New Yorker editor to discuss news media since Sept. 11, 2001

By Lisa Trei

David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker magazine, will join a trio of journalists and academics at Stanford May 17 and 18 for a lecture and symposium on the performance of the news media since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001.

Remnick will deliver the annual John S. Knight Lecture at 7:30 p.m. May 17 in Kresge Auditorium. The title of his talk is "The Press Since Sept. 11."

At 11 a.m. the following day, Remnick will participate in a discussion of issues raised in his talk with Joann Byrd, former ombudsman of the Washington Post; Stanford history Professor David Kennedy; and Salon.com founder David Talbot. Raul Ramirez, news and public affairs director of KQED-FM in San Francisco, will moderate the event, which will be held in the Schwab Residential Center on Serra Street.

Both events, which are free and open to the public, are sponsored by the John S. Knight Fellowships for Professional Journalists, a program that brings mid-career journalists to campus to study for an academic year.

Remnick, editor of The New Yorker since 1998, joined the weekly magazine in 1992, following 10 years at the Washington Post. He was the Post's Moscow correspondent from 1988 to 1992, an experience that formed the basis of his 1993 book on the former Soviet Union, Lenin's Tomb, which won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. He is also the author of Resurrection, on the struggle to build a Russian state from the ruins of the Soviet empire; King of the World, on the boxer Muhammad Ali; and The Devil Problem (and Other True Stories), a collection of his New Yorker pieces.

Byrd retired last year as editorial page editor at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. She was ombudsman at the Washington Post from 1992 to 1995 and, before that, executive editor of The Herald in Everett, Wash. She is a member of the Pulitzer Board and was one of three outside members of the New York Times committee that investigated the plagiarism and fabrication of news stories by former staff reporter Jayson Blair.

Kennedy, the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History, specializes in 20th-century U.S. history. He is the author or co-editor of 10 books, including Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, which won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for history. He also is a member of the Pulitzer Board.

Talbot founded Salon.com in 1995 and is its editor-in-chief and chief executive officer. Previously, he was the arts and features editor of the San Francisco Examiner, and he has written for The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Interview and Playboy. He was senior editor of Mother Jones magazine in the early 1980s.

Ramirez has been news and public affairs director at KQED since 1991. He has worked at the Miami Herald, Washington Post, Oakland Tribune and San Francisco Examiner. In 1999, he received a career achievement award from the Society of Professional Journalists of Northern California.

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