Rory O'Connor

Rory O'Connor is an award-winning journalist and filmmaker. He has been the show runner in charge of five television series, produced nationally broadcast news for CBS and PBS, and been a key figure in the creation of dozens of documentary films. His programming has aired on leading broadcast and cable networks in more than one hundred countries - from ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS and FOX in the U.S. to the BBC, RAI, NHK, National Geographic and many others internationally. In addition to managing the weekly news magazines South Africa Now and Rights & Wrongs: Human Rights Television (seen in 17 and 62 countries respectively,) O'Connor ran the nationally syndicated series ABC Children First and public television's regional nightly program The Ten O'clock News, and he was the creator and News Director of the nightly Neighborhood Network News on the Boston cable system. He is equally experienced in the digital media field as founding Managing Editor at the media watchdog site MediaChannel.org and Editorial Director of the social news network Newstrust.net. A longtime blogger and media critic for such online sites as the Huffington Post, AlterNet, Al Jazeera, Salon, Wired and others, he has also appeared as an on-air commentator and 'vlogger' on such international broadcast systems as Al Jazeera, Press TV, PBS, and the CBC. O'Connor's broadcast, film and print work has been recognized with a George Polk Award, a Writer's Guild Award, a George Orwell Award and two Emmys, among many honors. He has written three books, including most recently Friends, Followers and the Future: How Social Media are Changing Politics, Threatening Big Brands, and Killing Traditional Media. O'Connor began working in broadcast journalism as an on-air reporter and producer at WGBH-TV, the PBS flagship in Boston, while his commentary was featured regularly on WBCN-FM and WCAS-AM, two of New England's leading radio stations. He later was a senior producer at the ABC affiliate WCVB-TV Boston, where he played a key role in the formation of "The Investigators," the station's first investigative news team. He subsequently produced segments for the national PBS program "The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour," and the CBS News network series "48 Hours." Prior to his career in broadcasting and film, O'Connor was a print journalist for more than a decade, writing and editing for such newspapers and magazines as the Boston Globe, the Phoenix, Boston magazine, and The Real Paper, where he served in a variety of senior editorial positions, including that of Managing Editor. His articles have appeared in such national outlets as The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, Vogue, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, Newsweek, and many others. He is the co-author of the award-winning non-fiction book Nukespeak: The Selling of Nuclear Technology from the Manhattan Project to Fukushima (Sierra Club Books, Second Edition, 2011), and author of Shock Jocks: Hate Speech & Talk Radio (AlterNet Books, 2008), as well as Friends, Followers and the Future (City Lights, 2012). A graduate of Boston College, O'Connor was also a Sagan Fellow at The Shorenstein Center at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and an External Fellow of The Walt Whitman Center for the Culture and Politics of Democracy at Rutgers University.