When: Friday, September 16,  7:00 PM

Where: North Gate Hall Room 105

Photojournalist, Social Documentarian, Movement Propagandist: The Photography of Matt Herron.

When Matt Herron moved to Mississippi with his family in 1963, he thought of himself as wearing three hats. As a photojournalist, he was beginning to see his career take off and hoped to win assignments from editors he knew in New York by submitting picture story ideas from the heart of the Civil Rights struggle. Influenced by several formative meetings with the well-known documentary photographer Dorothea Lange, Herron also hoped to document the process of social change that was beginning to disrupt deeply ingrained patterns of life in both black and white communities of the Deep South. To this end, he organized a team of photographers in the Spring of 1964 to follow this process through one of the most tumultuous summers in Civil Rights history. Finally, as a pacifist and political radical, Herron was personally drawn to the cause of racial justice and eagerly committed his cameras to the organizing work of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Mississippi and other venues of the South.

How well did these three hats fit one head? That is the subject of a new photography exhibition at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

The exhibit will be available for viewing at North Gate Hall, Monday-Friday, from August 29- December 1, 2011

***RSVP REQUIRED***
Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America’s Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda

A Conversation with Eric Schmitt

When: Monday, September 19,  6:00 PM

Where: North Gate Hall Library

In their new book, Counterstrike, Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker of The New York Times tell the story of how a group of analysts within the military, spy agencies, and law enforcement has fashioned an innovative, effective new strategy to fight terrorism, unbeknownst to most Americans and in sharp contrast to the cowboy slogans that have characterized the U.S. government's public posture. Adapting themes from classic Cold War deterrence theory, these strategists have expanded the field of battle in order to disrupt jihadist networks in ever more creative ways.

Eric Schmitt is one of the most experienced reporters in the country covering the Pentagon, national security issues, and covert operations. No stranger to controversy and reporting on difficult stories, he was sent by The New York Times to evaluate the material offered up by WikiLeaks and negotiate with their leader, Julian Assange.

Schmitt is a terrorism correspondent for The New York Times and has embedded with troops in Iraq, Somalia, and Pakistan. Schmitt has twice been a member of Times reporting teams that were awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

Thom Shanker, a Pentagon correspondent for the Times, routinely spends time embedded with troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Shanker was formerly a foreign editor and correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, based in Moscow, Berlin, and Sarajevo.

Books will be available for purchase.

RSVP: juliehirano@berkeley.edu

Pamela Constable
Playing with Fire: Pakistan at War with Itself

When: Tuesday, September 20,  6:00 PM

Where: North Gate Hall Library

A volatile nation at the heart of major cultural, political, and religious conflicts in the world today, Pakistan commands our attention. Yet more than six decades after the country’s founding as a Muslim democracy, it continues to struggle over its basic identity, alliances, and direction. In Playing with Fire, acclaimed journalist Pamela Constable peels back layers of contradiction and confusion to shed light on modern Pakistan.

Pamela Constable, a frequent visitor to the Berkeley campus, is a foreign correspondent and former deputy foreign editor at The Washington Post. Since 1998, she has reported extensively from Pakistan, Afghanistan, and India as well as Iraq. Before joining the Post in 1994, she was a foreign correspondent and foreign policy reporter for The Boston Globe, where she covered South and Central America for a decade, focusing on Chile and Haiti, as well as parts of Asia and the former Soviet Union. Constable is author of Fragments of Grace: My Search for Meaning in the Strife of South Asia and co-author of A Nation of Enemies: Chile Under Pinochet.

Books will be available for purchase.

"Disengaged: Elite Media in a Vernacular Nation"
A Conversation with J-School Senior Lecturer Bob Calo

When:  Tuesday, September 27,  5:00 PM

Where: North Gate Hall Library

Join Senior Lecturer Bob Calo in a conversation about the demographic, cultural and political roots of audience disengagement. He'll be talking about his recent article as a Shorenstein Center Goldsmith Fellow, at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government in the Spring 2011: "Disengaged: Elite Media in a Vernacular Nation".

Journalists tend to regard the "crisis in journalism" as something that happened to them, and not anything they did. It was the Internet that jumbled the informational sensitivities of their readers, corporate ownership that raised suspicions about our editorial motives, the audience itself that lacked the education or perspective to appreciate the work. Yet, 40 years of polling is clear about one thing: The decline in trust and the uneasiness of the audience with the profession and its product started well before technology began to shred the conventions of the media. If we fail to examine our part in the collapse of trust, no amount of digital re-imagining or niche marketing is going to restore our desired place in the public conversation.