Joe Alex Morris Jr. Lecture

NPR’s London correspondent Frank Langfitt has been selected to deliver the next Joe Alex Morris Jr. Memorial Lecture at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism.

Langfitt covers the UK and Ireland—notably the many developments surrounding Brexit and most recently the COVID-19 pandemic—as well as stories elsewhere in Europe. He previously, spent five years as an NPR correspondent covering China. Based in Shanghai, he drove a free taxi around the city for a series on a changing China as seen through the eyes of ordinary people. He expanded that reporting into the book, “The Shanghai Free Taxi: Journeys with the Hustlers and Rebels of the New China.”

Before moving to Shanghai, Langfitt was NPR’s East Africa correspondent based in Nairobi and before that was NPR’s labor correspondent based in Washington, D.C. He was a 2003 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.

Learn more.

The Joe Alex Morris Jr. Memorial Lecture is presented annually by an American overseas correspondent or commentator on foreign affairs who is invited to Harvard to discuss international reporting.

The lecture honors Joe Alex Morris Jr., a Middle East correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. A member of the Harvard class of 1949, Morris inherited an interest in international news from his father, who had served as foreign editor of United Press International and the New York Herald Tribune.

Joe Jr. worked as a local reporter at The Hartford Times and the Minneapolis Tribune before traveling abroad to work on assignment in Europe and then the Middle East for UPI, the New York Herald Tribune, Newsweek and later the Los Angeles Times. He reported from the Middle East for 25 years. In February 1979, he was killed in Tehran while covering a violent gun battle during the Iranian Revolution. He was 51 years old at the time.

Morris’ family, his Harvard classmates and his journalistic colleagues established the lectureship in his name in 1981. That same year, Morris posthumously received the Nieman Fellows’ Louis M. Lyons Award for Conscience and Integrity.