The Aspen Institute

Join us for this conversation featuring Joanne Lipman, journalist, CNBC contributor, and best-selling author; Richard Gingras, American internet executive and entrepreneur; and Brian Stelter, American political commentator and chief media correspondent for CNN. 

This reception is part of the Society of Fellows Discussion Reception Series in the Bay Area, which is generously underwritten by Janet and Tom McKinley and Mary and Harold Zlot.

**If you are not currently a Society of Fellows member, and are interested in joining, please contact the SOF team at sof@aspeninstitute.org or at (970) 544-7980 from 9:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. MST.

Speakers:

Richard Gingras is Vice President, News at Google. In that role Gingras guides Google’s strategy in how it surfaces news on Google search, Google News, and its smart devices. He also oversees Google’s effort to enable a healthy, open ecosystem for quality journalism, which includes Accelerated Mobile Pages, Subscribe with Google, the Trust Project and various other efforts to provide tools for journalists and news providers. In March 2018, Gingras announced
the Google News Initiative, a global effort including $300 million dollars to elevate quality journalism, explore new models for sustainability, and provide technology to stimulate cost-efficiency in newsrooms. Richard has been involved in digital media since 1980 or as he once put it “since the days of steam powered modems”. He helped found Salon.com where he once worked with Pulitzer Prize winner Glenn Greenwald and has worked at Apple , the @Home Network , the Excite portal among other digital ventures. He also serves on the boards of the First Amendment Coalition , the International Center for Journalists , and the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard.

Joanne Lipman, one of the nation’s leading journalists, is a CNBC Contributor and author of the No. 1 bestseller “THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID: What Men and Women Need to Know About Working Together.” She is also the inaugural Distinguished Journalism Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. She is the former Chief Content Officer of Gannett and Editor-in-Chief of both USA TODAY and the USA TODAY NETWORK, encompassing the flagship publication plus 109 local newspapers including the Detroit Free Press, the Des Moines Register, and the Arizona Republic. In that role, she oversaw more than 3,000 journalists and led the organization to three Pulitzer prizes.

Lipman began her career as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, ultimately rising to deputy managing editor – the first woman to attain that post – and supervising coverage that won three Pulitzer Prizes. At the Journal, she created Weekend Journal and Personal Journal, and oversaw creation of the Saturday edition. She subsequently was founding editor-in-chief of Conde Nast Portfolio magazine, which won Loeb and National Magazine Awards.

Lipman’s work has been published in numerous outlets including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Time, Fortune, Newsweek and the Harvard Business Review. She has appeared as a television commentator on CNBC, ABC, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, and PBS, among others. She is a frequent public speaker, with recent engagements including the World Economic Forum in Davos, the United Nations, the Aspen Ideas Festival, the International Lean In conference, West Point Military Academy, the Federal Reserve Board, and the Milken Institute Global conference. She also is co-author, with Melanie Kupchynsky, of the acclaimed music memoir “Strings Attached.”

A winner of the Matrix Award for women in communications, Lipman has served or is currently serving on boards including Yale University Council; the World Editors Forum; the Knight Commission on Trust, Media and Democracy; the Yale Daily News; Spirited Media; the Yale Alumni Magazine; and the advisory boards of Data.world, Breastcancer.org and the Yale School of Music. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She and her husband live in New York City and are the parents of two children.

Brian Stelter is the chief media correspondent for CNN Worldwide and anchor of “Reliable Sources,” which examines the week’s top media stories every Sunday at 11:00 a.m. ET on CNN/U.S. Stelter reports for CNN Media, and writes a nightly e-newsletter.

Prior to joining CNN in November 2013, Stelter was a media reporter at The New York Times. Starting in 2007, he covered television and digital media for the Business Day and Arts section of the newspaper. He was also a lead contributor to the “Media Decoder” blog.

In January 2004, while he was still a freshman in college, Stelter created TV Newser, a blog dedicated to coverage of the television news industry. He sold it to Mediabistro.com in July 2004, but continued to edit and write for the blog during the next three years until he graduated college and joined The New York Times.

Stelter published The New York Times best-selling book, Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV (2013), about the competitive world of morning news shows. He is a consultant on Apple’s as-yet-untitled drama about morning shows.

He was featured in the 2011 documentary, “Page One: Inside the New York Times”, directed by Andrew Rossi. He was also named to Forbes Magazine’s “30 Under 30: Media” for three consecutive years.

Stelter graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Mass Communications with a concentration in Journalism from Towson University in Baltimore, Maryland, in 2007. He is on the board of Baltimore Student Media, a nonprofit that publishes Towson’s independent student newspaper, The Towerlight.

Moderator:

Vivian Schiller is a longtime executive at the intersection of journalism, media and technology. She recently joined the Aspen Institute in a new position heading up programs across media, technology and cybersecurity.

Prior to joining Aspen, Schiller served as the founding heads the Civil Foundation, an independent not-for-profit committed to the sustainability of trustworthy journalism around the world. She is also strategic advisor to Craig Newmark Philanthropies

Over the last 30 years, Vivian has held executive roles at some of the most respected media organization in the world. Those include: President and CEO of NPR;

Global Chair of News at Twitter; General Manager of NYTimes.com; Chief Digital Office of NBC News; chief of the Discovery Times Channel, a joint venture of The New York Times and Discovery Communications; and head of CNN documentary and long form divisions. Documentaries and series produced under her auspices earned multiple honors, including three Peabody Awards, four Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia University Awards, and dozens of Emmys.

Schiller is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations; and a Director of the Scott Trust, which owns The Guardian.