Editor-in-chief and President of the Huffington Post Media Group Arianna Huffington will address the Tufts community at the ninth annual Edward R. Murrow Forum on Issues in Journalism, according to Director of the Communications and Media Studies (CMS) Program Julie Dobrow.
"We always try to get an A-list journalist to come for our Edward R. Murrow Forum on Issues in Journalism and it seemed to us that while we have had a lot of television journalists who have come, we have had far fewer print journalists," Dobrow said. "Of course now that online news is such an incredibly important part of the whole complexion of news, we could think of few people who have had more of an impact on online news than Arianna Huffington."
Online platforms, like the Huffington Post, have sped up the news cycle, which Dobrow said she is interested to hear more about from Huffington.
"I'm hoping she will talk with us about her perceptions about what online news has meant for all of the competition in print broadcasting and other online sources," Dobrow said. "Does online news continue to democratize news for us? Does it mean we increasingly can read about or tune into only the news that which we basically already agree?"
Dobrow emphasized that both Murrow and Huffington have participated in revolutionary changes to news media.
"One of the things that characterized Murrow was that he did a lot of really cutting edge things in his day," she said. "When news went from radio to television, he was right there making that transition, he was very important in that. [Murrow] was amazing about contextualizing news and I think that is something that potentially the Huffington Post does as well. ... I wanted to have Ariana Huffington come here because just like Edward R. Murrow, she in her own way has really been a trailblazer in the way that news has been presented to us.
According to her bio on the Huffington Post website, Huffington won a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 2012 and was named to Forbes Most Powerful Women list in 2013.
This year's forum will be held at 12 p.m. on April 16 in the Cohen Auditorium.
