Tufts University

Tufts University

Journalism For a Digital World

A New Director Wants to Make the Murrow Center a Player in 21st Century Media and International relations...

Edward Schumacher-Matos, F73, found out about newspapering from the best and the brightest: while at Fletcher, he brought a course with the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist David Halberstam. It was one of those chance experiences that propelled a vocation. 

Halberstam acquainted him with the incredible proofreader of the Boston Globe, Tom Winship, who thus proposed he begin reporting for a neighborhood paper. In this way, while still at Fletcher, Schumacher-Matos handled a gig as low maintenance journalist for the Quincy Patriot Ledger, a local paper of Boston's South Shore. He secured the normal business of residential community life—school board and arranging executive gatherings and those yearly town gatherings where the straightforward demonstration of raising a hand affirms multimillion-dollar spending plans. "I truly adored it," he says. 

So started what ended up being a deep rooted universal profession in news coverage. Schumacher-Matos shared a 1980 Pulitzer Prize as a major aspect of the Philadelphia Inquirer group that secured the Three Mile Island atomic force plant mischance and was agency boss for the New York Times in Madrid and Buenos Aires, partner distributer of the Wall Street Journal's Americas versions in Spanish and Portuguese, and ombudsman for the Miami Herald and, until a year ago, for National Public Radio. 

He's turn up at ground zero now, coming back to the Fletcher School as chief of the recently renamed Edward R. Murrow Center for a Digital World. His most recent task is a goal-oriented one: change the inside into a worldwide player in molding how the fast creation and transmission of data will adjust global relations. 

Supported by a liberal blessing, Schumacher-Matos needs the middle—initiated 50 years prior by Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey to respect its namesake's recognized vocation in reporting and administration of the U.S. Data Agency—to be the main voice in investigating how the computerized age can offer ascent to popular governments or dive the world into turmoil. 

"Generally as Murrow himself was especially a pioneer, first in the potential outcomes of radio news coverage and afterward in TV, we think the inside ought to end up a pioneer in the advanced period," he says. 

"We have no clue about the full social, social and political effect of the advanced age," says Schumacher-Matos. "It could be a power for majority rule government, with social orders and countries moving toward a solitary, more congruous world. On the other hand it could be a power for confusion, moving us toward turmoil. The Murrow Center can give a system to us to inspect these inquiries with a wide lens, so we can control positive results." 

The middle has all the buzz of a startup with enormous aspirations. New pursuits incorporate the Fletcher Ideas Exchange, a TEDx-styled occasion that helps understudies sharpen aptitudes basic to open tact, and new global coordinated efforts pushing into unfamiliar issues, for example, an examination of advanced rights as human rights. 

This mid year, the inside and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars are facilitating a roundtable discourse in Bogotá, Colombia, that will unite computerized rights specialists to outline model Internet laws in Latin America. "Advanced rights are beginning to end up seen as a human rights issue," says Schumacher-Matos. It's an exceedingly significant discussion for Latin America, says Schumacher-Matos, as "laws that give individuals the privilege to Internet access are seen by numerous as fundamental to monetary advancement." 

While the underlying vision behind the Murrow Center was analyzing media, its region of request is a mushrooming, moving target. There are presently more than 7 billion cell phone memberships around the world, up from 738 million in 2000, as per the U.N. Worldwide Telecommunication Union. Web use has expanded sevenfold since 2000, to more than 3.2 billion individuals, 2 billion of whom live in creating nations. 

Schumacher-Matos needs to put the Murrow Center smack in the thick of this computerized unrest. Working with media outlet accomplices in India and China, the inside is building up an online intuitive news stage that will "unite diverse perspectives from various parts of the world in a way that is convincing." 

While distributions like the New York Times, the Economist, the Wall Street Journal and Foreign Affairs outline stories from a national perspective, the new stage will concentrate on near points of view, says Schumacher-Matos. "I consider it to be a worldwide comprehension venture. The entire thought is that by opening up each other's business sectors to each other's voices, we will add to comprehension, and, after some time, we trust great things will originate from it." 

Other great things underway are an expansive examination activity called Cyberspace and World Order. The results of an interconnected world on world soundness stay misty, as they disturb noteworthy connections amongst states and natives. The Murrow-drove activity—including a workforce board of trustees, understudy bunches, and outside graduated class and scholars—will distinguish how Fletcher could best add to another computerized and bound together digital technique, and bolster personnel and understudy research in this rising field. 

The Murrow Center is taking an exhaustive way to deal with meeting "to a great degree high understudy request" for relational abilities, as well. Schumacher-Matos likewise shows altering and opinion piece composing for Ph.D. understudies and editors of understudy diaries. At the point when gotten some information about the eventual fate of the Murrow Center, Schumacher-Matos is typically energetic. "We'll continue building it, and ideally keep on getting all the more financing to bolster it," he says.