Thinking Clearly: About the Authors

John Herbers spent 24 years on the staff of the New York Times. As a reporter there, he covered civil rights, Congress, The Kennedy presidential campaign, urban affairs and the Watergate years. In 1975 Herbers was named assistant national editor and in 1977 became deputy Washington bureau chief. Two years later he requested a return to writing and was the paper's national Washington correspondent where he reported on national trends in politics, government and social movements. Herbers began his career at the Greenwood, Miss. Morning Star and then the Jackson, Miss. Daily News. From there moved to United Press where he served at Miss. Bureau chief until moving to the Times. Herbers is the author of four books, including No Thank You, Mr. President (1977).

J.D. Lasica is the director of content for iVendor, a Silicon Valley startup that offers e-commerce capabilities to major brick-and-mortar retail chains. He is also a columnist for the American Journalism Review and the Online Journalism Review. Prior to this work, he was senior editorial manager for Microsoft's San Francisco Sidewalk and editor at The Sacramento Bee.

Stanley Meisler is a former foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. He covered Nairobi, Mexico City, much of Latin America, Toronto, Paris and the United Nations from 1967-1996. He was then a foreign affairs reporter in Washington, D.C. until 1998. Before joining the Times, Meisler worked as a reporter for the Associated Press from 1954-1964. Currently, he is an author and contributor to various journals and magazines including Smithsonian, Foreign Affairs, The Atlantic Monthly, The Foreign Policy and Columbia Journalism Review.

Geneva Overholser has held newspaper jobs at several levels, including reporter, editorial writer, top editor, ombudsman and has free-lanced from such places as Kinshasa and Paris. She began her career as a reporter for the Colorado Springs Sun. She then served on the editorial board of the New York Times and was deputy editorial page editor for The Des Moines Register. She was editor of the Register from 1988 to 1995 and next she spent four years as ombudsman for The Washington Post. Currently Overholser writes as a columnist.

Jack Nelson, chief Washington Correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, has covered every President since Richard Nixon and every presidential campaign since 1968. He began his career as a reporter with the Biloxi, Mississippi Daily Herald. He later reported for the The Atlanta Constitution, until becoming Atlanta bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times in 1965. He has stayed with the Times ever since, filling several positions including 22 years as Washington bureau chief. Nelson has co-authored six books and has lectured at colleges and universities throughout the country.

Alicia Shepard is a senior writer for American Journalism Review and co-author of the book Running Toward Danger: Stories Behind the Breaking News of 9/11. She has won the National Press Club's media criticism award three times. Shepard's career began in Washington, DC, with Scripps League Newspapers where she spent five years covering various aspects of the federal government. She next joined the San Jose Mercury News where she wrote about city government and the courts. After five years abroad on a sailing and writing venture with her family, Shepard returned to the Washington area to write. She received a masters in journalism from the University of Maryland in 2002.

Jim Perry joined the Wall Street Journal in 1977 and worked there as a political reporter until his retirement in 1997. His journalism career began at the Hartford Times, after which he joined the Philadelphia Bulletin. In 1962 he moved to Washington, DC, to work for the National Observer (the Dow Jones weekly) and began reporting on national politics. It was when the Observer folded that Perry joined the Journal. Perry has written six books, including two about the press: Us & Them, How the Press Covered the 1972 Election and, most recently, A Bohemian Brigade, The Civil War Correspondents, Mostly Rough, Sometimes Ready.

Project Consultants

James W. Carey (academic advisor) is CBS professor of International Journalism at Columbia University. From 1979 to 1992 Carey was dean of the College of Communications at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Prior to that, he held the George H. Gallup Chair at the University of Iowa. He has held the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship in Science, Technology and Human Values, and is one of 20 elected fellows of the International Communications Association. In addition to over 100 essays, monographs and reviews, Carey has published two books: Media, Myth and Narratives: Television and the Press and Communication as Culture.

Jim Dickenson (an editor) spent nearly 30 years as a political reporter, editor and columnist for The Washington Post, The Washington Star, The National Observer, and United Press International. As such, he covered every presidential campaign from 1964 to 1988 as well as the White House, Congress and the Watergate scandal. In 1991, Dickenson was a media consultant in Belgrade to a consortium of Yugoslav-American businessmen investing in Yugoslavia. He helped train reporters and editors for its proposed news operation and news programs. He is the author of Home on The Range: A Century on the High Plains and is currently working on a book about the final battles in the Pacific in World War II as well as his memoirs.

Cleve Mathews (copy editor) is a retired newspaper journalist, radio network news director and journalism professor, who keeps his hand in by teaching retirees and taking on selected writing and editing jobs. He spent nine years at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and 12 years at the New York Times. He left the Times Washington Bureau in 1971 to be NPR's first news director, where he helped create the program "All Things Considered." For 17 years he taught journalism, first at Wichita State University, then at Syracuse University's Newhouse School. He took a leave from Syracuse to be the first Atwood Fellow at the University of Alaska in Anchorage. Mathews has taught a variety of media and public issues courses at the College for Seniors at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. He is co-author with William Rivers of Ethics for the Media.

Richard Roth (academic advisor) is associate dean of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. He is also an associate professor at the school and the faculty advisor for the student chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. Before joining Medill, Roth spent seven years as a tenured faculty member at DePauw University (Greencastle, IN) and advisor to the student newspaper. As a practicing journalist, Roth was editor-in-chief of the Terre Haute (Ind.) Tribune-Star for six years. He also spent eleven years reporting for the late Buffalo Courier-Express.

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