PRESS RELEASES 2005

Harvard Professor Steve Ross to discuss “New Media”  

October 7, 2005 

Professor Steven Ross, of Harvard University, will visit Jamaica next week to discuss the impact of new technology on the media landscape.  He will meet with academics, journalists, and those in the media business.  Professor Ross’ visit is sponsored by the Speaker Program of the U.S. State Department and facilitated by the U.S. Embassy’s Office of Public Affairs.  

Professor Ross will join classes at the Caribbean Institute of Media and Communication (CARIMAC) at the University of the West Indies, and will discuss the development of the Institute’s academic programs with senior faculty members.  He will also talk about “Media in the Coming Age of Broadband” at a breakfast sponsored by the Media Association of Jamaica in association with CARIMAC; and at a roundtable discussion with practicing Jamaican journalists at the U.S. Embassy’s Public Affairs Auditorium.  He will also travel to Mandeville to meet with Northern Caribbean University’s faculty and students of the Departments of Communication Studies and Information Technology.

Professor Ross’s career combines teaching, writing, consulting and technology development.  He also edits a trade/professional magazine (Broadband Properties, www.bbpmag.com).  An associate professor of professional practice at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism from 1985 to 2004, Ross taught new media and computer-assisted reporting as well as heading the school’s science and environmental reporting program. Professor Ross chaired the interest group for professors of science and medical writing at the Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communication from 2003-4.  Since 1994, Professor Ross has conducted the largest surveys of journalists’ use of on-line services in the United States.  These have been replicated in many countries.  Among his 19 books are works on the environment and planning, multimedia, finance, statistics, product safety, and toxic substances.  He has lectured and consulted extensively in the United States and abroad on media-business issues, and has worked in 84 countries.

An engineer and scientist by training, Professor Ross graduated from Columbia University with a Masters in Journalism in 1970, after earning his BS degree in physics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1969.