ehume's blog

About Ellen Hume

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Before coming to MIT in January 2008, Ellen Hume was a journalist for 20 years who founded the Center on Media and Society at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where she created the New England Ethnic Newswire. Previously, she served as executive director and senior fellow at Harvard University's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, and as executive director of PBS's Democracy Project, where she developed special news programs that encouraged citizen involvement in public affairs. She was a White House and political correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, national reporter with the Los Angeles Times and regular commentator on PBS's Washington Week in Review and CNN's Reliable Sources program. She holds a B.A. in American History and Literature from Harvard University and honorary doctorates from Kenyon College and Daniel Webster College. In the summer of 2009 she will depart MIT to become an Annenberg Fellow at Central European University in Budapest.

The future of news?

The lucky and talented Knight News Challenge winners have joined us here at MIT this week to explore “The Future of News and Civic Media.” As they arrive, I am preparing to depart. This farewell post for C4FCM is inspired especially by them and by four experiences here this spring:

Couch Potatoes and Journalism Culture

Journalism requires not only a business model, but a culture. At the Center for Future Civic Media, we sometimes take a moment to reflect on the online news experiments begun in the pioneer digital media days in the 1990s, to keep a clear head about how journalism and social networks intersect. But perhaps we shouldn’t use the j-word.

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