Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Alex S. Jones is the recipient of the 2011 DeWitt Carter Reddick Award, one of the highest honors given by The University of Texas at Austin College of Communication, recognizing achievements in the field of communication.
He will accept the award during the College of Communication Honors Day Convocation, for which he is the keynote speaker at 5:30 p.m., April 15, at the Texas Union Ballroom. The title of his speech is “Wikileaks, Facebook and Us: Why Professional Journalism Still Matters.”
Jones directs the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy and lectures at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. Prior to his work at Harvard, he hosted NPR’s “On the Media” and served as executive editor and host of PBS’s “Media Matters.” He spent nine years covering the press for The New York Times and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1987.
Jones is the author of “Losing the News: The Future of the News That Feeds Democracy,” and co-author of “The Patriarch: The Rise and Fall of the Bingham Dynasty” and “The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family behind the New York Times,” which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award.
DeWitt Carter Reddick was the first dean of the College of Communication. He also was director of the School of Journalism from 1959 to 1965, teaching thousands of journalism students, including Walter Cronkite, Lady Bird Johnson, Ben Sargent and Karen Elliott House, from 1927 until his retirement in 1975.
Established in 1974, the DeWitt Carter Reddick Award recognizes excellence in the field of communication. Past Reddick Award recipients include Walter Cronkite, Molly Ivins, Nicholas Lemann, Bill Moyers, William S. Paley, William J. Raspberry, Helen Thomas, Ted Turner and Bill Wittliff, among others.
