Rex Smith to Speak at Friends' Annual Meeting

The Friends' Annual Meeting will be held Tuesday, May 20, 2008 at 7 p.m. in the large auditiorium in the main library. Rex Smith, editor of the Times Union, will be speaking on "Communication for Citizenship: How Journalism Can Help Sustain Society's Progress."

Rex is Editor and Vice President of the Times Union, the dominant communication medium in a 16-county area of upstate New York. He has led the newspaper since mid-2002 to national recognition for writing, reporting, photography and design, both in print and on the Web.

Rex, who grew up in the Black Hills of South Dakota, came to Albany as a national correspondent and state capitol bureau chief for Newsday, one of the nation’s largest newspapers, then spent four years as editor of The Record in Troy. Earlier in his career, he was a congressional aide in Washington and editor of a small daily paper in Indiana. He also spent a year as a television reporter and anchor in the metropolitan New York region.

Among numerous professional citations, Rex has received the Distinguished Service Award of the national Society of Professional Journalists, the World Hunger Media Award, a Pulitzer Fellowship and a Rotary Fellowship. He has reported from Central America, South Africa and the former Soviet Union. He is a graduate cum laude of Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, and received his master’s degree with highest honors from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where he was awarded a Pulitzer Fellowship.

Rex hosts a nationally syndicated weekly program, “The Media Project,” on Northeast Public Radio, and is past president of the state press association and vice chair of the state Fair Trial/Free Press Conference. He is in demand as a public speaker and a contest judge, and has twice been a juror for the Pulitzer Prizes. He lives in Rensselaer County with his wife, the author and radio commentator Marion Roach, and their 12-year-old daughter, Grace Yu Ying Smith.