A group of leading professionals and scholars will discuss the changes overtaking U.S. journalism in "The Future of Journalism: Converged Media, Backpack Journalism and the Reinvention of Reporting" on Wednesday, April 22, on Loyola’s North Charles Street campus. The discussion, which takes place from 5-6:30 p.m. in Knott Hall B03, will be followed by a reception.

The panel will focus on seismic technological and economic shifts currently reshaping the journalism landscape, including:

• The demise of traditional print
• The electronic delivery of the news through the Web, cell phones, iPods, and wireless reading devices such as Amazon's Kindle
• The rise of the blogosphere
• Converging media technologies
• Newspaper bankruptcies and collapsing ownership
• Social responsibility in the 24/7 news cycle

Panelists include:

• Bob Marshall – Pulitzer Prize winner
  Marshall is an environmental reporter and columnist for the New Orleans Times- Picayune, where his reporting on the impact of pollution in the Gulf of Mexico and the Hurricane Katrina disaster won two Pulitzer Prizes, the ultimate recognition for professional U.S. journalists. He is this year’s Muriel and Clarence J. Caulfield Memorial Lecturer for the Loyola department of communication and a graduate of Loyola University New Orleans.
   
• Michael Memoli – Loyola alumnus and White House correspondent
  Memoli is White House correspondent for RealClearPolitics.com. He is a Loyola graduate and former editor of the student newspaper, The Greyhound. Memoli learned his multimedia craft in Loyola’s converged media summer program in Italy.
   
• Kerry Luft – Newspaper foreign editor and Washington bureau chief
  Luft is Washington Bureau Chief of the Tribune Company, representing eight newspapers including the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the Baltimore Sun and others. Luft and his company are at the center of the rapid changes overtaking the newspaper business, as they devise new ways to cope with economic and technical challenges to the old news and information gathering paradigms. Luft also is an adjunct faculty member at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.
   
• Elliot King, Ph.D. - author of a new book on the future of journalism
  King has been a professor of communication at Loyola for 18 years. He co-wrote the first U.S. book about online journalism in 1995, when this new modality promised to revolutionize journalism for the better. His new book, Free For All: The Emergence of Online Journalism in America, forthcoming from Northwestern University Press, traces what has happened since and conjectures on where it is going.

Andrew Ciofalo, a professor of communication at Loyola, will moderate the panel discussion. Ciofalo joined the Loyola faculty in 1983 to found the media studies program. A specialist in experiential and international education, he is the founder of Loyola's Apprentice House Press, the only student-based book publishing organization among U.S. universities. He is one of the first journalism educators to identify the emergence of converged media and to apply the approach to courses on campus and abroad.

The panel is part of Loyola’s department of communication's celebration of "Communication Week," which also includes the Caulfield Memorial Lecture on Friday, April 24.