Burleigh Lecture 2008
"Journalism and Ethics of Global Citizenship"

Douglas McGill was a staff reporter at The New York Times from 1979 to 1989, and a bureau chief for Bloomberg News in London and Hong Kong from 1991 to 1996. In the late 1990s, he founded two web sites that offered daily English-language news from China. In 2000, he returned to the United States to live in his home town, Rochester, Minnesota, where he has pioneered what he calls “glocal” journalism, or articles that illuminate the connections between local and global life. In 2003, McGill broke the story of the genocide of the Anuak tribe of Ethiopian Africans by interviewing Anuak refugees living in Minnesota, and by telephoning eyewitnesses to the genocide who lived in remote western Ethiopia.

Since 2003, McGill has been an adjunct professor of journalism and mass media at the University of St. Thomas, and has lectured on global citizenship ethics at schools including the Hubert Humphrey School of Public Affairs, Harvard University, the Poynter Institute, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and Missouri State University. For the past three years, he has also taught mass media issues and journalistic techniques to Minnesota citizens wishing to understand more about and the threat to democracy posed by journalism’s decline, and who want to start writing and publishing journalism themselves. In 2007, McGill published a collection of his local-global journalism and essays in “Here: A Global Citizen’s Journey.” He publishes regularly at his web site, The McGill Report (www.mcgillreport.org), and at Local Man (www.localman.org), a blog about journalism and global citizenship ethics.

Cudahy 001 - 7 p.m.
Wednesday, February 6