Alex Jones

Who is Alex Jones?

Alex S. Jones is an American journalist who has been director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government since July 1, 2000. Jones is also a lecturer at the school, occupying the Laurence M. Lombard Chair in the Press and Public Policy. He won a Pulitzer Prize for journalism in 1987.

Jones covered the newspaper industry for The New York Times from 1983 until 1992. His prize-winning story "The Fall of the House of Bingham" concerned events that ended in 1986 with the sale of Louisville, Kentucky media — two newspapers and three broadcast stations — after 15 years of management by Barry Bingham, Jr. The following year Jones won the annual Pulitzer Prize for Specialized Reporting, recognizing that work as "a skillful and sensitive report of a powerful newspaper family's bickering and how it led to the sale of a famed media empire."

He and his wife Susan E. Tifft wrote long books about two newspaper dynasties, beginning with the Binghams in 1991 and focusing on Barry Bingham, Sr., The Patriarch: The Rise and Fall of the Bingham Dynasty.