Reuters Memorial Lecture
Our annual Reuters Memorial Lecture is delivered each year to a public audience by someone at the highest level of journalism. The lecture deals with a critical issue facing the news industry. The event includes a panel discussion with the Chair of the Reuters Institute's Steering Committee alongside other prominent figures from the world of journalism.
Rebecca Corbett delivered the 2020 Reuters Memorial Lecture on Monday 2 March. Rebecca Corbett supervised the Harvey Weinstein investigation and she leads the investigations department at The New York Times. The event will be held at Lady Margaret Hall. The title of Corbett's talk is Truth and Consequences: Harvey Weinstein, #MeToo, and the future of investigative journalism. The event is fully booked, but it will be live-streamed.
The lecture was followed by a panel discussion with:
- Alan Rusbridger, Chair of the Reuters Institute's Steering Committee, Principal of Lady Margaret Hall and former editor-in-chief of The Guardian.
- Helen Lewis, journalist at The Atlantic and of the book Difficult Women: A History Of Feminism in 11 Fights.
- Javier Moreno Barber, editor-in-chief of El País America.
People would say that two women had broken the Weinstein story, but it had really been three,” wrote Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey in She Said, the book on their award-winning investigation. The third woman is Rebecca Corbett, who leads the investigations department at The New York Times. As an editor, Corbett supervised every step of the process. She paired up Kantor and Twohey and encouraged them to keep their eyes on the bigger story. “I felt from the beginning that this should be about more than one man,” she said.
Rebecca Corbett started her career as an assistant editor at the Waterville Morning Sentinel, a small local newspaper in Maine. After working briefly in Connecticut, she joined the Baltimore Sun, where she oversaw award-winning projects and worked with a young reporter named David Simon, who went on to create The Wire. Corbett joined The New York Times’s Washington bureau in 2004 as enterprise editor. Since then, she has edited many Pulitzer Prize-winning stories, including the investigation on the secret surveillance of Americans by the NSA in 2005.
Last year's Reuters Memorial Lecture was delivered by Siddharth Varadarajan, the founding editor of The Wire and former editor of The Hindu. You can watch his talk here.
Previous speakers include:
- Marty Baron, executive editor of The Washington Post. Watch: 'When a president wages war on a press at work'
- Melissa Bell, co-founder and current publisher of Vox Media. Watch: 'We broke the news. How do we fix it?'