Alex Jones (journalist)

Alex S. Jones
Alex Jones in 2009
Born	(1946-11-19) November 19, 1946 (age 70) Greeneville, TN
Education	Washington & Lee
Occupation	Journalist

Alex S. Jones (born November 19, 1946) is an American journalist who has been director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government since July 1, 2000. Jones is also a lecturer at the school, occupying the Laurence M. Lombard Chair in the Press and Public Policy. He won a Pulitzer Prize for journalism in 1987.

Jones covered the newspaper industry for The New York Times from 1983 until 1992. His prize-winning story "The Fall of the House of Bingham" concerned events that ended in 1986 with the sale of Louisville, Kentucky media — two newspapers and three broadcast stations — after 15 years of management by Barry Bingham, Jr. The following year Jones won the annual Pulitzer Prize for Specialized Reporting (predecessor of the Pulitzer Prize for Beat Reporting), recognizing that work as "a skillful and sensitive report of a powerful newspaper family's bickering and how it led to the sale of a famed media empire."

He and his wife Susan E. Tifft (1951–2010) wrote long books about two newspaper dynasties, beginning with the Binghams in 1991 and focusing on Barry Bingham, Sr., The Patriarch: The Rise and Fall of the Bingham Dynasty (Summit Books, 574pp). A review in the Los Angeles Times called it "the best kind of family history — one so packed with archival fact and telling anecdote that a reader can be excused for believing that at times he or she understands the Binghams far better than they seem to have understood themselves." Jones and Tifft followed The Dynasty with a 1999 book about the history of Adolph S. Ochs and his descendants, The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family behind the New York Times (Little, Brown, 870pp). The book was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and selected by Time magazine as one of the five best nonfiction books of that year.