PROGRAM
Please join us at Roosevelt House for the Annual Jack Newfield Lecture featuring journalist Nicholas Pileggi, the 2019 Jack Newfield Lecturer at the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute, in conversation with New York Times veteran reporter and editor Sam Roberts.
Nicholas Pileggi, a onetime AP crime reporter, is an acclaimed magazine writer, producer, author, and screenwriter. He is known for the non-fiction book Wiseguy and the screenplay for Goodfellas, its 1990 film adaptation, for which he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Screenplay.
Sam Roberts has worked for The New York Times for more than 35 years as a reporter focusing on New York government and politics, and as deputy metropolitan editor and deputy Sunday Review editor.
These two accomplished journalists will discuss the enduring relevance and influence of the legendary Jack Newfield and the changing landscape of 21st Century investigative journalism.
The Roosevelt House Newfield lecture series is named for the late Village Voice columnist and social reformer Jack Newfield (1938-2004), whose career as a muckraking journalist spanned 40 years (highlighted by 700 columns for the Voice). His fearless crusades earned him a reputation as one of New York’s—and the nation’s—most relentless investigative reporters and most influential commentators.
The father of a new kind of probing journalism, Newfield famously said in his 2002 autobiography, Somebody’s Gotta Tell It: The Upbeat Memoir of a Working-Class Journalist: “The point is not to confuse objectivity with truth.” Honoring that mission for his entire career, Newfield also wrote memorably for the New York Post, the Daily News, New York Sun, New York Magazine, and The Nation. Among the honors he received were the George Polk Journalism Award for political reporting in 1980 and a 1991 Emmy for the HBO documentary, Don King: Unauthorized.
A Newfield Visiting Professorship was established at Hunter College in 2006. Newfield Fellows have included the late Wayne Barrett, Tom Robbins, Charles Stuart, Errol Louis, Alyssa Katz, Barbara Nevins Taylor, Jarrett Murphy, and Andrea Bernstein. Beginning in 2018, the fellowship transitioned from a teaching program to a Roosevelt House lecture series with an emphasis on the values and issues that engaged Jack Newfield. The 2018 lecturer was New York Times White House correspondent Maggie Haberman.
We hope you will be able to participate in this special evening.
