Joel Kaplan
Joel Kaplan, ombudsman at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), is a longtime journalist and journalism educator. He is currently the Associate Dean for Professional Graduate Studies at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communication at Syracuse University. As such, he oversees the School’s 10 professional graduate programs: Arts Journalism; Magazine, Newspaper and Online Journalism; Broadcast Journalism; Public Relations; Public Diplomacy; Advertising; Media Management; Television, Radio & Film; Documentary Film and History; and Photography.
Prof. Kaplan also teaches investigative reporting, advanced reporting and communications law at Newhouse. Prior to joining the Newhouse faculty, he covered City Hall for The Chicago Tribune; was a member of the newspaper’s investigative team; and contributed to several articles in the paper’s 1987 Pulitzer Prize winning investigation of Chicago’s City Council. From 1979 to 1986, he was a reporter for The Tennessean in Nashville where he covered the state legislature. In 1986, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in investigative reporting for a series on then U.S. Rep. Bill Boner.
He has served on the national board of Investigative Reporters & Editors (IRE) and was its treasurer. Kaplan was also a contributing editor for Chicago Magazine; is on the advisory board for the Tully Center for Free Speech; and has served as an accreditation team member for the Association of Schools of Journalism and Mass Communications.
Prior to assuming the position of CPB ombudsman, Kaplan also authored two White Papers commissioned by CPB: “Objectivity & Balance: Today’s Best Practices in American Journalism” (PDF) and “Expectations for Objectivity and Balance in Multi-Platform Distribution: Traditional and New Media.” (PDF)
He is a co-author of Murder of Innocence: The Tragic Life and Final Rampage of Laurie Dann (Warner Books). The movie version of that book originally aired on CBS. He was a Nieman Fellow (1985) at Harvard University and a Journalism Fellow at Yale Law School (1991), where he received a master's in the study of law. He also has a master's in journalism from the University of Illinois and a bachelor's in arts from Vanderbilt University.
Kaplan and his wife, Susan Miller Kaplan, who teaches on-line database searching to Newhouse students, live with their four children and three beagles in Fayetteville, N.Y.
Contact the CPB Ombudsman
Mailing Address
Ombudsman
Corporation for Public Broadcasting
401 Ninth Street, NW
Washington, DC 20004
