Live Talks Los Angeles invites you to:

a morning Business Forum with:

James O’Shea in conversation with Geneva Overholser
The Future of Newspapers

Award-winning journalist James O’Shea is former managing editor of the Chicago Tribune and the past editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Times.  He is founder and editor of the Chicago News Cooperative. Under his leadership, the Tribune’s news staff received six Pulitzer Prizes. O’Shea is author of The Deal from Hell: How Moguls and Wall Street Plundered Great american Newspapers. 

Geneva Overholser is director of the Annenberg School of Journalism at the University of Southern California.

Wednesday, September 7, 2011
7:45am  Continental Breakfast
8:15-9:15am  Forum

The City Club on Bunker Hill
333 S. Grand Avenue, 54th Floor
Los Angeles, CA 90071

Tickets: $20, $35 includes O'Shea's book

Award-winning journalist James O’Shea is former managing editor of the Chicago Tribune and the past editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Times.  He is founder and editor of the Chicago News Cooperative. Under his leadership, the Tribune’s news staff received six Pulitzer Prizes.

O’Shea is author of The Deal from Hell: How Moguls and Wall Street Plundered Great american Newspapers. In 2000, after the Tribune Company acquired Times Mirror Corporation, it comprised the most powerful collection of newspapers in the world. How then did Tribune nosedive into bankruptcy and public scandal? In The Deal From Hell, veteran O’Shea takes us behind the scenes of the decisions that led to disaster in boardrooms and newsrooms from coast to coast, based on access to key players, court testimony, and sworn depositions.

The Deal From Hell is a riveting narrative that chronicles how news industry executives and editors–convinced they were acting in the best interests of their publications–made a series of flawed decisions that endangered journalistic credibility and drove the newspapers, already confronting a perfect storm of political, technological, economic, and social turmoil, to the brink of extinction.

Geneva Overholser is director of the Annenberg School of Journalism at the University of Southern California. She is a former editor of the Des Moines Register, ombudsman of the Washington Post and editorial board member of the New York Times.  She held the Hurley Chair in Public Affairs Reporting for the Missouri School of Journalism.

Overholser is on the boards of the Knight Fellowships at Stanford, Center for Public Integrity, Committee of Concerned Journalists, Academy of American Poets and examiner.com. She served on the Pulitzer Prize Board and was an officer of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. She is a fellow of the Society of Professional Journalists and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She held a Nieman fellowship at Harvard.

She graduated from Wellesley College and has a master’s from the Medill School of Journalism, honorary doctorates from Grinnell College and St. Andrews Presbyterian College, and alumnae achievement awards from Wellesley, Northwestern and Medill.