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The New York Times Company Foundation Announces Seven 2006 Institutes for Journalists
[November 17, 2005]

The New York Times Company Foundation Announces Seven 2006 Institutes for Journalists


NEW YORK --(Business Wire)-- Nov. 17, 2005 -- The New York Times Company Foundation announced today the seven New York Times Institutes for Journalists in 2006. These journalism institutes, begun in 2000, are immersion courses on complex subjects of rising importance to the public. Applications are welcome from writers, reporters and editors from media organizations around the country.



The institutes run for one to three weeks and each accepts about a dozen experienced journalists. The institutes are each conducted by an institution that is expert in the particular subject. In addition to the actual immersion courses, the institutes typically involve creation of Web sites as an online meeting place for participants as well as alumni of past courses. These sites also enable other journalists to learn from the institutes' instructional materials.

The Times Foundation supports all the instructional and Web site costs and contributes to the travel and expenses of the participants. Since 2000, it has created 26 institutes that have served more than 300 journalists.


The 2006 Institutes will be:

March 19-24: Environmental Threats, in association with Columbia University in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. The Center for Environmental Research and Conservation at Columbia will repeat the exceptionally successful institute it conducted last year on Wind, Water and Health. The institute, for about 15 fellows, uses lectures, discussion and daily field work to present the latest information about the impact of environmental change on local economies, weather, tsunamis, drinking water, fisheries and emerging infectious diseases.

April: The Ethnic Press, at The New York Times. New York City is home to more than a hundred foreign language newspapers and magazines, serving a million readers. This institute, repeated annually since 2000, invites a dozen of their editors and reporters to share experiences with their Times counterparts. The journalists discuss subjects like ethics, legal liability and Internet use.

July: Dance Reporting and Criticism, at the National Dance Institute, Duke University in Durham, N.C. The three-week institute, held in partnership with the American Dance Festival, helps 10 journalists learn to write about dance with authority and passion. The festival's faculty, visiting choreographers, scholars, teachers and distinguished critics lead discussions and the fellows also attend performances, write reviews, participate in dance-technique classes, view dance films and videos, analyze movement and study dance history.

July 10-23: Theater Reporting and Criticism, at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Conn. This two-week institute is conducted in partnership with the annual summer O'Neill Playwrights' Conference. It is the only training program for critics that work with a professional theater. The dozen fellows attend performances and study with master critics from daily and weekly publications.

September: Why Boys Do Worse, at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism in New York. According to many social measurements, girls outperform boys at almost all ages on test scores, high school graduation rates, school grades, drug use and other indices. This gender gap, furthermore, continues to widen. This week-long institute for a dozen fellows draws from several Columbia University faculties and elsewhere, examining reasons for the phenomenon and proposed policy interventions.

September 24-29: The Age Boom Academy, at the International Longevity Center in New York. This will be the seventh institute on the subject, designed to help journalists understand the revolutionary worldwide rise in life expectancy and what a rapidly increasing population of elders means to politics, economics, health and culture. Scholars and public officials offer insight from a spectrum of fields.

November: Two Explosions in Health Care: Content and Cost, at the Markle Foundation in New York. This institute will explore the accelerating collision of medical technology and economics. Physicians and pharmaceutical companies offer patients an increasing array of drugs and procedures based on revolutions in genetics and information technology. Some of these innovations are medically spectacular but others offer only marginal improvement. Meanwhile, health-care costs are rising much faster than the economy. Markle will gather experts from around the country to help 15 journalists master the complexities.

The New York Times Company (NYSE: NYT), a leading media company with 2004 revenues of $3.3 billion, includes The New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, The Boston Globe, 15 other daily newspapers, nine network-affiliated television stations, two New York City radio stations and 35 Web sites, including NYTimes.com, Boston.com and About.com. For the fifth consecutive year, the Company was ranked No. 1 in the publishing industry in Fortune's 2005 list of America's Most Admired Companies. The Company's core purpose is to enhance society by creating, collecting and distributing high-quality news, information and entertainment.

This press release can be downloaded from www.nytco.com

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