Geneva Overholser is director of the School of Journalism at the USC Annenberg School for Communication. Previously, she held the Curtis B. Hurley Chair in Public Affairs Reporting for the Missouri School of Journalism, where she was based in the school’s Washington bureau.
She was editor of
The Des Moines Register from 1988 to 1995, where she led the paper to a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. While at the
Register, she also earned recognition as Editor of the Year by the National Press Foundation and was named “The Best in the Business” by
American Journalism Review.
She has been ombudsman of
The Washington Post, a member of the editorial board of
The New York Times, a syndicated columnist for The Washington Post Writers Group, and a reporter for the
Colorado Springs Sun. She has been a columnist for the
Columbia Journalism Review and frequent contributor to Poynter.org. She also spent five years overseas, working and writing in Paris and Kinshasa.
Through the Annenberg Public Policy Center, in 2006 she published a manifesto on the future of journalism titled
On Behalf of Journalism: A Manifesto for Change. She is also co-editor, with Kathleen Hall Jamieson, of the volume “The Press,” part of the Oxford University Press
Institutions of American Democracy series.
She chairs the board of the Center for Public Integrity. In addition, she serves on the Journalism Advisory Committee of the Knight Foundation and on the boards of the John S. Knight Fellowships at Stanford University, the Committee of Concerned Journalists, the Fund for Independence in Journalism and the Academy of American Poets. She was for nine years a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board, the final year as chair, and is a former officer of the American Society of Newspaper Editors.
Overholser holds a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and a bachelor’s degree in history from Wellesley College. She is married to David Westphal, who was most recently Washington editor for McClatchy Newspapers, and they have three children.
close