Top Speakers at EJC Conference on Financial Crisis
Icelandic Banker to Deliver Keynote at CoveringTheCrisis
MAASTRICHT, 7 September 2009 - More than ten top international journalists, financial writers and academics have confirmed they will speak at CoveringTheCrisis, an international conference on the role of the media in the economic meltdown, organised by the European Journalism Centre (EJC). The conference takes place in Brussels on Monday Nov. 9 and Tuesday Nov. 10, bringing together journalists, business representatives and policymakers from Europe and the USA.
Registration is open to journalists and media professionals via the conference website, www.coveringthecrisis.eu.
Also featuring government officials and regulators, the conference will ask why mass media failed to report effectively on the Wall Street and City shenanigans that led to the biggest financial crisis of our generation, and why the few specialist reporters who saw it coming failed to get their message across. The conference will analyse control of financial news in a discussion between journalists, academics and bankers, and close with a debate on the future of journalism and financial journalism.
Icelandic banker and author Ásgeir Jónsson will give the keynote speech at the conference. Jónsson is chief economist and head of research at Kaupthing Bank, the largest bank in Iceland until the collapse of its banking sector. His keynote will set the scene for a lively debate. "It may well be that Iceland was the canary in the coal mine, in life as well as in death," he writes in 'Why Iceland?', an inside account of one of the biggest losses of the economic meltdown.
Others confirmed speakers include:
- Danny Schechter, editor of MediaChannel.org and author of 'Plunder: Investigating our Economic Calamity';
- Damian Tambini of the POLIS institute at the London School of Economics;
- Dean Starkman, editor of The Audit, the online business press section of the Columbia Journalism Review;
- Richard Rescigno, managing editor of US investment weekly Barron's;
- Wolfgang Munchau, associate editor and columnist for the Financial Times;
- Mark Gilbert, London bureau chief and financial markets columnist for Bloomberg News;
- Greg Philo, Professor of Communications and Social Change at Glasgow University;
- Melisande Middleton, director of the Center for International Media Ethics
- Willem Middelkoop, Dutch investor, author and journalist.
The conference will weigh up the future for the news business in a collapsed economy; the effect of the coverage on the development of the crisis story; and the responsibilities of market watchdogs and policy-makers. Further questions include: Are generalist-journalists capable of covering the full financial story? Are financial journalists too close to the subjects they cover? If the media warned viewers and readers, why did no-one react? And, taking a wider perspective, the event also includes a session on the role of money in today's society. Are we witnessing a paradigm shift for money?
The event will coincide with the November meeting of European finance ministers in Brussels and will be held at the Sofitel Brussels Europe hotel.
Registration is open via the conference website, www.coveringthecrisis.eu, for a nominal fee of 150 euro that allows the EJC to cover practical expenses.
Anyone interested can follow the debate via the website and our conference accounts on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Facebook. These can be accessed directly via the conference website.
For more information:
Contact:
Programme queries: Raymond Frenken
Administrative queries: Bianca Lemmens
The European Journalism Centre is an independent, international, non-profit institute dedicated to the highest standards in journalism, mainly through the further training of journalists and media professionals. Building on its extensive international network, the Centre operates as a partner and facilitator in a wide variety of projects.
