Newsweek editor to deliver 17th annual John S. Knight Lecture

Mark Whitaker, editor of Newsweek magazine, will deliver a talk titled "Choices in the Age of 24/7 News" for the 17th annual John S. Knight Lecture. The following day, he will take part in a panel discussion focusing on issues raised in his speech and the rapidly changing dynamics of the news media environment.

The lecture is scheduled for 7:30 p.m. Monday, May 16, in the Hewlett Teaching Center Lecture Hall. The symposium is scheduled to begin at noon Tuesday, May 17, in the Bechtel Conference Center at Encina Hall. Sponsored by the Knight Fellowships program, both events are free and open to the public.

Whitaker will be joined on the symposium panel May 17 by Katrina Heron, an author and former editor of Wired magazine, and Tim Porter, who writes the journalism blog First Draft. James Bettinger, director of the Knight Fellowships for Professional Journalists, will moderate the discussion.

Under Whitaker's leadership, Newsweek won the 2004 National Magazine Award for General Excellence, the industry's most prestigious award, for its coverage of the war in Iraq. Newsweek also won the General Excellence award in 2002 for the magazine's coverage of the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington. This year Newsweek won the award for a single-topic issue, "How He Did It"—a special issue on the re-election of George W. Bush, published Nov. 15, 2004.

Whitaker came to Newsweek in 1977 as a reporting intern in the San Francisco bureau and later reported as a stringer and intern in Boston, Washington, London and Paris. He joined the magazine staff in 1981 and rose to a succession of more responsible positions: business editor from 1997 to 1991, assistant managing editor from 1991 to 1996 and managing editor from 1996 to 1998.

Since becoming editor in 1998, Whitaker has redesigned the magazine to emphasize more in-depth reporting, diversify opinion columns and introduce new sections and series on personal service ("Tip Sheet"), health ("Health for Life"), technology ("Next Frontiers") and business ("Enterprise").

Katrina Heron is a co-author of Safe: How We Can Change the Rules of Engagement in a Newly Dangerous World, published earlier this year. She was a top editor at the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker before moving to Wired magazine. She was editor-in-chief from 1997 through 2001, a period during which the magazine solidified its importance to information technology coverage. She was a Knight Fellow in 1995-96 and delivered the Knight Lecture in 2001.

Tim Porter is an editor and writer with an extensive background in print and web journalism. He is associate director of Tomorrow's Workforce, a newsroom development project, and author of First Draft, a blog on quality journalism and newsroom innovation. Formerly, he was an assistant managing editor with the San Francisco Examiner, editor of Examiner.com and editor of the Richmond Independent.

The Knight Fellowships program brings outstanding mid-career journalists—12 from the United States and six to eight from other countries—to study at Stanford for an academic year. It has sponsored an annual lecture since 1988. Beginning last year the event was expanded to include a symposium the day following the lecture.

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