment. In 1995, Themelis began to teach
his students about industrial ecology, and
a year later, he established the Earth Engineering Center.
It was a critical time in the history of
the school, says Themelis, when the academic focus of what had been known as
the Henry Krumb School of Mines moved
New Books by Faculty
from “the three M’s—mining, materials
and metallurgy—to the three E’s: earth,
environment and engineering,” Themelis said. The school changed its name
in 1997, and in 1999, he and other engineering faculty founded the school’s
Earth and environmental engineering
department.
In 2007, Themelis retired from
teaching to focus on sustainable waste
management and, in particular, wasteto-energy research and his administrative role at the center and the global
WTERT consortium.
Themelis underscores the importance
of sharing information among the consortium partners, particularly those in
developing countries where technology
is lagging. He credits the council for innovations such as beneficial uses for ash
and improved metal recovery, as well as
for underwriting new research. Under
his leadership, WTERT and the Earth
Engineering Center have helped design
advanced waste-management systems
that in the future may be implemented
in New York City; the Greek cities of
Athens and Rhodes; Florence, Italy; Santiago, Chile; and Mumbai, India.
“Right now there are 1.2 billion tons of
solid waste annually, and only about onesixth of this is being turned into energy.
The rest goes to landfills,” said Themelis.
“This is tantamount to burying one billion barrels of oil by transforming one
hundred square kilometers of greenfields
to landfills. My hope is that we can show
people that the management of wastes
can be more sustainable.”
The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History
BY SAMUEL MOYN
Harvard University Press
In The Last Utopia, history Professor Samuel Moyn argues that
the contemporary human rights
movement began in the decade
after 1968, when social and
political dissidents became disillusioned with revolutionary communism and nationalism. Others
have traced the idea of human
rights to the dawn of Western
civilization, to the Enlightenment,
or to the United Nations General
Assembly’s Universal Declaration
of Human Rights in 1948. But Moyn, an expert in modern European intellectual history, frames the movement as the successor to earlier failed political utopias, and he credits President
Jimmy Carter for being one of the first leaders to make it a
hallmark of his foreign policy.
Here Comes Another Lesson: Stories
BY STEPHEN O’CONNOR
Free Press
This is the second collection of
short stories by Stephen O’Connor,
an adjunct professor in Columbia’s M.F.A. writing program. The
stories range from the fantastic
to the realistic, with one featuring a minotaur who falls in love
with his would-be victim. Charles,
the “Professor of Atheism,” is a
recurring character befuddled by
his transformation from a fringe
academic to a lauded scholar.
O’Connor, whose fiction has appeared in The New Yorker and
numerous other publications, also writes poetry and nonfiction.
His nonfiction works include Will My Name Be Shouted Out?,
about his experience teaching writing to inner-city students, and
Orphan Trains: The Story of Charles Loring Brace and the Children
He Saved and Failed.
Everyone’s a Critic: Panel Explores Divide
Between Print and Digital Movie Reviewers
By Nick Obourn
The Cloud Corporation
A
BY TIMOTHY DONNELLY
Wave Press
PIOTR REDLINSKI
t the Cannes International Film Festival in May, Oliver
Stone held a press luncheon for the much-hyped sequel
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, inviting only Internet
film reviewers. To David Denby, (CC’65, JRN’66) film critic of
The New Yorker magazine, the exclusion underlined the frosty
relationship between print and Web reviewers and how movie
studios play one group against another.
“The film industry [is] destructive to the point of nihilism at
this point,” he said at an Oct. 26 panel titled “New Directions:
Re-Imagining Film Criticism in the Digital Age.” He added,
“They would … like to reduce any value or importance that
we may have by surrounding us with as many non-critics and
pseudo-critics as possible.”
The discussion, which was co-hosted by the Graduate School
of Journalism and the School of the Arts, aimed to give both
sides a platform. Besides Denby, panelists included New York
Times film critic A.O. Scott and Stephanie Zacharek, chief film
critic for Movieline.com and former critic for Salon.com.
Ted Mundorf, CEO of Landmark Theatres, said print reviews,
combined with film trailers, still drive the most traffic to his 54
theaters nationwide, which specialize in screening independent
and avant-garde film.
“We have found that The New York Times, the Los Angeles
Times and The Washington Post have been very supportive and
run reviews,” said Mundorf. “They run all the reviews, for all the
movies, 100 percent of the time. And those three markets are
our best performers.”
Panelists agreed that while the Internet has increased the
availability of information about films, it has created other
problems. “It’s harder to find what matters to you because there
is so much out there,” said Zacharek, who was at the forefront
of online magazine writing when she joined Salon in 1996. “You
can go online and find hundreds of reviews so it’s not that [reviewers] are not paying attention. It’s that the people that you
need to buy the tickets are not finding their way to the dozens
and hundreds of reviews.”
Scott agreed that the industry was suffering from too much
information. “In the 1970s, The New York Times reviewed about
250 movies a year,” he said. “We now review about 650 movies
a year because it is our commitment to review anything that
opens on a Manhattan screen for at least a five-day run. There’s
just a lot more stuff that is available a lot more easily.”
Some of the panelists noted that while writers have more
space online to discuss films than they would in print, there
can be an amateur quality to online writing that doesn’t serve
Timothy Donnelly’s second collection of poems comes seven years
after his first, Twenty-seven Props
for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit.
Elegant, inventive and strange,
Donnelly’s poems are simple yet
extremely complex—the title poem
runs 35 stanzas—with source material as varied as the USA Patriot
Act and Bruce Springsteen’s Born
to Run. In this new volume, Donnelly, an assistant professor at the
School of the Arts and director of
undergraduate creative writing, challenges conventional uses of
language and pushes political, social and personal boundaries to
the edge. In addition to teaching at Columbia, Donnelly is poetry
editor for Boston Review.
Film critic for The New Yorker magazine David Denby (CC’65 & Journalism‘66) was part of a
panel discussion on film criticism in the digital age on Oct. 26 at the J-school.
The Lucky Ones
the interests of readers. Also, on the Internet, readers can learn
about films playing nearly anywhere, but that has hurt the local
film reviewer at the local newspaper. “I miss the local flare,”
said Denby, who cited The Village Voice’s Jim Hoberman as an
example of a film critic he trusts.
All of the panelists, whether writer, distributor, theater
chain owner or producer, agreed they depended on the viability of the film industry. The critics, Denby, Scott and Zacharek, acknowledged that they need good films in order to write
good reviews.
Producer Christine Vachon, whose credits include the films
Boys Don’t Cry and Far From Heaven, noted that reviews are
crucial even for HBO films. She is currently working on the upcoming HBO movie Mildred Pierce starring Kate Winslet.
Denby, said “There are a lot of very serious people on the
Internet, very erudite people,” but he believes that online reviews haven’t been helpful to the movie industry because they
don’t necessarily help movies find an audience or sell tickets.
“To keep the art form alive,” said Denby, “you have to get
people into the seats in theaters…and that’s what the Internet is not doing.”
BY MAE NGAI
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
History Professor Mae Ngai’s latest
book, The Lucky Ones: One Family
and the Extraordinary Invention of
Chinese America, examines the history of early Chinese immigration
to San Francisco through the lens
of one rag-to-riches family. Ngai,
the Lung Family Professor of Asian
American Studies, introduces readers to Jeu Dip, who emigrated to the
United States at age 12, eventually
changing his name to Joseph Tape,
and his wife, Mary McGladery, an
indentured Chinese servant rescued from prostitution at age 11.
Using historical documents, photographs and newspaper clippings, Ngai writes a sweeping and compelling saga of one family
that sheds light on the little-known history of the Chinese middle
class in America.
6
The Record
NOVEMBER 12, 2010
SENATE HEARS ABOUT SCIENCE BUILDINGS,
FRINGE BENEFITS AND MORE
Senators
spent
much of their Oct. 22
plenary session riveted
to screens, as administrators provided compelling images of new
science buildings and some eye-opening
numbers for next year’s fringe benefits.
The Senate also heard from a presidential
committee on sexual assault.
A proposal from Columbia students in
off-campus ROTC programs to provide
a color guard for twice-weekly flag ceremonies on the Morningside campus elicited the following statement, read aloud
by Executive Committee chair Sharyn
O’Halloran (Ten., SIPA): “The Executive
Committee believes Columbia should
welcome the participation of all Columbia students—indeed, of all members of
the Columbia community—in campus
ceremonies honoring the flag, subject to
any logistical or administrative considerations. For example, we ask participants
in such ceremonies, particularly in the
early morning, to exclude music and other
sounds that have the potential to disturb
other members of our community.”
President Lee Bollinger, an Executive
Committee member, said the issue of
ROTC has been fraught with complications, particularly the conflict between
“don’t ask, don’t tell,” and Columbia’s
antidiscrimination policies. “The Executive Committee has formulated a way of
thinking about this, with respect to honoring the flag, and it strikes me as a very
sound approach,” Bollinger said.
In remarks about the Northwest Corner building, Executive Vice President for
Facilities Joseph Ienuso said 11 professors
will move in later this month, with about
10 more spaces still to be filled; the digital media library there, a consolidation
of several departmental science libraries,
will open in the spring. Ienuso showed
pictures of the building’s lobby, which will
provide campus access from Broadway
and 120th Street. He also reviewed the
Manhattanville project, and showed pre-
liminary computer images of the Jerome
L. Greene Science Center (also known as
Mind Brain Behavior).
Linda Nilsen, assistant vice president
for benefits in Human Resources, reviewed changes in benefits for 2011 and
explained an administration task force on
fringe benefits that is studying ways to restrain the current surge in costs, particularly for health. Increases in officer premiums for point-of-service plans in 2011
range from 10 percent to 20 percent in
most salary tiers, the second consecutive year of steep increases. One graph
showed annual increases of 30 percent
in the number of officers who used more
than $50,000 a year of medical services
between 2008 and 2010, from 150 to
more than 250. Nilsen said the explanation of this trend was not yet clear.
Four faculty senators serve on the 27member administration task force on
fringe benefits. An 11-member Senate
“shadow” committee, representing librarians, researchers and administrative staff
as well as faculty, will start meeting later
this month.
Karen Singleton, director of the Sexual
Violence Prevention and Response Program, reported for the Presidential Advisory Committee on Sexual Assault, which
she co-chairs. PACSA was launched by the
Senate in spring 2007. In 2009-10, PACSA
revised the Disciplinary Procedure for
Sexual Assault. Last spring, Singleton said,
there were five formal complaints of sexual assault, the highest number since the
Universitywide disciplinary procedure was
established by the Senate in 1995.
The Senate meets next on Friday, Nov.
12, at 1:15 p.m., in 107 Jerome Greene.
Anyone with a CUID is welcome. Most
plenary documents are on the Web at
www.columbia.edu/cu/senate.
Tom Mathewson is manager of the University Senate. His column is editorially
independent of The Record. For more information about the Senate, go to www
.columbia.edu/cu/senate.
President Bollinger Agrees
to New Five-Year Contract
among the best among its peer group in a turbulent financial period.
“Columbia is thriving on many levels today,
ee C. Bollinger will remain Columbia’s presi- and is well positioned for the long-term both
dent until at least 2015, the University trust- locally and globally, because of Lee’s distincees announced last month.
tive vision,” said Campbell. He added that
In a statement to the University commuthere is still work to be done in building
nity, Board of Trustees Chair William V.
on the University’s momentum.
Campbell said that “it’s clear from many
For his part, Bollinger said, “For
perspectives why the Trustees feel so
anyone who cares about creating
strongly about the importance of havnew knowledge and conveying
ing Lee Bollinger continue as
the knowledge we have to the
president for the next five years.”
next generation, as well as beCampbell described Columing engaged in the seemingly
bia as “a place where talented
endless challenges facing our
students want to study, accomworld, there is no better place
plished faculty want to teach
to be than Columbia Univerand do research, world leaders
sity…But its potential for the
future is even greater, and I am
want to speak, and skilled proextremely happy to be able to
fessionals want to work.” He
contribute to the realization of
praised Bollinger for recruiting
that potential.”
and empowering an impres- 19th President of Columbia UniBollinger became the Unisive array of “academic deans versity, Lee C. Bollinger
versity’s 19th president in
and executive talent who are
driving both intellectual excellence and solid 2002. If he stays in office through the 20152016 academic year, he will be the longest
institutional management.”
He pointed out that Columbia has maintained serving president since Grayson Kirk, whose
fiscal stability despite the economic downturn 15-year tenure ended when he resigned in the
of 2008-09. The University remained less reliant wake of campus protests in 1968. Nicholas
on endowment income than several leading peer Murray Butler, Columbia’s president from 1902
institutions and its investment returns have been to 1945, held that office the longest.
By Record Staff
L
The New Jewish
Studies Library
he Columbia University
Libraries received a gift
of $4 million to establish the
Norman E. Alexander Library
for Jewish Studies, which will
include three new endowments: a Jewish Studies librar-
Post-Election Spin
D
T
ian, the General Jewish Studies
Collection and the Special Collections in Judaica. For more information, visit news.columbia
.edu/alexanderlibrary
orian T. Warren, assistant
professor of political science and international and
public affairs, answers questions about the result of the
Nov. 2 midterm elections—
what they say about the state
of the nation and how they will
affect Congress and the Obama
Administration. For a video of his
responses, visit news.columbia
.edu/dorianwarren
COLUMBIA PEOPLE
Scott Halvorson
WHO HE IS: Dean of Students, School of General
Studies
YEARS AT COLUMBIA: 13
WHAT HE DOES: Halvorson (SOA’01) was appointed dean of students in February, after serving in
an interim capacity for two years. He meets daily
with colleagues and deans at the School of General Studies to discuss a range of topics, from academic policies and curriculum to student housing and event planning. He also advises students
individually, helping them with anything from
planning their course load to resolving conflicts
with professors or fellow classmates.
EILEEN BARROSO
BEST PART OF THE JOB: When seniors file for graduation each year. “I find that many students have
achieved, by this time, a real insight into their
own character and growth, and it means a lot
when they share it with me,” said Halvorson.
ROAD TO COLUMBIA: After receiving a master’s degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1988, Halvorson moved to California
to teach public high school students for eight
years in the Long Beach Unified School District.
In 1996, Halvorson came to Columbia to study
screenwriting; while a student, he applied for a
job at the School of General Studies. His experience in public schools helped him land a job as
assistant director of the University’s Higher Education Opportunity Program, which provides
supportive services and financial aid to underserved college students in New York state.
“I taught a lot of wonderful kids [at Long
Beach], but the odds were stacked against them
in so many ways,” said Halvorson. “My experience there made me truly realize the inequities
in our public school system, and this is why I
developed such a commitment to equal access
in education.” In 1999, Halvorson helped design the Program for Academic Leadership and
Service; often referred to as PALS, it provides
underserved, low-income students access to a
Columbia undergraduate education. He directed
PALS from its inception up until February of this
year. He also served as assistant dean of students
at the School of General Studies from 1998 to
2003 and was associate dean from 2003 to 2008.
He taught a screenwriting class at the School of
the Arts from 2002 to 2005 and has taught University Writing for several years (2007-2010),
a class that all Columbia undergraduates must
take as part of the Core Curriculum.
While drawn to Columbia to start a career in
film, his involvement and interest in education
ultimately took precedence. “I am fascinated by
how we, as human beings, change by choice,
how the decisions we make take us down one
road or another,” said Halvorson. “In my job,
I am dealing every day with students who are
undergoing deep change—intellectual, social,
personal … It’s a beautiful thing to observe, and
it’s a pleasure to remind students of just how far
they have come.”
MOST MEMORABLE MOMENT: Watching Carlos Barrezueta, a PALS student, deliver the school’s valedictory address in 2003 to a standing ovation.
As dean of students, it is Halvorson’s job to read
the names of graduates as they cross the stage at
Commencement. “Doing that for the first time
without mangling too many names—I hope!—
was certainly memorable.”
IN HIS SPARE TIME: Halvorson, 48, plays the guitar
at an “extremely amateur level,” as he puts it.
Last spring, he and a few colleagues performed
as a band under the name The Administrators at
the first General Studies Student Council Talent
Show. “No one had to twist my arm to perform
a couple of tunes from the ancient ’80s,” he said.
“You’re never too administrative to rock.”
—By Melanie A. Farmer
The Record
NOVEMBER 12, 2010
7
FACULTY Q&A
EMILY
BELL
POSITION:
Professor of Journalism and
Director of the Tow Center at Columbia University
JOINED FACULTY:
2010
HISTORY:
Britain’s Guardian News & Media;
director of digital content
2006-2010
The Guardian online edition at Guardian.co.uk;
editor-in-chief
2001-2006
MediaGuardian.co.uk; founder and editor
2000-2001
continued from page 1
E
mily Bell’s career in journalism over the past 20 years
has tracked the industry’s trajectory.
Joining London’s Observer as a print reporter newly
graduated from Christ Church, Oxford University, the Britishborn Bell spent her first decade in the field writing, and later
editing, stories about the business of media, technology and
marketing. “My first love was written journalism,” she said,
adding that “writing about television from a business perspective is what first led me in the 1990s to become interested in the Internet and its possibilities.”
In 2000, the Guardian newspaper (which had bought the
Observer) encouraged her to jump to its online division. “People did actually think I was crazy at that time to leave a settled
job on a national newspaper, but it was so compelling to think
how you could experiment and do new things,” she said.
As editor-in-chief of Guardian.co.uk, Bell became one of
the world’s foremost authorities on online news and information, turning the website into one of the most successful
and widely read news portals in the world, with 37 million
unique users, according to Britain’s independent ABC, which
measures media performance. She later became director of
digital content for Guardian News & Media. “That was the
post that I held when I got a call from Columbia saying, ‘Have
you seen this job? Are you interested?’ ”
The school was looking for a director for its Tow Center for
Digital Journalism, which was founded in January with a mandate to teach and study digital journalism and emerging media.
It was established with $15 million in funding, a third from the
Tow Foundation and the rest from 10 individual donors.
As the center’s first director, Bell will teach graduate students, collaborate with and study news organizations, and
oversee original scholarly research on issues surrounding
digital journalism. She also will help oversee the new dualdegree Master of Science Program in Computer Science and
Journalism with Columbia’s Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science.
“I think that the Tow Center really wants to be the place
where journalists and technologists meet and talk, and where
we can experiment with ideas and facilitate a conversation
about how this changing world is impacting journalism and
how journalism will develop,” she said.
Q.
A.
You have print experience and you have online
experience. What are the major differences
between the two?
In the early days of the Web, what you were doing
was an amplification of print. There was very little
interactivity with users, you had flat text, and you had still
photography. Today, the complexities of managing an online
newsroom involve choices in the ways to tell your story. There
is something about managing journalism in real time that’s
different from a culture which prints once a day. In a live production environment, you have people who have to be quite
open about what they’re doing. When you’re protecting stories
for a print deadline, it leads you to a very different mentality
about protecting exclusivity. The second difference is the skill
set of the people involved—not just the journalists and graphic designers you might have on a newspaper, but technologists
who come up with creative and journalistic solutions to problems. The third difference is an enormous one: You have an
audience that talks back to you directly on a one-to-one basis,
and that’s a real paradigm shift for print journalists.
EILEEN BARROSO
Observer (later bought by Guardian);
media reporter and later business editor
1990-2000
Journalism Dean Nicholas Lemann and Emily Bell at a Nov. 4 panel discussion as part of the, A Free Press for a Global Society conference.
Q.
A.
Do you think an M.B.A education is now required to
run a news outlet successfully?
I don’t think you need an M.B.A-level education, but
I do think you need a profound understanding of the
business pressures and the costs and resource allocation. Even
a relatively junior reporter, editor or copyeditor must know
what the options are in terms of how you tell a story and how
much those options cost. The number of things you can now
do are almost unlimited. Do you tell it on video? On your own
platform? Future Web journalists have to have a detailed understanding of the implications of the tools that they use to tell
their stories, and how much those tools cost.
Q.
A.
Will the industry get to a point where people start
paying for news? When?
Charging for news is a very complex question. You
certainly need to have some way of paying for serious
journalism, but if you want to unbundle serious journalism
from the package of a newspaper, it has almost never paid for
itself. You cannot support the cost of a correspondent in Iraq
or Afghanistan on the advertising and the payment that you
attract for their journalism; you pay for them through the property ads or travel section ads. There is this automatic and quite
understandable psychological need in the news business to
think that people must pay for journalism on the Web because
it is valuable. Now, if you take that to its logical conclusion, you
would end up with all news being paid for at the point of consumption. And I think in a democratic society that’s a highly
problematic concept. Do you want to be part of a conversation
which informs and supports democracy? Walling up all content
takes you out of that conversation, and that’s not something
that the news industry should be seeking out. Now, should parts
of the news industry monetize through charging? Yes, and they
already do and they will. Look at the apps business, where you
have a sustainable charging model mainly because you don’t
have to build it yourself.
Q.
A.
What is the future for journalism in nations where
much of the population doesn’t have Internet access?
Q.
A.
Can you characterize the difference between digital
journalism and traditional news stories?
That’s a great question because I think access to
journalism is just not talked about enough. I think
you’re already seeing a sort of leapfrog effect in some places, like certain areas of sub-Saharan Africa or Asia, where
the proliferation of news in mobile phones and simple text
messaging is likely to run ahead of people buying printed
newspapers. The cost of actually producing journalism is
falling all the time. About 60 percent of everything that
print journalists do is connected to production and distribution of a physical product. What will be interesting in
developing economies is how low-cost mobile technologies
take the place of physical print distribution.
I used to have a phrase that I deployed at the
Guardian, which I stole from our chief technology
strategist, which is “being of the Web, not just on the Web.”
Digital journalism is about creating a living sort of news,
rather than a finished article, and that’s the key difference.
If you’re just putting stories on the Web—it doesn’t mean
that stories aren’t good or that people won’t read them—but
there’s a fundamental difference between that and actually
producing digital journalism.
Q.
A.
Much of what I see on so-called news websites is
poorly researched and poorly edited. What can be
done to bring a higher degree of quality to online news?
If there are online stories which are poorly researched,
poorly written and poorly edited, I don’t think that’s
a problem of online journalism. I think that’s a problem of
journalism, full stop. We have to be frank with ourselves that
the ratings, the trust ratings, for journalism are terrible. Now,
at Columbia, where we’re sending out these incredibly welltrained, intelligent reporters, it’s sometimes easy to ignore the
fact that there are a lot of problems around the standards of
journalism. I think the first thing you need to stop is the reproduction of shoddy stuff. There’s a huge audience for instant,
celebrity-driven stuff, for example, but if you look over time,
a lot of the big Web audiences do actually gravitate to higherquality content. I think that as the news business begins to
realize this, it will start providing people with real-time updates without lots of instant and not particularly great articles.
The analysis, the longer reported piece—a multimedia story
that you tell over time, with a database—you have to produce
those in a high-quality way to attract and hold an audience.
To survive, journalism has to have professional standards of
reporting and distributing information.
Q.
A.
What will the Tow Center be doing?
We want the Tow Center to be the place where technology and journalism meet and become properly
integrated, as opposed to sitting parallel to one another. As
an example, take the question of how you protect sources
in the 21st century. In the digital world, we’re talking about
vast numbers of sources, not just somebody that you phone
up and then you keep their identity secret—this is a problem
that computer scientists think about a lot. Another example is
how to engage new audiences who use a number of different
technological devices. It’s really hard for one skill set, the verbal tradition of storytelling, to be able to solve that. You could
argue that in the late ’90s, the news business was too arrogant
to look at computer science programs at places like Stanford
and say, ‘These people are doing really interesting things with
information, aggregation, distribution [and] that’s our business.’ There was a denial that things like Google, because it’s
not a content business, could have an impact on what we do
as journalists. The next generation of journalists must have an
understanding of those skills, as well as the verbal tradition,
and look to the technological future. I think that it’s entirely
appropriate that Columbia, which has pioneered quality journalism since it was founded in 1912 with a gift from Joseph
Pulitzer, is thinking about these problems in a different way.
To see the complete video of Emily Bell’s responses, go to
news.columbia.edu/emilybell
COLUMBIA PICTURES
2
3
wenty former student athletes and three
former head coaches were inducted into the
Columbia Athletics Hall of Fame at an Oct. 22
black-tie dinner in Low Library.
Among the members this year are Beijing
Olympic silver medalist in fencing Erinn Smart;
U.S. Open Tennis champion Oliver Campbell; one
of Columbia’s most beloved coaches, Buff Donelli;
and one of his most successful teams, the 1961
Ivy League Champion football squad.
The captain of the ’61 squad, William V.
Campbell, chair of the University Trustees, is also
a former head football coach and National Football Foundation Gold Medal winner. In 2009, the
National Football Foundation and College Hall
of Fame renamed the Draddy Trophy in honor
of Campbell. This trophy is the most prestigious
academic honor in collegiate football.
T
8
7
8
Pictured clockwise from top left are:
1. Al Butts (CC’64) with Campbell (CC’62);
2. Delilah DiCrescenzo (CC’05), track and field;
3. Garrett Neubart (CC’95), baseball;
4. Former fencing standouts Bob Cottingham Jr.
(CC’88) and Smart (BC’01);
5. Women’s basketball standout Kathy Gilbert
White (CC’91) with Lisa Landau Carnoy
(CC’89), co-founder of the Columbia Athletics
Women’s Leadership Council;
6. Head men’s soccer coach Kevin Anderson, former head men’s soccer coach Dieter Ficken and
head women’s soccer coach Kevin McCarthy;
7. Football standout Rory Wilfork (CC’97);
8. Head field hockey coach Marybeth Freeman
with former field hockey and softball standout
Nicole Campbell (CC’02).
4
HALL OF FAME PHOTOS BY GENE BOYARS
1
NOVEMBER 12, 2010
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6
Global Free Press
Creativity Panel
continued from page 1
continued from page 1
And Qin Liwen, the director of News Center, at
China’s Modern Media Group, said China has led the
way in developing digital applications to disseminate
information, and pointed out that access to media and
the Internet in China is free. “I’ve never experienced any
time in China with more public debate.”
On the second day of the conference, Singapore’s
Minister for Law, K. Shanmugam, delivered an address
energetically defending his country’s media policies
which, he said, ensure respect for government institutions and prevent the kind of shallow, entertainmentdriven news environment allowed in the U.S.
A panel titled “What Journalists Need to Know”
addressed how technology and the marketplace are
challenging traditional media in a global and digital
age. (see Q&A with Emily Bell on page 7) Bill Grueskin,
the Graduate School of Journalism’s academic dean,
pointed out that students now must take a “Business of
Journalism” course and learn the necessity of thinking
entrepreneurially as they enter a fast-changing news
business. Jack Weiss, a former Columbia Law School
professor and now the chancellor of the Paul M. Hebert Law Center at Louisiana State University, said journalism schools should adopt mandatory international
law and ethics classes.
Bollinger queried journalism dean Nick Lemann
about other ways to improve journalism education,
suggesting that students could benefit by gaining
mastery of specific subject areas, which would require
expanding the length of the curriculum. Lemann
countered that while increasing expertise is important, such a move risked limiting students’ ability to
move nimbly across a broad spectrum of subjects,
which is what has always separated the journalism
school from other academic degree programs.
Bollinger said that this would be the first of
many such conversations Columbia would host in
different locations around the world as part of the
University’s commitment to dealing with the major
issues created by globalization.
to do. The first musical I wrote pretty much opened
and closed … and I wondered if I was going to continue. I decided that I had too many life-changing
theater experiences, and I had this other show that
I was going to see through. And that show was Next
to Normal.”
The panel discussion, held Oct. 15 at Jazz at Lincoln Center, included a performance by SYOTOS,
a band led by associate professor of music Chris
Washburne. An art exhibit showcased the photographs and paintings of 22 University graduates
whose work has been displayed in galleries and
museums worldwide.
Dennehy, a two-time Tony Award-winner and
longtime supporter of the University’s Arts Initiative, recalled his days as a student and an aspiring
theater actor, when the New York of the 1950s provided him with a “banquet” of inspiration.
“It was an extraordinary time,” Dennehy said. “I
can remember, very clearly, hanging out at the West
End [bar] and seeing this strange-looking, obvious
alcoholic with huge sheets of paper under his arm,
and it was Jack Kerouac—who had not become Jack
Kerouac then. His creative days were over, but he
was there, as were so many other extraordinary
people. And that was New York.”
Big-city living was also a source of inspiration
for Solomon, who grew up in West Philadelphia
before moving to New York to attend Barnard. For
the author of Get Down, who was also recognized
as one of the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under
35,” the most rewarding aspect of creative expression is that it follows many paths.
“I think of creativity as anything that makes everyday life more beautiful, so if you’re doing anything like that, you should think of it as creative,”
she said. “Tend your garden, cook, put together an
awesome outfit and write a novel, too. There are
so many different ways to be creative. Cure cancer.
That’s creative.”
WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING AT?
Hint: This prophet’s profile resides in one of the oldest buildings on campus. Wherein
people learn that you need not part the Red Sea in order to advance your spiritual
growth. Where is this sculpture located and who is it? Send answers to curecord@
columbia.edu. The first person to email the right answer wins a Record mug.
ANSWER TO LAST CHALLENGE: 7th floor stairwell of the Mudd building
WINNER: Jiaqi Liu (SEAS 2014)