Author: Belinda Clarke
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Joseph Aaron (BSJ78)
Joseph Aaron, the longtime publisher and editor-in-chief of the Chicago Jewish News, died Nov. 16, 2019. He was 64.
“He loved that (the newspaper) gave him the forum to tell it like it is,” his brother Maury told the Chicago Tribune. “He said whatever was on his mind, regardless of whether or not it was controversial and regardless of whether it was a family friend. He said what he believed and he did not hold back.”
Born in Chicago, Aaron grew up in West Rogers Park, graduated from Hebrew Theological College in Skokie, and then earned a bachelor’s degree from Medill. He began his career as a reporter for Lerner Newspapers and later was the editor of JUF News, the monthly magazine of the Jewish United Fund.
In 1994, Aaron left the Jewish United Fund to start the Chicago Jewish News, which today has a circulation of about 40,000.
Denise Plessas Kus, the newspaper’s production manager, told the Tribune that Aaron’s weekly columns “showed that he was proud of his Jewish community and every once in a while saddened when it didn’t live up to what he thought they could be.”
Aaron explored the positives for Jewish people in the U.S. today, compared with how Jews have been treated at other times in history, said Rabbi Meir Shimon Moscowitz, regional director of the Lubavitch Chabad of Illinois. Moscowitz is the son of Aaron’s longtime friend Rabbi Danny Moscowitz, who died in 2014.
“He didn’t like people who always found the negative in others,” Moscowitz told the Tribune. “He liked people who found the positive in others. And he kept going at it for years and years, which is not easy. And he wasn’t afraid to say what he thought. He was very open and direct.”
Aaron recently celebrated the 25th anniversary of the founding of Chicago Jewish News. Aaron is survived by another brother, Fred; and two sisters, Susie Alter and Sharon Aaron.
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Heidi Barker (BSJ91)
Heidi M. Barker is the new vice president of corporate communications in the ethics and compliance department for Carnival Corporation.
Based at the company’s headquarters in Miami, Barker will report to Carnival Corporation Chief Ethics and Compliance Officer Peter Anderson, starting in March.
Barker joins the companywide ethics and compliance team led by Anderson, which was formed last year to help ensure a culture of compliance, learning and integrity inside Carnival Corporation and across its nine global cruise line brands, according to a press release.
The program’s goals are to meet or exceed all legal and statutory requirements, as well as to promote the highest ethical principles, the company said.
In this newly created position, Barker will lead all ethics and compliance communications for Carnival Corporation, including the key focus areas of health, environment, safety, security, culture and training, among others. As part of this role, she will coordinate compliance-related communications across the organization, working closely with Roger Frizzell, the corporation’s chief communications officer, and the compliance and communications teams within the company’s nine cruise brands.
Additionally, Barker will oversee communications for Operation Oceans Alive, Carnival Corporation’s environmental commitment and stewardship program, officially launched in 2018. Designed to promote a culture of transparency, learning and commitment within the corporation, Operation Oceans Alive ensures that all employees receive environmental education, training and oversight, while continuing the company’s commitment to protecting the oceans, seas and destinations in which it operates.
Photo by Andrew Skwish
Story by Thea Showalter (BSJ22)
Amidst a national crisis for local news organizations, Medill is seeking ways to save and strengthen the local news industry through the Local News Initiative (LNI), a groundbreaking project that aims to diagnose the challenges facing smaller news organizations and develop solutions.
For the past year and a half, Medill has collaborated with three newspapers, receiving hard-to-get data to analyze in exchange for providing the papers with crucial research on how to navigate the changing terrain of news media.
“LNI is developing new insights into reader behavior that is helping local news organizations grow their numbers of digital subscribers,” said Tim Franklin, senior associate dean of Medill and leader of the Local News Initiative. “This work is critically important now as local news organizations pivot from an advertising-supported business model to one focused on reader revenue.”
Newspapers have historically made the vast majority of their revenue from advertising, according to Associate ProfessorTom Collinger, Executive Director of the Medill IMC Spiegel Digital & Database Research Center. But as the habits of readers change, news organizations are increasingly depending on revenue from subscribers, not advertisers, leading to a pressing need to understand subscriber behavior.
In the fall of 2018, researchers from Medill’s Spiegel Research Center received 13 terabytes of subscriber data from its three partner papers— the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Indianapolis Star (Indy Star). The data would help the researchers probe questions about local news readership that had never before been answered.
“I’m especially proud that the analytical work that we have been doing is work that in many other industries would be easily available now online,” Collinger said.
But understanding local news subscriber behavior was far from easy. Researchers at The Spiegel Research Center had to merge two vast sets of data— subscriber data and clickstream data— to map how individual subscribers behaved when reading online.
In February of 2019, LNI came out with initial findings: in order to keep readers as digital subscribers, news organizations must encourage them to develop a regular reading habit and provide unique local content to make their subscription valuable.
Over the summer and fall of 2019, Franklin, along with Spiegel Research Center Director and Professor Ed Malthouse, presented LNI findings at the annual conferences for the Newspaper Association Managers, News Leaders Association, and Online News Association.
“We’ve gotten a whole lot of publicity on this,” said Malthouse. “It’s been very satisfying to see the work take off like this.”
For the Chicago Tribune, partnering with the LNI has provided an “outsider’s perspective” on audience data that, alongside the Tribune’s internal data analysis, has helped to “paint a broad picture of what content areas are the most valuable” to readers, said Christine Taylor, managing editor of audience at the Tribune.
The findings have shown the Tribune that its readers are “overwhelmingly” smartphone readers, prompting the Tribune to focus on its app in 2020, and explore tools to boost mobile engagement.
“It forces us to think about how we prepare and produce our content to meet those readers,” said Taylor. “It just makes us think differently about our deadlines— it makes us think differently about how we construct our stories. It’s really forcing the newsroom to just think very differently about how it approaches content.”
A year after the LNI began working with the subscription data, the LNI won a Google Innovation Award in October 2019 in order to build what is called a “subscriber engagement index,” a digital tool that will show local newspapers how their actions are impacting their subscribers in real time.
A newspaper that shares its data with the index will be able to see how its subscribers behave compared to other papers using various metrics, and how those behaviors contribute to retention and subscription rates.
“That’s where we’re going. We’re building this out as we speak,” said Collinger. “And it’s a significant piece of data work….The industry has never seen anything like this.”
In the next few months, LNI will also examine the “finances of customer retention,” said Malthouse. Finding strategies to encourage a reader to subscribe to a newspaper is only the first step.
“If you have a new customer, you have to nurture that relationship,” said Malthouse. “Teaching the news organizations how to take this new customer and nurture that relationship, and turn that person into a regular reader who values your content is the name of the game. So that, I think, is going to be a big part of where we go.”
Collinger added that Medill is uniquely qualified to lead the way on local news research, because the Local News Initiative is a product of all the programs that make Medill different.
“Medill uniquely has a world class journalism program and a world class integrated marketing communication program, and the integration of the best of those two things made this possible,” said Collinger. “It is not what makes Medill the same, but what makes us different in complementary ways that has allowed this to be such a wonderful expression of where we believe media is going.”
By Kaitlyn Thompson (BSJ11, IMC17)
Michael Lazerow (BSJ96, MSJ96) and his wife Kass recently made the decision to gift a scholarship to support Medill graduate journalism students. Lazerow, a serial entrepreneur, has co-founded several successful media and software companies. The most recent, founded with Kass, sold to Salesforce for $800 million. Kass and Mike are now two of the most prolific technology investors in New York City – a departure from Mike’s time as a Medill student studying political reporting in D.C.
We spoke with Mike about his time at Northwestern, how he went from Medill student and Daily Northwestern writer to entrepreneur, and he and Kass’s decision to create a scholarship to help Medill graduate students.
Thompson: Early in your career, you moved away from traditional journalism and into entrepreneurship. Did you always know that’s what you wanted to do with your career?
Lazerow: If you would have asked me at Northwestern what I would do and what I was interested in, I would have said I would be a political reporter based in D.C. I worked at Roll Call, the newspaper of Capitol Hill, and finished my Medill career in the D.C. program with Professor Ellen Shearer. My class had a bunch of people who would later become political journalists. I thought I wanted to do that, and it was the closest thing I had to a dream until the commercial internet came along.
Thompson: So far, you’ve co-funded over 50 different investments and founded several companies in your career. What do you think makes you a particularly good investor?
Lazerow: I started my first company back at Northwestern, and since then, I’ve been through a lot – financings and acquisitions, hirings and firings. I know what it’s like to run out of money. I know what it’s like to bring on a first client and to lose that client. That is what I think is kind of different – I started investing very grassroots, and I don’t consider myself an investor so much as an entrepreneur.
I do everything with my wife, Kass, who I met while attending a wedding soon after my time at Northwestern. We’ve also always been fascinated with “new” and innovation and what’s around the corner. Most of our time is spent with companies that are trying to take very large industries (invest where the money is) and leading some sort of transformation. I’m interested in everything that requires a beginners mind.
Thompson: How have your journalism degrees impacted your investment decisions? Have you used any of the skills you learned at Medill in your current career?
Lazerow: What Medill taught me more than anything is don’t bury the lede, say what you mean and mean what you say, and less is more. I grew up in Medill writing for the newspaper format where I only had a certain number of words – this scarcity of space. Clear writing is an extension of clear thinking. Whether it’s through emails, or blogs, or posts that I’ve written since leaving Medill, I continue to write almost every day.
Thompson: There are many ways to give back. When you decided to give back to Medill, what inspired you to choose to fund a Medill scholarship? I hear your wife Kass was instrumental in this decision, too.
Lazerow: When my wife Kass and I decided we wanted to do something to pay it forward, we put our investor hats on and wanted to know how we could make the most impact. We got to understand why the need for graduate scholarships specifically was so important. In order to attract a diverse student body, and people from all different walks of life, there has to be financial assistance. Graduate school is expensive and there are limited options for financial aid and grants. Giving to Medill in this way really fit within really all of the giving that we’ve done to date (like Cycle for Survival) – it has significant impact and all of the money given actually goes to fulfill the promise of why it was donated.
Thompson: I want to take a minute to revisit your time attending Northwestern as a student. What memories stand out most?
Lazerow: One of the thing I loved most about Medill was that I was at Northwestern. I was attending a Big 10 school with arts, sports, Greek life – access to an entire world from this one global university. 75 percent of my classes were outside of Medill, which meant I was forced to go out and take courses in disciplines like economics, philosophy and literature.
At the same time, I happened to be in this world-class journalism program. I wrote for The Daily Northwestern and, while I wrote a bunch of stories, I really dove into my first company, University Wire, which was a news service for college papers, one of the first information services using the internet exclusively with no print version.
Additionally, what I got out of Medill was not just a journalism degree, but long-standing relationships. To this day, I continue to be very close with NU and Medill people. The most important driver of my ability to start that first business while at Northwestern was my adviser, Mary Dedinsky. She was phenomenal and incredibly supportive. She also gave me one of my first Medill F’s that I still have a copy of today.
Thompson: Lastly, what advice do you have for people graduating with a journalism degree today?
Lazerow: If you’re considering going into journalism, know that prestige and masthead no longer matter. Find where you can do the best work, no matter where it is. I’ve seen a lot of people make mistakes in this industry by focusing on, “I’m a writer for this, I’m a writer for that” instead of breaking out and just doing the most interesting work possible. Think omni-channel from the beginning – you’re a content creator, not just a print journalist or a TV journalist.
And even if you’re a journalist, think like a marketer. The journalists who are thriving are ones that know their reader / viewer / consumer and understand how to reach them and what channels they’re on. The days of writing and creating videos and not understanding your consumer is over.
Michael Lazerow is a serial entrepreneur who has co-founded four successful internet-based media companies. He is best-known as the founder, CEO and chairman of Buddy Media, Inc., a New York City-based company that develops and markets applications on the leading social media networks. It was purchased by Salesforce.com for $800 million in 2012. Currently, Michael is an investor for Lazerow Ventures, a fund for his personal tech investments. These have included Buzzfeed, Domo, Namely, Scopely and about 50 others.
Before Buddy Media, Michael founded GolfServ, the parent company of GOLF.com, which was purchased by Time Warner’s Time Inc. division in January 2006 for $24 million. He led GolfServ from a start-up to a multi-million-dollar profitable golf media company. The company delivers golf content and ecommerce services to millions of golfers through its flagship GOLF.com site.
His byline has appeared in more than a dozen newspapers, including Roll Call, the newspaper of Capitol Hill; the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel; the Miami Herald; the Delaware State-News; The Capital Times in Madison, Wis.; and the Montgomery Journal.
Michael was on staff at The Daily Northwestern during his freshman year. While at NU, he created University Wire (U-Wire), a network of college papers that was sold to CBS.
Michael is a member of the Medill Board of Advisers. He often makes time to meet and speak with Medill students in NYC, particularly those in the Media Innovation and Content Strategy specialization.
Bio: Kaitlyn Thompson is a marketing strategist, passionate storyteller, global citizen, green tea connoisseur and chili cook-off champion always asking “why.”
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HappiNest
Judy Holland (MSJ86)
HappiNest explores a variety of challenges that arise when the house is suddenly empty or emptying, and Judy Holland provides tips and tools for managing the emotions and realities of this new life stage. Whether you’re seeking a renaissance in your romantic relationship, guiding a boomerang child at home, or figuring out how to handle an empty nest divorce, this HappiNest book and podcast are for you.
From dealing with friends and career transitions, to reconnecting with genuine interests and passions, this road map will help guide you. There are hills, valleys, thickets, briar patches, and ditches ahead, as well as waterfalls that resolve into pristine ponds. With mindfulness, hard work, and knowledge of experiences, research, and wisdom from seasoned empty nesters, you can create the most fulfilling phase of your life—and make the world a better place.
Margaret Littman (MSJ94)
For more than 200 years Memphis has captured America’s imagination. It is the home to the Blues and the center of the civil rights movement. It is called the Bluff City thanks to its location along the mighty Mississippi River, and today the river banks provide recreation, opportunity, and a connection to history, not to mention great views. This guidebook, authored by Tennessean Margaret Littman, delves into all Memphis has to offer, including, the best barbeque and hot wings, immersive museums, late-night dance spots, and, of course, all things Elvis. This inclusive, yet selective, guide features itineraries with side trips to Little Rock and Hot Springs, Ark., plus the Mississippi Blues Trail.
By Thea Showalter (BSJ22)
Medill Associate Professor and Director of Investigative Reporting and Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Debra Cenziper recently released “Citizen 865: The Hunt for Hitler’s Hidden Soldiers in America.” Her book, published last November, tells the extraordinary true story of the U.S. Department of Justice’s decades-long search for former members of a secretive Nazi killing squad who hid in plain sight after the war as American citizens.
In her book, Cenziper breaks open the story surrounding one of the deadliest and most secret Nazi killing operations of World War II— a “school for mass murder” run in the small Polish town of Trawniki. The SS recruited and trained thousands of men from across Eastern Europe, creating a ruthless army of soldiers that ultimately carried out the systematic murder of nearly two million Jews in fewer than 20 months.
But after the end of the war and the fall of the Third Reich, some of the so-called “Trawniki Men” obtained documentation to move to America and vanished, some taking their families with them. Decades later in Prague, American historians unearthed new evidence of the Trawniki men, triggering a fervent search on U.S. soil and a long-awaited battle for justice.
“Citizen 865” is a “triumph of reporting and storytelling,” but it doesn’t feel dark, despite its subject matter, said bestselling author and Medill alum Alex Kotlowitz at a Medill book talk with Cenziper held January 30 at Medill.
“It’s a book that reads like a detective novel,” Kotlowitz said.
But “Citizen 865” is also a love story— it weaves in the tale of Feliks and Lucyna, two Jewish orphans who escaped the Trawniki Men and certain death at every turn. The couple later moved to America and raised a family, unaware that they were sharing a country with some of the men who had once pursued them and killed their families.
Cenziper said that idea for the book came in late 2016, at a cocktail party outside Washington, D.C. where she talked to a lawyer with the Department of Justice about a lesser-known, “tiny” unit responsible for tracking down Nazis after the war, and was hooked.
“I was really interested in knowing the people inside the Justice Department who spent their entire lives trying to track these people down,” Cenziper said.
Cenziper soon after talked to Elizabeth White, one of the historians who discovered the Nazi roster of Trawniki men in Prague in the 1990s.
“When she told me that story I knew it was a book,” Cenziper said. “Because I loved that image of historians finding those records in a dusty basement in Prague. I was fascinated by that idea.”
She retraced the steps of Elizabeth White and her colleagues by visiting the Nazi archives in Prague. She also met Feliks and Lucyna’s children and grandchildren, who shared tapes recorded by the couple to preserve a record of their story.
Through “Citizen 865,” Cenziper was able to bring “a sense of hope and light” to an “incredibly dark period” of history, said Kotlowitz.
Cenziper acknowledged that the reporting– researching people whose lives were tragically impacted, and listening to interviews with mass murderers, who were dispassionate and clinical about their crimes– was often dark and difficult.
However, chronicling the efforts of so many historians, investigators and prosecutors to seek justice brought a sense of hope.
“I was so moved by the people in this book, especially the historians,” Cenziper said. “They were able to find this unexplored sliver of history and expand the record.”
James R. Ward, 98, resident of Glen Ellyn for 63 years, passed away on January 24, 2020 at Wynscape Health & Rehabilitation, Wheaton. Ward was born August 12, 1921 in Aurora, Illinois to Rev. Elias and Genevieve (Robertson) Ward. Although his home base was Aurora, he lived in and attended elementary schools in Plattville, Sheridan, Paw Paw and Hampshire; he graduated from Plainfield High School in 1938.
At Northwestern University he joined the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity and became a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Honor Society and the Deru Society; he served as editor of the Daily Northwestern in 1941. WWII interrupted his senior year studies as he worked in the Office of Civilian Defense-Youth Division as part of Eleanor Roosevelt’s staff. In 1942 he then graduated from Northwestern and also received a commission as a Navy officer.
Ward served as an aviation specialist stateside and later in the South Pacific as lieutenant fight director on the USS Bataan (CVL-29) until 1945. Following the war, he returned to Northwestern to complete his Master of Science in journalism in 1949; his first job was writing news for CBS in Chicago. He transitioned to work as special assistant to the president of Hotpoint and later was with R. H Donnelly/Donnelly Marketing’s (Oakbrook) as Midwest sales manager for 32 years. Following “retirement” in 1986, he purchased Hinsdale Travel which he continued to own until 1996. He then shifted to selling farm real estate with Coleman Land Company (St. Charles) from which he fully retired in 2007 at the age of 86.
Ward married Mary Lorena (Marilo) Lotts (Mendota & Ottawa) in 1947; they were together 41 years until her death in 1988. JoAnn (Hickey) Williams (Glen Ellyn) and Jim were married in 1989 until her death in 2009.
He had many interests and supported many organizations through his active participation. These included: founding the Lake Ellyn Yacht Club, First Methodist Church of Glen Ellyn, Wheaton Community Radio Amateurs (call sign W9DHX), Boy Scouts of America, American Society of Travel Advisors (ASTA), Skål International travel, Clan Donnachaidh Society (Scottish heritage), Sheridan Historical Society, Northwestern University’s John Evans Club, and The Chicago Farmers for which he was international travel coordinator for many years.
Jim is survived by his special friend Jeannine Warkow of Winfield, Illinois. Additional survivors include two sons, Jeffrey Ward (Dr. Julie Bjoraker) of Dover, Minnesota and Dr. Robertson Ward (Diane) of Provo, Utah. He is also survived by three grandchildren, Caryn Ward Lantz (Charles) of Burnsville, Minnesota, Brandon Ward (Cielle) of Parker, Colorado, and Shane Ward (Carly) of Chattanooga, Tennessee, and six great-grandchildren. Jim is also survived by a much-loved extended family.
Ward was also preceded in death by his parents, one stepbrother, and three stepsisters.
In lieu of flowers, memorials may be directed to the Medill School of Journalism, c/o Northwestern University, Alumni Relations and Development, 1201 Davis St, Evanston, Illinois 60208 or the Sheridan Historical Society Museum, 185 N. Robinson St., Sheridan, Illinois, 60551.
Photo: Jim Ward at the Daily Northwestern. Tribute and photo provided by Jeff Ward.
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Adam Amaro (BSJ07, MSJ07)
Adam Amaro died in January 2020. Most recently he had been living in Portland, Oregon working at KOIN-TV as a news producer. He produced the weekend 5:30, 6:00 and 11 p.m. newscasts and collaborated with reporters, managers, anchors, photographers, editors, and graphics artists to create powerful and informative shows. Prior to moving to Portland he was a producer at KTBC-TV in Austin where he produced the 9 p.m. hour-long newscast. He also field produced various “7 On Your Side” pieces.