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Jelani Cobb, Columbia’s New Journalism Dean, Talked of Pursuing Dreams and Being Able to Afford To

By David A. Andelman


The average journalist’s salary in New York hovers right around the $50,000 mark, though few entry-level spots are available for much more than $45,000. So how does Jelani Cobb justify what he admits is the cost of a year at Columbia University’s prestigious Graduate School of Journalism that he estimates at $120,000 and where he’s been named the new dean?

“It becomes unfeasible for a lot of people to stay in journalism if they walk out with 40 or 50 thousand dollars in debt,” Dean Cobb admitted to the January luncheon of The Silurians Press Club under questioning by Allan Dodds Frank, a former Silurian president. But Dean Cobb is doing his best to find ways to fix this tuition crisis. “One of my top objectives is to raise enough money to offset the cost of our tuition,” he explained.

Without question that is a key priority for many professional schools. New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine has begun awarding every student enrolled in their MD program full-tuition scholarships “so that any student can pursue the dream of becoming a physician without the burden of overwhelming student debt,” the school says. Indeed, one of Dean Cobb’s dreams, he explained, would be to “create a program where for every student that goes into local news or nonprofit news and stays there for five years, over the course of those five years we will pay off your loans.”

But absent that, for the moment, Dean Cobb is looking at a whole range of value-added skills and competencies that Columbia can bring to journalism and that the school can offer its graduates. “We have an embarrassment of riches,” he observed, “the reputation we have, and having the history and the tradition that we have, we have applicants from all sorts of backgrounds and all sorts of skill sets. So, I see a pool of student perspectives, students who are really clear about the social function that journalism serves.”

Then it becomes a question of how to arm them with the skills and the perception of their new calling that will result in a product that fulfills the needs of a rapidly changing society. “How do you teach these kids to  detect and ignore or challenge misinformation or disinformation—if there is, in fact, a difference between those two things,” Dean Cobb observed. “We want to see everyone more acutely informed about things like digital forensics. If someone is sending you a video and it purports to show Russian soldiers committing war crimes in Ukraine, how do you know that that video is what it says it is? How do you know that it is from January of 2023 and not from some unrelated conflict that happened two years ago?” Dean Cobb elaborated that students are being trained in “the forensics of where is the sun in this video? Where are the shadows? What time of day does it purport to be? Let’s get an atlas of the globe and see where the sun would be shining at that time of day, on that date. Are there serial numbers here? What kind of vehicle is that? When was that vehicle released? Is that vehicle a later model than it says it is?”

All of these skills, Dean Cobb observed are “a growth area.” And he points out, “Outlets are hiring in those areas.”

Dean Cobb was a product of New York schools, particularly his home borough of Queens, so he is acutely aware of one sad contemporary reality. “Less than 10% of the high schools in New York City have a school newspaper and those newspapers are disproportionately clustered at institutions that are in well-off communities,” he said. But in fact, this is not a new phenomenon. In the late 1990s, two of us who were senior editors at Bloomberg offered to help create a student newspaper at an inner city high school in Manhattan. It was a uniquely challenging task as there was no budget, no teacher with the most remote attachment to the craft. Persistence, though, paid off with a product everyone was proud to showcase.

But there is another skill, too, that Dean Cobb is most anxious to encourage and that springs from his own unique background with a Ph.D. in American history and deep roots as a New Yorker writer. “There are a lot of crucial histories that have been written by journalists and some pretty significant journalism that’s been written by historians,” he noted, pointing out that William Shirer who chronicled the history of the rise and fall of the Third Reich and Barbara Tuchman were both journalists at their core. It’s the common theme of doing the kind of forensic work to find out information that has been obscured or that is not visible to the public, digging into archives which reporters may need to do and historians do frequently, interviewing people, creating a cohesive narrative, and engaging the public, which I think are core skill sets that they have in common. Those historians’ sensibilities were useful to me.”

In the end, though, it all comes down to money—at least for the moment.  “If I do anything as a dean that’s worthwhile,” Dean Cobb concluded, “it will be in diminishing the degree to which finances determine somebody’s ability to pursue their dreams.”

The date: Wednesday, January 18, 2023
The time: Noon
The place: National Arts Club, 15 Gramercy Park South


David Gelles Dissected The Man Who Broke Capitalism–Jack Welch–at December’s Meeting

By David A. Andelman

When I left CNBC in Washington in 1994, Jack Welch was very much in charge of its owner, General Electric, whose stock was riding high at $50 a share (nearly $100 in today’s dollars). The company had been most generous to me, a very small cog in its corporate wheels, but I was moving to Bloomberg where ownership of individual companies’ shares was frowned upon. At the same time, there was something that told me the Jack Welch years were just too good to be true. So, I sold out. Much to my chagrin, I watched the shares rocket to $450 a share just a few years later, then begin a long, slow descent to where they find themselves today.

I never had a very good sense of just how far off the rails General Electric had gone and at what cost until I listened to The New York Times reporter David Gelles regale a Silurians luncheon on December 21 with tales culled from his remarkable book, The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America―and How to Undo His Legacy .

“When I started looking around, I found so many other CEOs who had been influenced by Welch or actually studied directly with him. But I [also] started to see his fingerprints all over our economy,” Gelles began in his conversation with longtime CNN business anchor and Silurian president-emeritus Mike Kandel. “It was this system that became an insidious way for companies to do business.”

The leadup to this profile of a superstar gone wrong is the Corner Office column Gelles has written for The Times for years. “In the course of those conversations, one name kept coming up, and it wasn’t Steve Jobs. It was Jack Welch. That bugged me for a while. Why was it that a CEO who had been retired for 20 years was still looming large in the minds of today’s CEOs? That was just sort of a puzzle for me.” But one that he has now brilliantly unpacked.

Welch’s system “involved extraordinary deal making,” Gelles continued, “more than 1,000 mergers and acquisitions in his 20 years at GE. That’s to the tune of one per week and all of that was in the service of not only making GE more profitable, but just bigger. Bigger was better. And in the process of that, it got so far away from its industrial roots.” The principal problem was that the real financial engine that propelled GE stock for so long had little to nothing to do with its deep roots in manufacturing. “The vast majority of the profits [of GE] were coming from GE Capital. It was coming from things like high interest credit cards and commercial real estate portfolios,” Gelles told Silurians. “And so, when the financial crisis hit, guess who is left holding the bag with one of the biggest subprime portfolios? It was GE, and that’s why they needed a bailout from Warren Buffett and the federal government.”

Gelles reminded his listeners that GE “traces its roots to Thomas Edison. GE was responsible for so many of the sort of major technological marvels that we all know and take for granted.” But it began to get away, far away, from these roots, especially under Welch. “Moreover, with the aura that Welch projected as an innovator and especially developer of executive talent, it had that reputation of turning out the best of the best corporate leaders. If you hired an executive who had worked for GE you were getting an absolutely top-notch CEO.” In all too many cases that was simply not the case.

Still, as Gelles suggested, it is not impossible that the media should share some of the blame. “The business press in particular, and I regard myself as a central part of the problem,” Gelles conceded. “Since Welch, with everyone from Elizabeth Holmes to Mark Zuckerberg, we are in the habit of celebrating our business leaders as cultural heroes—as sort of exemplary people. And that’s actually that sort of the idea that I start the book with. I ask this question: why do we lionize billionaires? What is it about America that makes the richest among us our heroes? And I don’t have the perfect answer, but [in this book, I’m] trying to sort of scratch at that question as I tried to understand why Welch was able to be so successful for so long.”

Gelles especially cited the example of another mega American corporation —Boeing and its crisis with the 737Max. “This relentless pressure is to sell as much as what we have,” Gelles continued. “There’s very little regard given to research and development. Relate that to what happened to Boeing with the 737Max. The 737 was introduced in the 1960s when the Beatles were still playing. And it’s still the plane. People are flying it. [But] Boeing has just simply not done the work and spent the money to figure out what a truly modern midsize passenger jet for the 21st century should be like. They just haven’t done the work. They haven’t put the money there. They need to do that, but they keep kicking the can down the road

All that said, Gelles does concede that Welch “was insanely smart. This guy knew more about just about everything than anyone he was talking to, [yet he was] at times cruel.” Then Gelles pointed out, “he engaged in behavior that today would be on the front page of The New York Times because it could easily be regarded as sexist or homophobic or deeply inappropriate in a modern office culture, but he got away with it because it was a different time. And he was Jack Welch.”

Finally, Gelles concluded that The Man Who Broke Capitalism is really “a conversation about a system [that] it goes well beyond Welch at this point. In theory, the CEO works for the board and in theory, the board works for the investors, but too often the boards are effectively captured by their CEOs, and they become these clubby little affairs where everyone’s just, you know, trying to not rock the boat.”

“In his heyday, GE was responsible for something like 1% of [America’s] GDP,” Gelles said. “Jack Welch was a CEO who mingled with presidents, who was essentially a statesman and the impact he had on all these other CEOs, the impact he had on business school curriculums, on the boards of directors, not only at GE but it all these other companies is just unparalleled, and I think will remain unmatched for a really long time. So, I say he is why I wrote the book.”

Perhaps not really to celebrate but to debunk.

The date: Wednesday, December 21, 2022
The time: Noon.
The place: The National Arts Club, 15 Gramercy Park South.


Maggie Haberman: Silurians’ Taylor Swift, Trump’s Nemesis

By David A. Andelman


“For this crowd, you are our Taylor Swift, our number one rock star,” Silurians president Joe Berger proclaimed at the November 16 lunch featuring Maggie Haberman, chronicler of Donald Trump and all his peccadillos.

From the get-go at this memorable luncheon, with the largest in-person turnout since the onset of covid, Maggie was clear: “I try to stick to what I know.” And for 58 riveting minutes under the probing questions of former Silurians president Allan Dodds Frank, she unveiled some of her deepest secrets about a Donald Trump she has come to know more deeply than perhaps any other journalist today.

“He refers to us all as the enemy of the people,” Maggie observed. “One of my fondest memories of covering that White House was sitting in the Oval Office with my colleague Peter Baker and our publisher A.G. Sulzberger sitting across the Resolute desk from Trump, saying directly to Trump, ‘Your language about enemy of the people is enabling despots around the globe to engage in free press crackdowns.’ And Trump just kept responding saying, ‘I think I’m entitled to a good story from my paper.’ [That’s] how he views The Times, which is what his thing with me is about. He is uniquely obsessed with the paper, and I’m just the person who covers him more often than others.”

Which helps explain why Trump was so deeply unhappy about at least some of her reporting especially in her remarkable book, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America. “He’s been extremely angry at various aspects of the book including beginning with reporting from February 2022 that he had been flushing documents down the toilet in the White House,” which helps to explain, Maggie, says, why “I haven’t talked to Donald Trump since I interviewed him in September 2021.

And this despite the fact that she’s had access to his succession of cell phone numbers: “He has a different cell phone number now than he used to, because it changed in the White House. And there’s been lots written about his issues with cell phone use that his staff had to spend a lot of time tamping down. It’s just that it always seemed like it was a joke because so much of it ends up seeming, like it’s a running laugh track with him, but it’s not funny. Someone gave me his cell phone number, I’m not going to say who, and then someone gave me his new cell phone number.”

And then there are Donald Trump’s friends—if you could ever say he’s actually had any. As Maggie put it when the topic of Rudy Giuliani came up—a subject very close to many Silurians who’ve covered one or the other or both in the course of their careers. “They have a very transactional relationship, they were not friends,” she began. “This whole line that they were pals going back to New York, and Giuliani was a prosecutor and Trump was in a habit of trying to cultivate prosecutors for obvious reasons.” Then there was the money. “In 1988, Giuliani’s office got a tip about potential money laundering at Trump Tower. They looked into it, dropped it fairly quickly. There’s been claims that there might have been other reasons, which is that Giuliani wanted to have Trump as a fundraiser when Giuliani was about to be mayor. And this basically set the tone, I think, for this relationship.”

Inevitably, of course, there is the question of what the world, even journalists, all too often simply miss about Trump in their dealings with or writing about him. “He has only a handful of moves,” Maggie said thoughtfully. “Everything is flat and the same and devoid of context—describing Meade Esposito as ruling with an iron fist, the same language that he uses to describe Xi Jinping. Everything is the same, and the context doesn’t matter. Donald Trump is the same in every single context. A letter from a notorious dictator written to a sitting president is the same as trading with Page Six to get them not to write a story about his making Marla Maples return two gold Lexuses—and instead giving them the fact that he was divorcing her, which is also in the book if you want to read about it. That’s the part that really gets missed about him.”

But perhaps the single most important observation, that she tossed off almost as an aside, was a simple answer to what could be a most complex question: on what is Donald Trump most perceptive? “What he’s very perceptive about,” Maggie answered quickly, “is the darkness in human behavior.”

The next question allowed her to elaborate. “Do you think Donald Trump understood the just-below-the-surface racism of many Americans?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Better than other people?”

“I think he was more willing to capitalize on it than other people.” It won’t end. “He has normalized so much behavior that had been relegated to the fringes of our politics,” she continued. “Over the course of decades, after the Civil Rights era, and after the 1970s and 80s, he is just sort of frozen in time in 1980s New York City. I write in the book that the only two politicians I ever heard publicly use the phrase ‘The Blacks’ were Donald Trump and Andrew Cuomo. He has a certain mindset. He is openly race-baiting Mitch McConnell’s wife, who was born in Taiwan. He described Governor Glenn Youngkin’s name as sounding Chinese on his social media website the other day. This is not going to a good place and to that end, just to close that thought, his chief policy advisor, Stephen Miller, has been just making increasingly overtly racist, appeals on Twitter. We got one of his mailers at our house in Brooklyn which was pretty striking, and it was all about anti-white and anti-Asian bias, and there will be more of that.”

But that’s only a part of his appeal to the nation, Maggie believes: “One of the things that was very hard for people around the country, when you would try having a discussion with them about ‘he’s not actually as rich as he says he is,’ well, he’s richer than 99% of the country. Because they can see Trump Tower, because they watch The Apprentice, and they thought it was real. Now he has been president, that’s pretty real. They all want a piece of Trump…that’s generally how he sells himself.”

Then there’s a base reality of the anger out there in America. “Why Trump won the presidency? I think that voters in red states who voted for Donald Trump wanted a quote unquote fighter and they wanted somebody who was voicing a level of anger, that a lot of them had in their lives, and Donald Trump came into political being during an enormous era of mistrust in this country, and he fueled it, he capitalized on it.”

So, what’s more important—fame or money? “He is a child of privilege who always had money and who always believed there was going to be a [safety] net there. What he didn’t have was fame. His father couldn’t give him fame. His father could give him connections, his father could give him loans, his father could co-sign agreements with banks and with landholders, but fame was something totally different.”

As for what’s next? Well, we might even have Maggie around to let us know, though she insists “at the moment I’m planning on doing what the paper asks me to do, which is be part of its politics coverage and that will include Donald Trump. But I will not cover him hour to hour the way that I did for the previous years.”

And indeed, there may be quite a lot to cover for a very long time. “The story of this book is about people writing Donald Trump’s obit, over and over and over, and he just finds a way to come back, and the things that matter to us in this room, you know, many of us anyway, do not necessarily matter to the people who cast the votes. He is still really strong. We will know more in the coming days, we will know how his fundraising going. Are donors fleeing, does he have any major donors left? Can he really get a campaign off the ground? Will he get indicted? We don’t know. But absent that, I would not write him off.”

Either way, we now have an absolutely indispensable guidebook to the land of Trump: Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America from our own Maggie Haberman.


MTA Chair Janno Lieber Discussed the Future of Subways and Commuter Lines on October 19

By David A. Andelman

Mass transit “for us, is like air and water,” said John (“Janno”) Lieber. By “us” he meant, of course, we New Yorkers, including journalists who grew up with the city’s subways and buses as the lifeblood that took us to stories and back to our newsrooms, then home again at night. “I grew up in New York in the 1970s, when much of New York seemed not to be working,” Lieber began. He paused, flashed a winning gap-toothed grin, then added, “We’ve got a long way to go but know how far we have come already.”

In the hour he spent with us Silurians for lunch at the National Arts Club on October 19, Lieber affirmed “we need more transit not less.” But above all, though he just took office this past January, “We set our road back in the 2017 summer from hell, when the system stopped functioning.” And then he began detailing just what Janno Lieber’s MTA has managed to accomplish: a new entrance to Penn Station that really looks like a subway entrance—“twice as wide, 10 feet higher.” Then there are the 15 newly handicapped accessible stations in a year and a half, “the East Side access project we’ll get done this year—a genuine regional rail system that you can ride from Long Island to Dutchess County.” In terms of security, the system has gone from 3-4,000 cameras to 10,000 cameras. “Today,” Lieber asserted, “if you do crime in the subway system, you will get caught.”

The MTA is also making real progress, he said, on the Omni system that will replace today’s Metro card in as revolutionary a fashion as the paper Metro card replaced the old token of my youth. (I found one in an old coat pocket just the other day—imagine!) But, he conceded, “we’re fighting with banks over the Omni system and how much banks will charge.”

As it happens, back in 1979 to 1980, another epiphanal moment for the MTA, newly back from two fraught stints in Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe, I was the transportation reporter for The New York Times. Richard Ravitch, later New York’s lieutenant governor, had just been installed in the job Lieber now occupies. The language of the two men, the challenges they had to confront, the resources that were all too absent, could have been nearly interchangeable. Both inherited a system that, as Lieber told us, was a product of the Robert Moses era “when they undervalued mass transit.” But in the respective ages of Ravitch and Lieber there were similar problems of lack of resources and other spiraling troubles. With one vast, yawning difference: Richard Ravitch never found his city plunged into a pandemic.

Now, even as New York begins to emerge from COVID, ridership is still barely 60 percent to 65 percent of a comparable week in the pre-COVID era. Wall Street is still functioning at barely a 50 percent run-rate. Most of the riders who do patronize the city’s subways “are essential workers. They’re coming from outer borough neighborhoods, communities of color, disadvantaged communities.” In Manhattan, “we’re waiting for white collar office workers to come back.” Weekends are still a bright spot at 90 percent of the pre-COVID passenger load. Much of that is tourism, of which Lieber admits the city could still use much more.

And at its foundation, a top problem for Lieber, as it was for Ravitch back in my days, remains money. “We’re $1.8 billion per year in revenue down from pre-COVID,” he said. “What I tell Albany is that cutting services is not the way to play. That’s not good for any of us.” Continuing that theme, Lieber observed, “We need a funding plan that assures mass transit will be able to be provided at the right level. We should not have total reliance on the fare box. So we’re funding the system on the backs of the riders, and we need to deal with that.”

Much of this was language I heard repeatedly from Ravitch, who was driven by this back in 1979 to 1980. I still recall vividly the call I had from him late one evening in the fall of 1980 when I had put in my notice and was leaving The Times for CBS News. He pleaded with me to let him come to my very small apartment. It was late, my two-year-old son was asleep, my wife furious that I would entertain such a visit. But Ravitch could be persuasive, even when I impressed on him that I was moving to Paris for CBS and would never again be reporting on him. For two hours, he sat in my living room, pouring out his heart—eventually I came to believe, as much if not more for his benefit than for mine—explaining that everything he did, all he asked, was for the people of the MTA region.

I was almost persuaded. As I was, after listening to Janno Lieber more than 40 years later.


Silurians 2022 Dennis Duggan Prize

NEWMARK JOURNALISM STUDENT
CANDACE PEDRAZA
WINS 2022 DENNIS DUGGAN PRIZE

by Jack Deacy

Candace Pedraza

Candace Pedraza, who is in her final year as a student at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, is the 2022 winner of the Dennis Duggan Prize.

The prize, which includes a $2,000 stipend, has been awarded annually by the Silurians Press Club since 2007 to an outstanding Newmark J-School student. Ms. Pedraza, 25, will be presented with the prize at a Silurians Press Club luncheon at noon on Wednesday, September 21 at the National Arts Club in Manhattan.

The award is named in honor of Dennis Duggan, the well-respected and popular Newsday reporter and columnist who chronicled the trials and tribulations of everyday New Yorkers for more than four decades. Duggan, who also served two terms as president of the Silurians Press Club, died in April 2006 at the age of 78.

Ms. Pedraza, born and raised in the Pelham Bay section of the Bronx, attended PS 71 and Herbert Lehman High School.

“From a very young age I was always interested in current events, read newspapers voraciously and watched television news shows,” Ms. Pedraza said. “So it’s no wonder that I was drawn to a career in journalism.”

At the State University of New York at Geneseo, she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Communications, Journalism and Media Studies. After a series of non-journalism jobs, Ms. Pedraza finally decided that a career in news was what she wanted and entered the CUNY graduate school.

As part of her studies at Newmark, she has produced stories for the school’s NYCity News Service, which is directed by John Mancini, a former editor of Newsday, who was a friend and colleague of Duggan.

“I know first hand that Candace’s reporting reflects Dennis’s generous spirit and his deep interest in improving conditions for New Yorkers whose stories are often overlooked,” he said.

Ms. Pedraza complemented her studies at Newmark with internships at City & State New York and The City, the nonprofit news outlets. She is also a writer and podcast co-host at The Knicks Wall, which covers the NBA team in depth. At Newmark, she is specializing in audio and data journalism, with a concentration in health and science reporting. Ms. Pedraza resides in Elizabeth, New Jersey, with her fiance and three cats.


First Silurians Luncheon of the Season, Sept. 21

by Joe Berger, President

Ken Auletta, masterful journalist, will talk about his new book on Harvey Weinstein and the Hollywood and media culture that enabled him, at the season’s first Silurians lunch, Sept. 21.

Ken Auletta, it can be said without exaggeration, is the nation’s media maven. This son of Coney Island has written 13 books, including five best sellers, that together with his Annals of Communications columns for The New Yorker magazine have charted the revolutions in the newspaper, television, film, Internet and advertising industries and what the upheaval reveals about our country and ourselves. He has profiled Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, Ted Turner, Sheryl Sandberg, and John Malone as well as Facebook, Google. AOL Time Warner, and the New York Times. Columbia Journalism Review concluded, “no other reporter has covered the new communications revolution as thoroughly as has Auletta.”

His latest book, published in July, is Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein And The Culture of Silence. It is the story of an unsavory but devilishly complex figure who behaved like a monster while also giving birth to acclaimed movies like Pulp Fiction, The Crying Game, The King’s Speech, Shakespeare in Love and The Artist. Hollywood Ending uncovers what made Weinstein a talented ogre and how a culture that prioritized fame and box office success enabled and shielded his numerous sexual assaults and outright rapes. Those Silurians who were here when Ronan Farrow spoke about Weinstein will be surprised how fresh and riveting is Auletta’s book. He provides the personal, psychological and economic context for Weinstein’s crimes. And he vividly opens a window on the intrigue, rationalization and valor that took place within the media world as Weinstein, armed with a battery of prominent lawyers and a firm of former Mossad agents, tried to squelch the assault story and courageous reporters and editors kept burrowing. It is a measure of the respect with which Auletta is held that among the subjects who sat for interviews with him were the Weinstein brothers. No wonder Auletta has won numerous journalism honors, including a lifetime achievement award from the Silurians.

The date: Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2022
The time: Noon.
The place: The National Arts Club, 15 Gramercy Park South.


 

SILURIANS OFFICER AND BOARD ELECTIONS, 2022 – 2023

JOSEPH BERGER ELECTED PRESIDENT;
AILEEN JACOBSON NAMED EDITOR OF SILURIAN NEWS;
CHESTER HIGGINS JR. JOINS BOARD OF GOVERNORS

By Ben Patrusky

Joseph Berger, a consummate New York Times reporter, columnist and editor for more than three decades and the prolific author of several celebrated books, was elected the 73rd president of the Silurian Press Club on May 18 at the final lunch of the 2021 -2022 season, and the first to be held in-person since the onset of the Covid pandemic.

Joseph Berger

In assuming the presidency, Berger will relinquish editorship of Silurian News and pass the mantle to his newly elected successor as first vice president, Aileen Jacobson, an accomplished former Newsday writer. Rounding out the officer roster are Carol Lawson, re-elected as secretary, and Karen Bedrosian Richardson as treasurer.

All current members of the board of governors were also re-elected to renewable one-year terms, along with one notable new addition, Chester Higgins Jr., the recipient of the Silurians 2022 Lifetime Achievement Award, and the first photojournalist to grace the Silurian board roster.

Berger, as president, succeeds Michael Serrill, who won plaudits for the skill and resourcefulness with which he continued to lead the organization through such unprecedented times. Though Silurian monthly “lunches” went virtual as the pandemic raged, Serrill, with the help of colleagues, delivered an outstanding procession of speakers – including (one small silver lining of the pandemic) several preeminent out-of-towners who normally would not have been available to appear but for Zoom. Among the illustrious presenters were: Marty Baron, recently retired editor of the Washington Post; Michael Wolff, author of “Fire and Fury,” a best-selling inside look at the Trump administration; Mikhail Zygar, a Russian writer and filmmaker, in conversation with former New York Times correspondent James Brooke, sharing their expertise on Ukraine from remote locations; Peter Bergen, CNN national security analyst; and iconic caricaturist Ed Sorel.. Serrill also presided over the twice-postponed 2022 awards dinner honoring Higgins, the first in-person event of his presidential term.

Continue reading →

Excellence In Journalism Awards

The New York Times and Newsday
Win Top Honors In The 77th Annual
Excellence In Journalism Awards

Fortune Magazine, ESPN, WABC-TV, Type Investigations, THE CITY, WINS 1010 Radio, The New Yorker, Gothamist/WNYC, The Record/northjersey.com, News 12 Network, City Limits, USA Today Network, Foreign Policy Magazine And CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism Also Win Awards

A powerful 18-month long investigation by Newsday into policing on Long Island that uncovered abusive treatment of detainees by law enforcement and discrimination against black applicants for police jobs and an incisive New York Times series that reported how the pandemic has devastated the New York City economy were both awarded the President’s Choice Medallion, the top prize in the Silurian Press Club’s 77th annual Excellence in Journalism Awards. 

The Times led this year’s winners with six first place Medallions winning the President’s Choice Award and awards for Breaking News Reporting, Investigative Reporting, Arts and Culture Reporting, Editorials, Commentary and Public Service, People Profiles and Feature Photography. Newsday was close behind with five winning Medallions, capturing the President’s Choice Award, and awards for Business and Financial Reporting , Breaking News Photography, Sports Photography and TV Feature News.

But far smaller and younger news outlets performed nimbly in the Silurians contest as well. Type Investigations, a nonprofit newsroom dedicated to independent investigative journalism, won two Medallions, one for Feature News Reporting, the other for Science and Health Reporting. THE CITY, another  online nonprofit news site, won the Medallion for Minority Affairs Reporting. In the remaining categories, Fortune magazine won for Environmental Reporting, ESPN for Sports Reporting and Commentary,WABC-TV for TV Breaking News and 1010 WINS Radio for Radio Breaking News.

Runners-up in each of the prize categories were honored with Merit awards. The Times won five, Newsday and THE CITY won three each and Streetblogs NYC, a nonprofit news website, won two.  The New Yorker, The Record/northjersey.com, Type Investigations, Gothamist/WNYC, Foreign Policy,  CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, the USA Today network,  City Limits and the News 12 Network each won a Merit award.

The Medallion and Merit awards will be presented at a dinner Wednesday, June 15 at the National Arts Club in Manhattan. Silurian Press Club president Michael Serrill announced that for the first time since 2019, when the Covid-19 pandemic emerged, the awards ceremony would be held live in-person rather than streamed virtually by Zoom. 

The Silurians Press Club, established in 1924 as The Society of the Silurians, is an organization of more than 300 veteran and retired New York journalists. Early members included William Randolph Hearst, Lincoln Steffens and Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck. In addition to sponsoring the Excellence In Journalism awards annually since 1945, the Silurians host monthly luncheons featuring prominent speakers and also provide educational grants for local journalism students and relief for journalists in financial trouble.  

    The full list of Medallion winners and Merit Award winners follows:

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Exactly Who Gets a Coveted Times Obit

by David A. Andelman

Bill McDonald – photo Fred R. Conrad/NYT

For 16 years, Bill McDonald has served as a gatekeeper for the powerful, the famous, the quirky or the just plain interesting as they exit the world where they plied their trade or exercised their talents. He is the obituary editor of The New York Times. And for our first in-person lunch at the National Arts Club in nearly two years, he regaled our membership with yarns of life and immortality beyond the grave.

Take the fellow who was the (hardly competent) lookout for the Watergate burglars. “We would always write about Watergate people,” McDonald said. “They’re just catnip for our readers.” Even if, as was the case for this one, he’d been dead for two years. There have been a few other notable cases among the long-dead. Like Donald W. Duncan, green beret turned anti-war leader and editor of Ramparts, a leftist magazine of the Vietnam war era, who Jeff Roth, Silurian and custodian of The Times morgue, uncovered. When fellow Silurian, Robert McFadden, the paper’s leading obituary writer, began to research this obit, he discovered that Duncan, too, had been long dead. “We did the obit,” McDonald observed. “It was a great story and no one else had done it. So, we got a lot of good reaction.”

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Tim Weiner, Intelligence and National Security Expert, Discussed the War in Ukraine and Explained Political Warfare at Our April 20 Meeting

By Aileen Jacobson

Tim Weiner


The war in Ukraine represents “the resurrection of political warfare by the United States,” said Tim Weiner, our speaker at the April 20 Zoom meeting, our second program on that ongoing war instigated by Russia.

Weiner, a Pulitzer Prize winner, is a former intelligence and national security reporter for the New York Times. He is also the author of several books, including a history of the CIA and a history of the FBI. His most recent is The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia and Political Warfare, 1945-2020. He also hosts a podcast.

Political warfare, Weiner explained to the fifty members who attended, is the use of a nation’s powers “short of war,” including diplomacy, economic warfare, intelligence operations and support for resistance actions.

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Video of Our Speakers

We’ve had a great run of speakers at recent events.  If you were unable to attend, you can now see what you missed.  If you did attend, here are encore presentations for you to enjoy.  Please SUBSCRIBE to our YouTube channel.

Click here to view the videos.

Our New Address

Please be aware that as of May 25, 2022, the Silurians Press Club has a new address:

Silurians Press Club
P.O. Box 2045
Grand Central Station
New York, NY 10163

Silurian Calendar

Dates for the 2023 season. All events, except those noted to be otherwise, fall on the third Wednesday of the month at the National Arts Club, 15 Gramercy Park South. Further details will be announced as they become known.

Luncheon:
On February 15, we will hear from Sandra Peddie, Silurian member, Newsday investigative reporter and author of “The Last of the Old Time Mafia Bosses, John ‘Sonny’ Franzese“
On March 15 we will honor Joyce Purnick with the Silurians 2023 Lifetime Achievement Award

Join The Silurians Press Club!

Veteran journalists. Attend luncheons talks with great speakers.  For further info click here.

Click to view the November 2022 issue of Silurian News
Click here to view previous issues.

New Members

Dan Cryer
Kyle Good
Joanne Mattera
Sheryl McCarthy
Melvin McCray
Jacklyn Monk
Sandra Peddie
Garry Pierre-Pierre
Terry Pristin
Dean Warren Schomburg
Mark Stamey
Sandra Stevenson

Obits

Grace O’Connor
Jim Lynn
Martin J. Steadman
Joseph J. Vecchione
Lawrence Malkin
Pat Fenton
Herbert Hadad
Judith Hole
Judith Bender
Rosalind Massow
Charles Strum
Jane H. Furse
Carl Spielvogel
Mike Santangelo
William Condie
Jack Schwartz
Stephen Stoneburn
Ray Brady

Member News

David Andelman has started a (free) Substack column Andelman Unleashed, so just click to subscribe. Also… On Dec 1 David was awarded France’s highest honor – the rank of chevalier (knight) of the Legion d’Honneur, for “a lifelong commitment to promoting better understanding between the people of France and the US”. (Learn more on page 8 of the Jan 2020 Silurian News.)


More news about Bill Diehl: Bill has a new book out, titled “50 Years of Celebrity Chatter: (Or The Time I Interviewed a Porn Star Naked,” in which he recounts his experiences interviewing various show-biz types during his years at ABC Radio Network and before that at WNEW. Besides the porn star Marilyn Chambers, of “Behind the Green Door” fame (she was naked, he wasn’t), he provides insights and anecdotes about a wide range of actors, including Tom Hanks, Bernadette Peters, Robin Williams, Harrison Ford, Sean Connery, Tony Curtiss and Mel Brooks. And there are photographs, in both the paperback and Kindle versions of the book, available on Amazon. David Andelman calls it “truly a great, fun ‘read.’ I commend it to all.”


Bill Diehl, a veteran radio broadcaster who spent much of his career with ABC covering entertainment industry personalities, is himself the subject of a new podcast about his career of almost five decades. He was interviewed by Jordan Rich, a popular Boston podcaster. Here is the link to the podcast: https://player.blubrry.com/id/76975387/.
Diehl, a long-time member of the Silurians’ Board of Governors, is the author of the 2017 memoir “Stay Tuned: My Life Behind the Mic.” It is available on Amazon. He is currently working on his second book, “Who Said That?” A follow-up to “Stay Tuned,” it is expected to be ready for publication in the fall.


Like many of us, Stephen B. Shepard has had some second thoughts. Unlike many of us, he’s written them down and put them in a new book, a memoir called — aptly — “Second Thoughts.” It’s available on Amazon either as a paperback or a Kindle version. Shepard started rethinking his life when he turned 80 a couple of years ago, and felt that “retrospection” might yield new understanding about such subjects as the family of his boyhood; the profound changes in journalism since he was a youngster; the Jewishness he once rejected; a greater appreciation that can come with re-reading “fiction that matters”; and a closer look at the meaning of male friendship. Shepard, former editor of BusinessWeek magazine, is the founding dean of the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, now known as the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. Small parts of “Second Thoughts” have appeared in his two earlier books, “Deadlines and Disruptions” and “A Literary Journey to Jewish Identity.”


Just in time for the start of a new year, former Silurians president David A. Andelman has published his latest book, “A Red Line in the Sand,” now available on Amazon. A seasoned commentator who contributes frequently to CNN Opinion on global affairs and a former foreign correspondent for The New York Times and CBS News, Andelman combines history and global politics to help his readers better understand the exploding number of military, political, and diplomatic crises around the globe. Using original documentary research, previously classified material, interviews with key players, and reportage from more than 80 countries across five decades to help understand the growth, the successes and frequent failures that have shaped our world today. A former president of the Overseas Press Club and, most recently, the Silurians Press Club, Andelman has a long and renowned record that spans print and broadcast media as fluidly as it does national borders. Over the course of his career, he has traveled through and reported from more than 85 countries. A graduate of Harvard University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, he is a Visiting Scholar at the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School and director of The Red Lines Project, a member of the Board of Contributors of USA Today, and a “Voices” columnist for CNN Opinion.
He is also the author of “The Peacemakers” and “A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today” and the co-author of “The Fourth World War.”

Around the Web

For a list of websites and blogs of special interests to journalists
click here.

Silurians Member Blogs

  • Andelman Unleashed
  • Arlene's Scratch Paper: a blog of her writing, photography and random musings by Arlene Schulman
  • Novelist Online Onpaper by Kenneth Crowe
  • PollyTalk From New York by Polly Guerin
  • The Media Beat – a multimedia commentary by David Tereshchuk

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