Lydia Kulbida Joins Film Panel This Friday 3/3!

Lydia Kulbida will join our pre-film discussion about His Girl Friday (1940) with leading local journalists this coming Friday at Page Hall (newly added event). Lydia is a prominent Capital Region broadcast journalist who co-anchors News10ABC at 4pm with Elisa Streeter and Chief Meteorologist Steve Caporizzo, and also co-anchors News10ABC at 6pm and FOX23 News at 10pm with John Gray.

March 3 (Friday): HIS GIRL FRIDAY

Pre-screening talk with Lydia Kulbida, Rosemary Armao, Marion Roach Smith and Casey Seiler about the challenges facing women in journalism —

7:30 p.m., Page Hall, 135 Western Avenue, Downtown Campus, 1400 Washington Ave.

Film screening to follow— 8:00 p.m.

Directed by Howard Hawks (United States, 1940, 92 minutes, b/w)

Starring Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell, Ralph Bellamy

A newspaper editor uses every trick he can think of to stop his top reporter—and ex-wife—from quitting journalism and hopping a train to Albany to marry another man with the intention of settling into a new life as a housewife. This fast-paced comedy with overlapping dialogue was adapted by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur from their  Broadway hit The Front Page. Chicago Reader reviewer Dave Kehr described Cary Grant’s performance as “…truly virtuoso— stunning technique applied to the most challenging material.” The American Film Institute ranked His Girl Friday at #19 in its list of the best American comedies of all time. Quentin Tarantino credits the film with teaching him to write dialogue.

 

A new high-definition digital restoration of His Girl Friday will be shown.

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Paul Grondahl to Lead NYS Writers Institute

Paul Grondahl Tapped to Lead Writers Institute

The New York State Writers Institute and the University at Albany are very pleased to announce the appointment of award-winning writer and reporter Paul Grondahl as the new director of the New York State Writers Institute.

Grondahl, who earned a master’s degree in English at UAlbany in 1984, was selected after a national search for a successor to Donald Faulkner, who retired last year.

“Paul is one of the best-known and most-loved writers in our community. I am confident that under Paul’s leadership, the New York State Writers Institute will reach new heights,” UAlbany’s Interim Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs Darrell P. Wheeler said. “I look forward to collaborating with him and the Institute’s many friends and supporters.”

William Kennedy, Founder and Executive Director of the Writers Institute said “Paul is a great choice for director of the Writers Institute for a lot of reasons. Above all, he’s a serious writer. He’s very savvy about literature and writers, and as a journalist, he’s nonpareil – maybe the best we’ve had in this town in 30 years or more.  He’s written two well-received biographies of major political figures on our local stage – Teddy Roosevelt, and Erastus Corning, the singular mayor of Albany for 42 years.  Paul also got his masters in English at UAlbany and he’s covered many of the major writers who have visited the Institute.” 

Grondahl, an award-winning journalist and biographer, has been a staff writer at the Albany Times Union since 1984, where his projects on domestic violence, death and dying, mental illness in state prisons and the problems facing sub-Saharan Africa have won local, state and national journalism awards.
The author of four books, Grondahl also leads writing workshops for students ranging from elementary school to college. He has taught as writer-in-residence at the Albany Academy and Albany Academy for Girls since 2005, and is an adjunct professor in the Africana Studies Department at UAlbany.

“I feel like I’m coming home,” Grondahl said about the appointment, and indeed in some ways he is.

Paul himself appeared twice as an author in the Institute’s Visiting Writer Series—in 1997 with his book Mayor Corning: Albany Icon, Albany Enigma, and in 2004 to discuss his biography of Theodore Roosevelt, I Rose Like a Rocket. Beginning with Saul Bellow’s inaugural reading in 1984, Paul has attended hundreds of Institute programs, not only as journalist, but also as a reader and a passionate supporter of the art of the written word.

Paul Grondahl Biography
Paul Grondahl is an award-winning journalist and author. Grondahl has been a staff writer at the Albany Times Union since 1984, where his assignments have taken him from the Arctic to Antarctica; from Northern Ireland to Africa; from New Orleans immediately after Hurricane Katrina and Haiti after its catastrophic earthquake in 2010; and across New York State, from Ground Zero on 9/​11 to the Adirondack wilderness.

His in-depth newspaper projects on domestic violence, death and dying, mental illness in state prisons and the problems facing sub-Saharan Africa have won a number of local, state and national journalism awards.

Grondahl’s writing prizes include the Society of Professional Journalists’ Sigma Delta Chi Award for Feature Reporting; Scripps Howard National Journalism Award; New York Newspaper Publishers Association; two first place national feature writing prizes from The Society for Features Journalists; more than a dozen New York State Associated Press writing contest awards; and the Hearst Eagle Award, the highest recognition for a reporter in the Hearst Corp.

The author of four books, Grondahl also was named Albany Author of the Year in 1997 by the Albany Public Library and Notable Author of the Year by the Guilderland Public Library and East Greenbush Public Library, both in 2004. He has been featured on C-SPAN's "About Books" and "Book TV."

Grondahl also has been selected several times in recent years as Best Local Journalist and Best Local Author in Metroland and Times Union readers’ polls.

In addition, he received the 2006 Dr. James M. Bell Humanitarian Award from Parsons Child and Family Center.

His work has appeared in a number of publications, including Smithsonian magazine, Newsday, The New York Times Book Review, the Houston Chronicle and other newspapers.

His second book, That Place Called Home, was excerpted in Reader’s Digest and optioned to CBS, where it went into development as a made-for-TV movie but was never produced.

In addition to his own books, Grondahl has contributed introductions to A Collection of Poems by Lewis A. Swyer (The Swyer Foundation/​Mount Ida Press, 2004) and Stepping Stones by Marty Silverman (Whitston Publishing Co., 2003).

Grondahl is a veteran teacher who leads highly regarded writing workshops with students ranging from elementary school to college. For the past decade, he has worked with high school students through the Minds-On workshop program at the Rensselaerville Institute and with high school seniors in the New Visions Public Communications program at the Times Union. He has taught as writer-in-residence at the Albany Academy and Albany Academy for Girls since 2005. He also has been an adjunct professor in the Africana Studies Department at the University at Albany.

Grondahl received his bachelor's degree in English literature from the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington in 1981 and a Master’s degree in English literature from the University at Albany in 1984. He was honored in 2005 as a distinguished alumni in arts and letters from UAlbany.

Publications:

I Rose Like a Rocket:  The Political Education of Theodore Roosevelt

University of Nebraska Press. (Paperback edition) May, 2007.

"A well-told new biography...Albany is Mr. Grondahl's turf, and here he gives free rein to his expertise."
-- The New York Sun
"What Mr. Grondahl makes clearer is how Roosevelt's principled stands on civil service reform and social responsibility periodically sidetracked his phenomenal career."
-- Washington Times
"An outstanding job of documenting Theodore Roosevelt's evolution from brash young political reformer to shrewd and pragmatic political operator...painted quite deftly by Grondahl."
-- Publishers Weekly

Mayor Corning: Albany Icon, Albany Enigma

Washington Park Press. Albany, N.Y., 1997.

(With an introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning author William Kennedy.)

A rich and compelling political biography of Mayor Erastus Corning 2nd, the nation's longest-tenured mayor of an American city and head of Albany's vaunted Democratic machine. First elected in 1941, Corning served until he died in office in 1983 after winning 11 consecutive elections.

"A minor classic — a highly readable, meticulously researched and illuminating history of some fascinating and shadowy byways in the politics of the Empire State."
-- The New York Times Book Review
"Detailed, accurate and eminently readable."
-- Mario M. Cuomo, former Governor of New York

"Here journalism at its finest merges with the art of the novelist. The book indeed resembles a series of fascinating interlocking novellas."
-- R.W.B. Lewis, Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer

That Place Called Home

Servant Publications. Ann Arbor, Mich., 2000.

(With a foreword by Eunice Kennedy Shriver)
This heartwarming story describes how Sr. Mary Ann LoGiudice, a Sister of Mercy in Albany, N.Y., gained approval from her religious order to adopt and raise a young girl named Barbara, both of whose parents died of AIDS. The nun and the young, HIV-positive girl formed an unlikely family and enjoyed many delightful, challenging and inspiring years together as mother and daughter.

"Her story is immensely moving and life-affirming."
-- Bob Keeler, Newsday religious writer
"One of the most moving testimonies to the power of love that I have ever read."
-- Sister Mary Rose McGeady, D.C. President of Covenant House, New York City

Now Is The Time:  A History of Parsons Child and Family Center 1829-2004

Whitston Publishing Company Inc. Albany, N.Y., 2006.

A narrative history of one of the oldest orphanages in the United States that draws on archival research and oral histories. Founded in 1829 and formerly known as the Albany Orphan Asylum and the Albany Home for Children, this is a powerful and emotionally charged chronicle of often forgotten children left in institutional care.

"Grondahl uses his storytelling skills to make readers curious about the institution, to draw them into the lives of children and staff -- and to inspire them to care about those lives.

-- The Sunday Gazette, Schenectady, NY

For additional information, contact the Writers Institute at 518-442-5620 or online at www.albany.edu/writers-inst.

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A Writer's Path from UAlbany to Acclaim

Tom Junod, who visits on Thursday 9/10 and Friday 9/11, is profiled and interviewed by Paul Grondahl in today’s Times Union.

Junod recalls his professors at UAlbany, including Fred LeBrun, Eugene Mirabelli, Warren Roberts and Judith Barlow.

Tom Junod's jagged path from UAlbany to journalistic acclaim

By Paul Grondahl

Updated 6:44 am, Wednesday, September 9, 2015

The only journalism course that Tom Junod — one of the nation's most acclaimed journalists as a two-time National Magazine Award winner and 10-time finalist — ever took was Fred LeBrun's Journalism 101 course his senior year at the University at Albany.

His jagged career path offers an object lesson in perseverance, lucky breaks, the drive of an underdog — and the gift of great teachers who didn't try to fit his square peg of creativity into a round hole.

More in the Times Union:  http://www.timesunion.com/tuplus-local/article/Tom-Junod-s-jagged-path-from-UAlbany-to-6492017.php

More about Tom Junod’s events tomorrow and Friday:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/junod_tom15.html

 

WRITER FOR ESQUIRE, UALBANY GRADUATE AND 11-TIME FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL MAGAZINE AWARD, TO DISCUSS HIS WORK

 

Thursday, Sept. 10, 2015, 4:15 p.m. Seminar, Standish Room, Science Library Uptown Campus

 

Friday, Sept. 11, 2015, 7:00 p.m. Reading in observance of 9/11, New York State Museum, Huxley Theater, Downtown Albany

CALENDAR LISTING:
Tom Junod, journalist, UAlbany graduate, winner of two National Magazine Awards, and the record holder for nominations for that award (11 times), will present a seminar on magazine writing on Thursday, September 10, 2015 at 4:15 p.m. in the Standish Room, Science Library, on the UAlbany uptown campus, 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany. The following day, Friday, September 11, 2015 at 7:00 p.m., in observance of 9/11 at the New York State Museum’s Huxley Theatre in downtown Albany, Junod will read from and discuss his famous article, “The Falling Man,” a 2003 meditation on AP photographer Richard Drew’s iconic image of a 9/11 victim plunging to his death. Free and open to the public, the events are cosponsored by the University at Albany, New York State Museum, and New York State Writers Institute.

For more information contact the Writers Institute at 518-442-5620 or online at www.albany.edu/writers-inst

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On 9/11, Tom Junod discusses his classic Esquire piece, "The Falling Man"

Friday, September 11, 2015
     
7:00 p.m. Reading in observance of 9/11 | The New York State Museum, Huxley Theatre, Albany

For Esquire’s 75th Anniversary in 2008, the editors of the magazine selected his 9/11 story “The Falling Man” as one of the seven top stories in Esquire’s history. Many of the stories he has written over the last two decades are still avidly read. On September 11 of each year, when Esquire posts “The Falling Man” online, the story gets hundreds of thousands of readers.

Here's the article (readers will need to subscribe for access):
http://classics.esquire.com/the-falling-man/

More about Junod's events (including his visit to UAlbany the day before, 9/10, which is also free and open to the general public:
http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/junod_tom15.html

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Tom Junod opens the Visiting Writers Series

One of America's most honored practitioners of magazine journalism, Tom Junod will return to his alma mater, the University at Albany, to meet with students and the general public on Thursday, September 10th. He'll speak again as part of a 9/11 memorial on Friday at the NYS Museum.

More about his events:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/junod_tom15.html

Here are some of Junod's articles in the Longform Archive:  http://longform.org/writers/tom-junod

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New Fall Series!

       The Writers Institute Fall 2015 schedule of events offers a rich variety of genres, from poetry to science writing to fiction to history to memoir to filmmaking and theatre. The upcoming series will even include a food writer—New York Times columnist and bestselling cookbook author Mark Bittman, whose work has been described by PBS as a “bible of basic cooking for millions of Americans.”

       The series will showcase two extraordinary former students at UAlbany—journalist Tom Junod, who holds the all-time record for National Magazine Award nominations (eleven!), and Edward Burns, director, actor, and one of the most prolific and influential independent filmmakers currently at work. Burns will present his new memoir, Independent Ed (2015), about which Matt Lauer of Today said, “Every young, hungry, creative person should view this as a textbook.... It’s a how-to.”
       
       Other guests will include Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker Rachel Grady; young adult novelist Jason Reynolds, winner of the American Library Association's Coretta Scott King Award; major American short story writer Ann Beattie; Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Adam Johnson; bestselling horror novelist Peter Straub; National Book Award finalist Mary Gaitskill; "Best New Documentary Filmmaker" at the Tribeca Film Festival, Sean Dunne; trail-blazing neuroscience writer Casey Schwartz; Vonnegut biographer Ginger Strand; and major American dramatist Tina Howe.

For more on the Visiting Writers Series, visit:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/vws.html#.VdXvw1_D_s1

For more on the Classic Film Series, visit:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/cfs.html#.VdXwQF_D_s0

      We hope to see you soon!

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Ill-Tempered White Dudes & Their Loss of Power

Journalist Kent Russell, who visits us on Thursday 3/12, talks to the Times Union's Elizabeth Floyd Mair about his new book, I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son (2015).

Q: Did the essays in this book start out as separate essays, or was the idea to write a book-length exploration of masculinity?

A: [S]ubconsciously, I was always chasing the same subject matter: ill-tempered white dudes and their strategies for coping with the loss of power. Subconsciously, I was always writing the book.

More in the Times Union:  http://www.timesunion.com/tuplus-features/article/Man-cave-dwellers-6118822.php

More about Russell's upcoming visit:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/russell_kent15.html

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Hell Before Breakfast in Publishers Weekly

"Acclaimed historian Patton (The Pattons) focuses on the war correspondent persona and the band of bold adventurers who earned their keep on the frontlines in this detailed salute. A first correspondent whose actions provided the template for all who followed, The Times of London's William H. Russell, respected battle, an appreciation that found him in the thick of the bloodiest clashes including the Battle of Bull Run, the Austro-Prussian War, the Franco-Prussian war, and the Russo-Turkish war. In a no-frills, straightforward narrative, Patton describes the backgrounds of the early pioneers, John Russell Young, George Smalley, Holt White, and Henry Villard, who embraced armed conflict and its horrors, while feeding their dramatic observations to The New York Herald and The New York Tribune. The American publications dueled with each other, such as when Smalley opposed sending untried reporters into the battlefield, instead preferring two experienced correspondents dispatched to each army's headquarters. Some excitement is generated with the sections of the wild and brilliant career of American painter-war correspondent Frank Millet, who bravely covered the 1877 war in the Ottoman Empire. Patton's tribute to these battlefield scribes revives an understanding of why these men mattered." --Publishers Weekly

Patton visits today:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/patton_Robert14.html

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Robert Patton Tuesday, Grandson of General George Patton

Robert Patton, grandson of the legendary WWII General George S. Patton will present his new nonfiction book, Hell Before Breakfast:  America's First War Correspondents Making History and Headlines, from the Battlefields of the Civil War to the Far Reaches of the Ottoman Empire (May 2014), tomorrow, Tuesday, April 29th.

More about the events:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/patton_Robert14.html

Booklist said:  “A fascinating cast of characters…Patton details major conflagrations and social and technological changes amid the gore of war and the prose of reporters of another era.”

More about the book: http://www.randomhouse.com/book/128217/hell-before-breakfast-by-robert-h-patton#praise

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Rave Reviews for Blood Will Out by Walter Kirn

Here are some reviews for the rising bestseller Blood Will Out by Walter Kirn, who visits us this coming Tuesday, March 25th:

"A Top Ten Book of Winter 2014" --USA Today

"In this smart, real-life psychological thriller, the fake Rockefeller is a zombie Gatsby and Kirn the post-apocalyptic Fitzgerald." --Nina Burleigh, The New York Times Book Review
 
"One of the most honest, compelling and strangest books about the relationship between a writer and his subject ever penned by an American scribe…Each new revelation comes subtly, and each adds to the pathetic and creepy portrait of Clark Rockefeller as a vacuous manipulator…The ending of 'Blood Will Out' is at once deeply ambiguous and deeply satisfying. By then, Kirn has looked into the eyes of a cruel, empty man - and learned a lot about himself in the process." --Hector Tobar, Los Angeles Times

"Engrossing… A haunting, pained and terrifically engaging self-interrogation… That's what makes great memoirs - which this one is - so interesting...." --Charles Finch, Chicago Tribune
 
"Riveting and disturbing, Blood Will Out is a mélange of memoir, stranger-than-fiction crime reporting and cultural critique. The literary markers run the gamut from James Ellroy's My Dark Places, and Fyodor Doestoevsky's Crime and Punishment to Patricia Highsmith's Ripley trilogy and Strangers on a Train. Kirn's self-lacerating meditations on class, art, vanity, ambition, betrayal and delusion elevate the material beyond its pulpy core." --Larry Lebowitz, Miami Herald

"Fascinating…The story of Blood Will Out is one of cosmic ironies and jaw-dropping reversals….What makes Blood Will Out so absorbing is its teller more than its subject. Kirn's persona is captivating-funny, pissed off, highly literate, and self-searching. He's also an elegant, classic writer….Add the highly readable, intricately told Blood Will Out to the list of great books about the dizzying tensions of the writing life and the maddening difficulty of getting at the truth." --Amity Gaige, Slate

More about the upcoming events:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/kirn_walter14.html 

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Newly Added Event-- Journalist Stephen Kinzer 4/7

You are invited to attend the following free event:

Stephen Kinzer, bestselling nonfiction author

April 7 (Monday)

Discussion — 7:30 p.m., [Note early start time] Standish Room, Science Library, Uptown Campus

 

Stephen Kinzer is an award-winning foreign correspondent, formerly with the New York Times, and a bestselling author of books on American foreign policy in Central America, Rwanda, Turkey, and Iran. His newest book is The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (2013), which recounts how the two powerful men helped to shape America’s zealously anti-Communist foreign policy in the 1950s.

 

The Washington Post reviewer called The Brothers, “a bracing, disturbing and serious study of the exercise of American global power.” The book was named a “Best Book of the Year” by the Atlantic and Kirkus Reviews.

 

Cosponsored by the New York State Writers Institute; Women Against War; UAlbany’s History, Political Science, and Judaic Studies Departments, and Journalism Program; and UAlbany Peace Action.

 

For more about Stephen Kinzer:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/kinzer_stephen14.html

 

For more information, contact the NYS Writers Institute at 442-5620 or by email at writers@albany.edu. You can also visit our blog at http://nyswiblog.blogspot.com/ or like us on Facebook.

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Nick Turse on Bill Moyers

Nick Turse, investigative journalist who comes to UAlbany today, was interviewed two weeks ago by Bill Moyers:

http://billmoyers.com/segment/nick-turse-describes-the-real-vietnam-war/

“American culture has never fully come to grips with Vietnam,” Turse tells Bill Moyers, referring to “hidden and forbidden histories that just haven’t been fully engaged.”

Come see Nick this afternoon in the UAlbany Performing Arts Center uptown:
http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/turse_nick14.html

He'll be talking about his newest book, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (2013).

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Nick Turse on the Fog of War

 

Nick Turse, author of the New York Times bestseller Kill Anything That Moves (2013), visits us on
Wednesday, Feb. 19th.

In The Nation's Investigative Fund's "The Backstory" project (about the art and practice of investigative journalism), Turse talks about the challenges of collecting data on civilian casualties in war zones, and in particular the challenges of writing his feature article for the October 7, 2013 issue of The Nation, "America's Afghan Victims."

Original article here:  http://www.thenation.com/article/176256/americas-afghan-victims#

Backstory interview here:  http://www.theinvestigativefund.org/backstories/1908/the_backstory:_nick_turse

More about Turse's upcoming visit to Albany here:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/turse_nick14.html

Photo:  Troops on patrol in Afghanistan Photo: Lewis Whyld/PA Wire

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Vietnam-themed events at the Writers Institute

The New York State Writers Institute will feature film, fiction and nonfiction in three events exploring recent history in Vietnam:

CYCLO [XICH LO]

January 31 (Friday)
Film screening — 7:30 p.m., Page Hall, 135 Western Avenue, Downtown Campus

Directed by Tran Anh Hung (Vietnam, 1995, 123 minutes, color, in Vietnamese with English subtitles)
Starring Le Van Loc, Tony Leung Chiu Wai, Tran Nu Yên-Khê

The first Vietnamese film to be nominated for an Oscar, and the winner of two top prizes at the Venice Film Festival, CYCLO tells the tale of a bicycle-taxi driver in Ho Chi Minh City who becomes entangled in a world of drugs and crime. The Chicago Reader’s Jonathan Rosenbaum called it, “a visionary piece of work, shot through with passion and poetry.”

 

James D. Redwood, short story writer
February 18 (Tuesday)
Reading — 4:15 p.m., Standish Room, Science Library, Uptown Campus

James D. Redwood, Professor of Law at Albany Law School, is the author of a first collection of stories, Love Beneath the Napalm (2014), inaugural winner of the Notre Dame Review Book Prize. Based on Redwood’s experiences as an English teacher and social worker in 1970s Vietnam, the stories have been published previously in leading literary magazines, including the Virginia Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review, and TriQuarterly.

 

Nick Turse, investigative journalist and military historian
February 19 (Wednesday)
Reading and discussion — 4:15 p.m., Recital Hall, Performing Arts Center

Nick Turse, award-winning journalist specializing in national security and military issues, is the managing editor of TomDispatch.com and Investigative Fund fellow at the Nation Institute. His newest book is the New York Times bestseller Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (2013), an account of U.S. war crimes against Vietnamese civilians based on previously classified documents. His investigations of U.S. war crimes have earned him a special Ridenhour Prize for Reportorial Distinction. His earlier books include The Changing Face of Empire (2012), The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan (2010), and The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives (2008).

Cosponsored by Women Against War, and UAlbany’s Journalism Program in conjunction with its 40th Anniversary

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Always an Ink-Stained Wretch

Bill Kennedy talks about his career in journalism and the history of the UAlbany Journalism Program in the current issue of Columbia Journalism Review:

"I was not privy to the arrival of the Journalism Program at the University at Albany, and I heard it had a somewhat uncertain birth. The program as Bill Rowley conceived it was pragmatic, professional, idealistic, literary, and peppered with journalists from the real world of news reporting. This opposed another idea that was on the table in the English Department: to present journalism as a textbook course, with excursions into municipal history, the history of journalism and who knows what else? Bill’s idea prevailed, I don’t know why, but he was a persuasive and insistent fellow. He wanted his students to step lively into their journalistic careers after graduation, but also to be educated in history, politics, literature, and, above all, to know how to write when they did so."

More:  http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/william_kennedy_albany_journal.php?page=all

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Looking back, and ahead, at journalism

Paul Grondahl talks about Bill Kennedy's appearance at the 40th anniversary celebration of UAlbany Journalism Program founder Bill Rowley last week:

Bill Kennedy was talking last week about his late, great friend Bill Rowley founding the University at Albany journalism program in 1973 — he was Rowley's first hire — and as the newspaperman-turned-novelist assessed the current state of journalism, his mood turned dark.

"Newsweek is gone. Time magazine is just a tattered print unit of Time Warner Cable," he said. "All the TV networks seem to have slid into the swamp of celebrity. The Times seems to be surviving, but I don't know how small papers can survive."

His talk was the centerpiece of what was billed as a 40th anniversary celebration, but as a truth-teller addressing an auditorium of professional skeptics and aspiring cynics, his forecast was stormy with a chance of extinction.

Kennedy quoted the prophecy of Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, new owner of the Washington Post, who once said that newspapers as we know them will be gone in 20 years. "That does not seem unreasonable to me," Kennedy added.

More in the Times Union:  http://www.timesunion.com/default/article/Looking-back-and-ahead-at-journalism-4898618.php

Picture: UAlbany undergraduate intern Michelle Checchi, a junior journalism major at UAlbany.

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William Kennedy Celebrates the UAlbany Journalism Program

Celebrating the 40th Anniversary of UAlbany’s Journalism Program
October 9 (Wednesday)
Lecture/Discussion by William Kennedy — 4:00 p.m., Recital Hall, Performing Arts Center, Uptown Campus 

Picture:  Bill as a young reporter.

William Kennedy, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and founder of the New York State Writers Institute, will help the UAlbany Journalism Program celebrate its 40th anniversary with a lecture on “William Rowley: Journalism and Social Justice.” Rowley, a former editor at the Knickerbocker News and Professor of English at the University, founded the Journalism Program in 1973. An anti-war activist who also taught in the prisons, Rowley believed that journalism and social justice were natural allies, with journalism being a useful tool for developing “imagination, critical intelligence, and intellectual independence.” His first hire to teach in the Journalism Program was a local writer named Bill Kennedy. For almost a decade Kennedy taught a course in Advanced Journalism and Magazine Writing. Kennedy will reflect on his years teaching at Albany and the current state of journalism.

 

Sponsored by UAlbany's Journalism Program in celebration of its 40th anniversary

More about the Journalism Program:  http://www.albany.edu/journalism/about.shtml

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Bring Your Questions for Gail Collins Tonight

Don't miss influential New York Times political columnist Gail Collins tonight at Page Hall, 8PM,
University at Albany downtown campus.

April 30 (Tuesday)
Reading — 8:00 p.m., Page Hall, 135 Western Avenue, Downtown Campus
One of the most recognizable names in American journalism, Gail Collins served as the first female editor of the New York Times Editorial Page (2001-2007), and has contributed an influential biweekly column to the Times Op-Ed page for most of the past decade. Her column is distinguished by its fondness for humor and storytelling, its attention to political absurdity, and its championing of women’s rights. Her newest book is As Texas Goes... How the Lone Star State Hijacked the American Agenda (2012). MSNBC host Rachel Maddow said, “Gail Collins is the funniest serious political commentator in America. Reading As Texas Goes... is pure pleasure from page one.” Publishers Weekly said, “Collins revels in the state’s 10-gallon self-regard, Alamo-inspired cult of suicidal last stands, and eccentric right-wing pols... she slathers plenty of wry humor onto a critique that stings like a red-hot brand.” Her previous books include When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present (2009), and Scorpion Tongues: Gossip, Celebrity, and American Politics (1998).

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Gail Collins in the Times Union

Gail Collins, who visits UAlbany tomorrow, is interviewed and profiled by Leigh Hornbeck in the Times Union:

Early in her newspaper career, Collins founded the Connecticut State News Bureau, in 1972. It was around then she made a choice to write about her subject "in a way that wouldn't make readers want to shoot themselves." The result was a mix of insightful, wry commentary that might zing, but never crushes, its subjects. She seems fully aware of the absurdity of political scandal at the same time she observes how what happens among our elected representatives will ultimately affect ordinary folk. She frequently calls out to the reader directly with a "people," the literary equivalent of a lapel grab.

Read more: http://www.timesunion.com/living/article/Political-observer-4463679.php#ixzz2RsuHySXz

More on Gail's visit:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/collins_gail13.html

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Director of Sci Journalism Program at Columbia Visits Today

One of the world's leading teachers and practitioners of science journalism will be visiting Albany today to talk about her new history of Manhattan's street grid.

Marguerite Holloway has been teaching at the Journalism School since 1997. She won a Presidential Teaching Award in 2009 and the Distinguished Teacher of the Year award in 2001. Holloway has been a long-time contributor to Scientific American, where she has covered many topics, particularly environmental issues, public health, neuroscience and women in science.

Holloway has a B.A. in comparative literature from Brown University and an M.S. from the Journalism School (class of 1988). Before she joined Scientific American in 1990, she worked as a reporter for the Medical Tribune and freelanced for publications including The Village Voice and Mother Jones. Her work has appeared in many other magazines and newspapers, among them Discover, The New York Times, Natural History and Wired. Her book, The Measure of Manhattan, has just been published by W.W. Norton.

More on her visit:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/vws.html#holloway

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