Education
Harvard University; Washington and Lee University.
Harvard University; Washington and Lee University.
Jones is also a lecturer at the school, occupying the Laurence M. Lombard Chair in the Press and Public Policy. Jones covered the newspaper industry for The New York Times from 1983 until 1992. The book was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and selected by Time magazine as one of the five best nonfiction books of that year.
Jones"s third book, Losing the News: The Future of the News That Feeds Democracy (Oxford, 2009, 234pp) explored the changing United States. media landscape and its implications for American democracy.
Writing for the Nieman Reports, Jones asserted that despite market pressures, "authentic journalistic objectivity" must remain at the center of the future of news reporting. Writing for the New York Times, Sir Harold Evans, former editor of the Sunday Times of London, called Jones a "bringer of light in the encircling gloom."
From 1995 until 1997 Jones was host of National Public Radio"s "On the Media", and from 1996 until 2003 he was executive editor and host of Public Broadcasting Service"s "Media Matters".
Jones was a Nieman Fellow in 1982, and currently sits on the organization"s advisory board. He also sits on the boards of the International Center for Journalists, the Sigma Delta Chi Foundation and other journalism-related boards.
In 2011, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and in 2014 inducted into the Tennessee Journalism Hall of Fame.
He won a Pulitzer Prize for journalism in 1987. His prize-winning story "The Fall of the House of Bingham" concerned events that ended in 1986 with the sale of Louisville, Kentucky media — two newspapers and three broadcast stations — after 15 years of management by Barry Bingham, Junior. The following year Jones won the annual Pulitzer Prize for Specialized Reporting (predecessor of the Pulitzer Prize for Beat Reporting), recognizing that work as "a skillful and sensitive report of a powerful newspaper family"s bickering and how it led to the sale of a famed media empire.".
A review in the Los Angeles Times called it "the best kind of family history — one so packed with archival fact and telling anecdote that a reader can be excused for believing that at times he or she understands the Binghams far better than they seem to have understood themselves." Jones and Tifft followed The Dynasty with a 1999 book about the history of Adolph South. Ochs and his descendants, The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family behind the New York Times (Little, Brown, 870pp).
American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
