The Future of Political Journalism on Debate

Journalism is not what it used to be.

The rules have changed when it comes to how people consume their news. People are no longer limited to the 24-hour television news cycles, but now Twitter and Facebook can connection millions of people in an instant.

So with the presidentical election still fresh in everyone's mind, Montclair State University's School of Communication and Media will bring together four speakers to debate how political journalism has developed in the 21st century and the impact of the media’s coverage on the recent campaign. 

The featured speakers of the night will be:

• Jonathan Alter,  political columnist for Bloomberg 
• Robert George, editorial writer for the New York Post
• Brigid Harrison, a professor of political science and law at Montclair State University
• Timothy O’Brien, executive editor for the Huffington Post

Moderating the discussion will be Merrill Brown, director of the university’s School of Communication and Media. 

The debate begins at 7:30 p.m. at Montclair State University, 1 Normal Ave., in the John J. Cali School of Music, Leshowitz Recital Hall. Park in the Red Hawk Parking Deck.  For directions, go to www.montclair.edu. 

The following are brief biographies of the speakers. 

Jonathan Alter is an award-winning author, reporter, columnist and television analyst. Since 2011, he has written a column for Bloomberg View, a worldwide commentary site for Bloomberg News.  Alter spent 28 years at Newsweek, where he was a senior editor and columnist and wrote more than 50 cover stories.  He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Washington Monthly, The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, The New Republic and other publications. Since 1996, Alter has been an analyst and contributing correspondent for “NBC News” and MSNBC.  His 2010 book, The Promise: President Obama, Year One, went to #4 on the New York Times Nonfiction Bestseller List and was one of the Times' "Notable Books" of the year. The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope, published in 2006, was also a bestseller.

Robert A George is an editorial writer for the New York Post and a conservative /libertarian blogger and pundit. He was born in Trinidad and lived in the United Kingdom before moving to the United States.  A graduate of St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, George worked for the Republican National Committee and, following the 1994 midterm elections, Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich.

Brigid Callahan Harrison is Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University, where she has taught since 1994. In addition to American Democracy Now (McGraw-Hill Publishers, first edition, 2009, second edition, December 2010), she is also the author of  A More Perfect Union (McGraw-Hill Publishers, 2010), Power and Society (Cengage, now in its 13th edition) and Women in American Politics (Wadsworth, 2003), as well as various peer-refereed journal articles.  A frequent commentator on U.S. politics, Harrison provides political analysis to “FOX News,” local affiliates of ABC, NBC, and CBS, and NPR radio programs.  She is a regular commentator on NJTV and writes a weekly column on New Jersey politics in the Sunday editions of The Bergen Record.  Her editorials have appeared in The New York Times, USA Today, The Star-Ledger, and The Press of Atlantic City. 

Timothy L. O'Brien is the Executive Editor of the Huffington Post, where he oversees all of the site's original reporting efforts.  He edited the ten-part series, "Beyond the Battlefield," for which the HuffPost won a Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting earlier this year.  Prior to joining the HuffPost in early 2011, O’Brien was an editor at The New York Times for the Sunday Business section.  There, he helped oversee a team of reporters that was a finalist for a 2009 Pulitzer Prize in Public Service for coverage of the financial crisis. The series that emerged from that work, "The Reckoning," was  a winner of a 2009 Loeb Award for Distinguished Business Journalism.  O’Brien is currently writing a series of historical thrillers for Random House