About the Tow-Knight Center for Journalism Futures:
Founded in 2010, the relaunched Tow-Knight Center for Journalism Futures at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY is a catalyst for reimagining journalism in an AI-transformed information landscape.
Its work centers on meeting the AI moment: understanding how journalists and news consumers can navigate an AI-intermediated information landscape to preserve journalism’s democratic mission.
I’m the Executive Director and Adiel Kaplan is my co-conspirator/the Center’s Program Director.
About (Re)Structured News:
(Re)Structured explores the evolution of information in an AI and digital age — how it’s changed how people access it, how it’s created, and how it’ll be paid for. It looks at how journalism needs to adapt — from the ground up — and fundamentally rethink what journalists do and what they produce if we are to continue to fulfill our mission of serving communities with information in the public interest.
About the older posts:
I started a blog back in 2010 called (Re)Structuring Journalism, devoted to an idea I called Structured Journalism — fundamentally a way of rethinking what we do and how we do it so as to both serve readers better and extract more value from our day-to-day work. The core idea was that we need to “structure” our work more so we could reuse, reconstitute and rebuild the information we collect so that our work would be more pertinent, personal and persistent. This was all pre-Generative AI, and built on what was then possible technologically.
Now, of course, Gen AI has come and made so much more possible — and in the process, both obviated some parts of Structured Journalism and supercharged others. But many of its core ideas about its economic value and defensive moat remain unchanged — for example, bots can’t scrape what you don’t put on your site.
The older posts here are from that original blog; I may go back and update them, but I probably won’t get around to it for a while. Read them as if they’re a time machine; some of the core ideas still make sense, even if the technology has moved along.
About me:
I’ve been a journalist for closing in on four decades, working in print, electronic media, television and radio.
I’m currently Executive Director of the Tow-Knight Center for Journalism Futures at the Newmark School of Journalism at CUNY, where I’ll be focusing on the intersection of journalism and AI — more specifically, on how AI will change how people come to and consumer news, and how the media industry needs to adapt to that new news landscape. At the same time, I’ll be keeping ties with Semafor, a new news startup founded in 2022 by Justin Smith and Ben Smith, where I was Executive Editor and am now Executive Editor at Large.
Previously, I was Executive Editor of Reuters, based in New York. From July 2009 to March 2011, I was Editor-in-Chief of the South China Morning Post, responsible for the editorial operations of the Hong Kong-based news media company.
Prior to that, I had a 16-year run at The Wall Street Journal, including as a Deputy Managing Editor in New York, where I managed the global newsroom budget, supervised the graphics team, and helped develop the paper’s computer-assisted reporting capabilities. I also ran the Journal’s Hong Kong-based Asian edition for eight years, opened the paper’s bureau in Hanoi, and was its correspondent in the Philippines.
I learned how to splice reel-to-reel audio tape and edit video on U-matic cassettes at the then-Singapore Broadcasting Corp, and embarrassingly anchored a few TV shows. In an earlier stint at Reuters in the late 1980s, I witnessed the speed at which information flashes through the financial system and the impact a single piece of news could have. And, when we created Connected China at Reuters later in the 2010s, I saw how the world of journalism could evolve and — hopefully — advance.
I’ve taught graduate-level classes at Columbia University, Hong Kong University, New York University and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore on the business models of journalism, using Excel as a reporting tool, and numeracy in the newsroom. I also set up and found funding for a fellowship that brought promising journalists from Asia to study business and economic reporting at New York University.
I’ve had a foot in both for-profit media, where I’ve spent most of my career, and in non-profit media, where I’ve sat on the boards of both funders and news organizations.
The views expressed here are my personal opinions and don’t reflect those of any of my employers.
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