Columbia J-School Panel: Future of Newspapers

Last week's panel discussion on journalism trends and the future of print media included Columbia J-School Prof. James B. Stewart; Steve Swartz, president of Hearst Newspapers; and Norman Pearlstine, chief content officer of Bloomberg.



Stewart is the author of eight books, and writes "Common Sense," a column in SmartMoney and SmartMoney.com, which also appears in the Wall Street Journal. He contributes regularly to The New Yorker and was formerly Page One Editor of the Wall Street Journal. Stewart is the recipient of a 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Wall Street Journal articles on the 1987 stock market crash and the insider trading scandal. He is also the winner of the George Polk award and two Gerald Loeb awards.

Swartz is president of Hearst Newspapers. Under his leadership, SmartMoney won two National Magazine Awards and was named Magazine of the Year by Advertising Age. Under Swartz’s leadership, Hearst played a key role in founding the newspaper industry's consortium with Yahoo!, launching the industry's partnership with the online real estate company Zillow, and forming quadrantONE, a national online sales network co-owned by Hearst, The New York Times Company, Gannett and Tribune.

Pearlstine previously served as a senior advisor to Time Warner, following 11 years as editor in chief of the company's Time Inc. subsidiary. Before joining Time Inc., Pearlstine worked for the Wall Street Journal from 1968 to 1992, except for a two-year period from 1978-1980 when he worked as an executive editor of Forbes magazine. In 1992, Pearlstine resigned from the Journal to work at SmartMoney magazine. Pearlstine has been honored with the National Press Foundation's Editor of the Year Award; the Loeb Lifetime Achievement Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism; the American Society of Magazine Editors Lifetime Achievement Award; and induction into the Magazine Editors' Hall of Fame.

Goodbye, Rocky Mountain News

E.W. Scripps Co. closed the Rocky Mountain News yesterday, another newspaper casualty of our perilous economy and the migration of readers to the Internet, leaving Denver another one-newspaper city with the Denver Post.

KobreGuide offers condolences to the staff, and the city it served so well, as evidenced by the Rocky Mountain News video stories we proudly featured.

Now we're bracing ourselves because the Hearst Corp. is threatening to shutter our hometown paper, the San Francisco Chronicle, another popular and meritorious KobreGuide channel. Where will it all end?