January 20: PCLI Presents ‘The Post-COVID Newsroom’

Media organizations have repeatedly delayed asking their employees to return to the newsroom as new variants and infection surges have prolonged the COVID-19 pandemic. When the pandemic does finally subside, will newsrooms go back to operating the way they did before? Will remote work remain an option? And how can journalists rest assured that their offices are safe places to be?

To explore these questions and more, the Press Club of Long Island will host “The Post-COVID Newsroom,” a panel discussion via Zoom, on Thursday, January 20, at 7 p.m. with a union leader, a news executive and an infectious disease specialist. This event is free and open to the public.

The panelists are:

• Zachary R. Dowdy is an assistant professor of practice at Stony Brook University’s School of Communication and Journalism. Prior to joining SBU as a full-time professor in 2020, he worked as a rewrite and criminal justice reporter and United Nations correspondent for Newsday as well as an adjunct professor. He has also worked for The Boston Herald and The Boston Globe, where he covered urban affairs, international issues and criminal justice with an emphasis on corrections and served as a fill-in urban affairs editor.
  Dowdy has taught journalism and writing courses at the University of Massachusetts-Boston and Roxbury Community College in Boston, and at Hofstra University on Long Island. He also participated as a writing coach in Partners in Print, a journalism program for elementary, middle and high school students in Boston. At Stony Brook, Dowdy is co-coordinator of the Robert W. Greene Summer Institute for High School Journalists, a weeklong residential journalism program boot camp for students.
  He has served as president of the Boston Association of Black Journalists and as vice president-print of the New York Association of Black Journalists. He now serves as vice president of the Editorial Unit of Local 406, the union representing employees at Newsday.
• Audrey Gruber is a seasoned and award-winning news executive. She currently serves as vice president of news for News 12 Networks where she oversees operations, personnel and overall network efficiency. She previously served as VP of original news production and development at Spectrum, the head of video at Daily Mail, senior investigative producer at Al Jazeera, executive producer at Fuse and various production positions at CBS, NBC, CNN and ABC. Gruber has won numerous top honors in journalism, including multiple Emmy Awards, a Peabody Award and DuPont Award, among others.
• Aaron E. Glatt, MD, MACP, FIDSA, FSHEA is the chairman of medicine, chief of infectious diseases and hospital epidemiologist at Mount Sinai South Nassau, and a full professor of medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. A spokesperson for the Infectious Diseases Society of America, he is board-certified in internal medicine and infectious diseases, and recently received the 2020 NY American College of Physicians Laureate Award and was named a Master of the American College of Physicians. The author of several hundred scientific journal articles, book chapters and presentations, he has served on editorial boards and as a reviewer for many prestigious journals, has worked on many government, hospital, medical school and public health committees, and has been frequently interviewed by print, television and online media.

Moderating the discussion is Scott Brinton, a Press Club of Long Island past president and Long Island Journalism Hall of Fame inductee. Brinton is the executive editor of the 18-edition Herald Community Newspapers and an adjunct professor of journalism at Hofstra University. He has also freelanced for The New York Times and Newsday. At Hofstra, he is co-director of the High School Summer Journalism Institute, which focuses on increasing diversity in the media.

Register on Zoom