I was born in 1946 in Greeneville, Tennessee, as the fourth generation of a newspaper family, the first two generations being women. That is another story and in time I shall tell it here.

         I grew up in the 1950s when towns like Greeneville had vibrant downtowns, especially on Saturdays when all the farm families would come to town. I loved the movies and often caught the double-feature on Saturdays at the Capitol Theater, then spent the rest of the day with my friends “playing” the movie. Do kids do that now? I don’t know.

         I went away to boarding school in Virginia at 13 and spent four years there. Then I went to Washington and Lee University. When I graduated in 1968, I went to Naval Officer Candidate School and served three years onboard two ships: USS Kearsarge and USS Coral Sea, doing two tours to the Gulf of Tonkin.

         When I left the Navy, I took off to see the world with a buddy and we traveled together for a year through Eastern Europe – we wanted to see this communism we’d always heard so much about – and then Western Europe, living in Paris for about six months.

         We then went to Morocco where my buddy told me he had had enough. He went back to the States, but I pressed on to Algiers, then south across the Sahara and eventually crossed the whole continent of Africa from north to south, ending at the Cape of Good Hope. And by then, I too had had enough.

         I returned to the States and went to work at one of our family’s even smaller newspapers where I became editor. Then I moved back to Greeneville and became editor of The Greeneville Sun. In 1981 I went to Harvard University as a Nieman Fellow – a program that gives mid-career journalists a year of unrestricted study at Harvard. I met Susan Tifft, the woman who became my wife the first week and we were together until she died of cancer in 2010.

         In 1983, I left Greeneville to become a reporter at The New York Times, covering the media. In 1987 I won a Pulitzer Prize for my article on the collapse of the Bingham family, an iconic newspaper family based in Louisville, Ky. Susan and I wrote a book about the Binghams called The Patriarch: The Fall of the House of Bingham to some acclaim. It is a good book, if I do say so

        We later wrote a second book – The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind The New York Times - on an iconic newspaper family. This time it was the Ochs/Sulzberger family who have owned and run The New York Times for more than a century. It was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for biography. 

       They were both good books, but we almost got divorced twice because of writing them, so we decided to do no more joint book-writing. I later wrote a third book: Losing The News: Saving the News That Feeds Democracy. I’m sorry to say it was prescient and foretold a lot of what is happening today to the news. 

      In 1995, I became the first host of On The Media, a two-hour live radio program focused on media issues produced at WNYC, the public radio station in New York City. It was only then that I came to fully understand how the disembodied human voice can connect with people, which is  what makes radio and podcasts so enduring in a digital world. I hosted the program for five years, with great pleasure.      

       In 2000, I became director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. I was there until stepping down in 2015 to embark on Third Life, the period of uncertain length between when you leave your formal work life and regain control of your time. That is where I am now, and NakedByways.com is a product of that freedom to do what interests me. 

      I think of the texts and podcasts on this site as the mortar that holds together the bricks of the life I have just described. Everything on the site will fit into this framework in a nook or a cranny. This mortar is more important to me than the bricks because it is what makes my life make sense in human terms. It is my memories of people and places, moments I cherish or were important in some way. It is more my life than this factual account could ever be. If you should be interested, welcome.