A family of professional journalists including two Hamilton College alumnae and their father Jim Kennedy, senior vice president strategy and enterprise development at the Associated Press (AP), will present a panel discussion “The News and Information Future: It’s Not All Pandas and Puppies” on Thursday, Oct. 29, at 7:30 p.m., in the Kennedy Auditorium, Taylor Science Center. The discussion is free and open to the public.
Meredith Kennedy ’09 is associate booking producer for The Today Show at NBC News and Liz Kennedy ’05 is director of content strategy and social media at FreshDirect, an online grocery and food delivery service in New York City. Both are graduates of Hamilton College.
Jim Kennedy leads strategic planning across all divisions of AP, the world's largest news organization, including services for print, broadcast and new media. He began his second stint with AP in 2001, after two years as executive director of product planning for The Wall Street Journal Online, also known as WSJ.com. Before moving to the Journal, he had spent 13 years at AP, first as business news editor and later as the founding director of the news agency's multimedia department.
As the AP’s business editor, Kennedy led the agency’s award-winning coverage of the stock market crash in 1987 and oversaw the development of new data services that first enabled newspapers to customize their listings of stocks and mutual funds. In 1995, he was tapped to lead a new department that created The WIRE, AP’s first Web-based news service, honored in 1999 by the Smithsonian Institution.
Meredith Kennedy was previously executive assistant to Katie Couric at Disney ABC Television group when Couric left her post as anchor of the CBS Evening News to transition to daytime television and develop her own talk show. Prior to that Kennedy was a news assistant at CBS News. She earned a master’s degree from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
Liz Kennedy was previously social media manager at iVillage, an online community for women. She also served as social media manager at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, and was a senior editor and video producer for Reader’s Digest. She earned a master’s degree in media studies and film from The New School.
Posted October 28, 2015
