Fall 1995
Stan Cloud Directs Pew’s Citizens Election Project
Stanley W. Cloud, former newspaper editor and Time Magazine’s Washington bureau chief, has been named executive director of the Citizens Election Project (CEP), the Pew Center’s research and demonstration program that will feature voter-oriented news coverage of the 1996 Presidential campaign.
CEP is dedicated to making voters’ issues and the voters themselves the focus of reporting in the 1996 presidential election. The project will be administered by the University of Maryland. CEP is acting as the coordinating body for ambitious multi-media undertakings in Iowa, New Hampshire, Florida and California. CEP will include town meeting-type candidate forums; close monitoring of political polling; focus groups to provide research in key primary states; and implementation of new on-line technologies, including electronic town meetings, “chat rooms,” and discussion group evaluations of candidate performance and issues. Closely allied with CEP will be National Public Radio’s 1996 Election Project with print partners around the country. Cloud is a Los Angeles native. At Time, he was correspondent in San Francisco, Moscow, Bangkok, Saigon and Washington, D.C. After Time purchased the Washington Star, he transferred to the paper where he became assistant managing editor and then managing editor in 1981. After the Star closed, he became executive editor of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. Cloud returned to Time in 1987 and became bureau chief in 1989. He took early retirement in December 1993 to work with his wife, Lynne Olson, on a book, The Murrow Boys, a biography of the correspondents Edward R. Murrow hired to cover World War II for CBS. The book is scheduled for spring 1996 publication.