UP centennial lecture series features Sheila Coronel

PCIJ co-founder and former executive director Sheila Coronel is the featured lecturer in the University of the Philippines Centennial Lecture Series this Friday, August 22, at 2 p.m. at the UP National Institute of Science and Mathematics Education Development (NISMED) Auditorium.

Coronel’s lecture deals with “Media Power and People Power: Citizens, Journalists and the University in the Internet Age,” and is the fourth lecture of the UP: View from the Outside series.

Coronel is the first and current director of the Toni Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism at the prestigious Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York.

A 2003 Ramon Magsaysay awardee for Journalism, Literature and the Creative Communication Arts, Coronel earned her bachelor’s degree in political Science at UP. She has a master’s degree in political sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Coronel is a four-time top-prize winner of the Jaime V. Ongpin Awards for Investigative Journalism, for which she was elevated to the awards’ Hall of Fame in 2001. In the same year, she was also named one of Asia’s 50 Most Influential Communicators by Asiaweek magazine.

Below is the synopsis of her lecture:

Today we are witnessing seismic shifts in the media landscape. The ground is moving beneath our feet. Not in the last hundred or so years, when we saw the rise of professional journalism and mass-circulation newspapers, has the cost of producing and disseminating news been so easy and so affordable. New technologies are democratizing the production and consumption of information. These changes will have profound impact on media and society. They will reconfigure journalism, education and governance in radical ways. The news media and the university — both central institutions of modern democracies — need to transform themselves if they are to remain relevant in the Internet Age.