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Where the Jobs Are: Journalism
NPR's Robert Smith '89, The Oregonian's Peter Zuckerman '03, OPB's Emily Harris, and Juliette Guilbert '89
Tuesday October 7, 2008
4:10 to 5:30 PM Eliot 314

Join us in welcoming back Robert Smith, Psychology, '89, now New York correspondent for National Public Radio (NPR), the Oregonian's Peter Zuckerman Biology '03, OPB's Emily Harris Yale, Russian, and Juliette Guilbert English '89, for the first in the season Where the Jobs Are: Journalism. Sure to be a timely, important session. Join us!

Panelist bios

Robert Smith '89 is a New York-based Correspondent for National Public Radio and a member of the network's 2008 political team.

Smith was one of NPR's feature reporters for the Democratic and Republican conventions and has spent time on the campaign trail with both John McCain and Barrack Obama; but his preferred assignment is covering the back of the pack: the fringe candidates and off-beat characters that pop into the political side-show. He documented the final campaign swings of Rudy Giuliani, Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul; followed Bill Clinton on a bubba tour of the South; and had the guts to stand up to Chuck Norris in New Hampshire.

Smith got his start in radio in the basement of the Doyle dormitory at KRRC. Late-night listeners in the ten-block radius around the Reed campus must have been thrilled with a radio show that finally dared to feature both 50's do-wop and 80's hip-hop. After Reed, Smith worked as a reporter at KBOO in Portland and at NPR member stations in Salt Lake City and Seattle.

Emily Harris is the On-Air Host of “Think Out Loud” for Oregon Public Broadcasting.

Harris grew up in Oregon and her initial foray outside the US was a Lincoln High School trip to the Soviet Union in 1984. She found herself cursing her high school Russian teacher years later, on a camping trip in Siberia, when she started running out of food. But she caught the international bug early and it stuck.

After getting a degree in Russian from Yale University, Harris spent three years in Portland helping Russian immigrants and learning radio rudiments at KBOO. She moved to Moscow with grand plans but no job in 1994. She eventually found reporting work there for a number of US and international broadcast outlets, including Marketplace and Fox News. The next stop was Los Angeles, which she expected to hate but loved. There she produced the public affairs show Which Way, LA?.

A move to Washington DC led to a reporting job at NPR. Harris covered welfare, the FCC, the Department of Agriculture and whatever else might have fallen through the cracks otherwise. She then joined NOW with Bill Moyers as a national correspondent in its initial year. In 2002, she moved to Berlin, Germany as an NPR correspondent, covering central and eastern Europe and elsewhere as needed. She reported regularly from Iraq and shared in NPR's 2004 Peabody award for Iraq coverage. After that, she spent a year at Stanford University on a Knight Foundation journalism fellowship.

In nearly 15 years away from the Northwest she has been to some amazing places, but her favorite remains ORASWWA* and she is happy to be home.

*Oregon and southwest Washington

Peter Zuckerman ‘03 is a reporter at The Oregonian, the largest newspaper in the Northwest, and is presently covering county politics.

Zuckerman’s reporting has won dozens of awards, including the Scripps Howard Foundation's National Journalism Award, the C.B. Blethen Memorial Award and the Livingston Award, which is the largest all-media, general reporting prize in American journalism. He has been profiled by Harvard University's Nieman Foundation for Journalism in a report about courage in journalism and by PBS in "In a Small Town," a documentary that is currently a finalist for a national Emmy.

At Reed College in Portland, OR., Zuckerman was co-editor-in-chief of the student newspaper, the Quest, which he and a friend resurrected after it had shut down. After graduating with a Biology degree, Zuckerman interned at the Portland bureau of the Associated Press and became a fellow at the Poynter Institute. He got his first job at the Post Register, a small daily paper in Idaho Falls, Idaho. He then moved to cover the entertainment industry for the Los Angeles Daily Journal, the oldest and largest legal newspaper.

Zuckerman, 28, is a member of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association. He lives in Oregon City.

Juliette Guilbert ‘89 graduated from Reed in English and went on to get a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University. Faced with the prospect of spending the rest of her days thinking about nineteenth-century American literature, she chose journalism instead, and has since written for Metropolis, Parenting, Seattle Metropolitan magazine, the Agence France Presse newswire, the Miami Herald, and other publications.

Juliette recently completed the cover article for the summer 2008 issue of Reed, the college’s alumni and campus community magazine. The article, “The Politicals…behind the scenes with aides, advisers, advocates and provocateurs” featured Reedies working to change the political landscape in this election year at the national and local levels.

She has written features on hurricane Katrina, shrimp fishing in Louisiana, and articles on a variety of topics including architecture and design, children and family, travel, and culture. She has also produced “non-commercial, sometimes crotchety” essays from time to time. Juliette lives in Seattle.