Bill Grueskin is dean of academic affairs and professor of professional practice at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.
He began his career at the Daily American in Italy, and then founded a weekly paper in North Dakota.
He later served as a reporter and editor at newspapers in Baltimore, Tampa and Miami.
As the Miami Herald’s city editor, he led local coverage of Hurricane Andrew; the Herald’s overall coverage of the storm won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for public service.
Grueskin then worked for 13 years at the Wall Street Journal, including roles as deputy page-one editor, managing editor of WSJ.com and deputy managing editor/news. He joined Columbia’s faculty in 2008.
Grueskin has a bachelor’s degree in classics from Stanford University and a master’s degree in international economics and U.S. foreign policy from Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.
Prof. Grueskin gave a lecture at the American College of Greece last January to a keen audience. Grueskin defined digital journalism broadly -not just displaying content on a PC screen via the Internet but included platforms, mobile phones and tablets.
The move to digital delivery has transformed not just the business of news, but also the way news is reported, aggregated, distributed and shared, he said.
Each of those changes has an underlying economic rationale, and the media industry has sometimes been slow to recognize the changes or has been paralyzed by their impact.
Grueskin predicted that more and more readers will become accustomed to getting their news online. “The trends are inexorably going online.”
Referring to the Greek printed media he pointed out that the fact that in Athens there are 16 newspapers while in New York there are only three has a lot to say about the survival prospects of the printed media business taking into account the shrinking advertising pie.
Grueskin also defined the role of journalists in the digital era. While in the printed media circulation was and still is a collective success story, in the digital media it is the popularity of the journalists that increases readership and revenue.
Journalists are nowadays active in the social media creating a network of ‘followers’ that follow them when they move to another digital medium.
The volume of ‘followers’ is a valuable asset in negotiating salaries and bonuses.
“The media that are able to adjust and respond to the challenges of the new digital environment, will survive and flourish” Prof. Grueskin concluded.
