Jim Newton , the IGS John Jacobs Fellow for 2003-2004, will spend four days each month on campus doing research and interviews for a biography of Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren. While on campus, Decker will also speak in seminars at IGS, GSPP, and the Graduate School of Journalism and will be available to meet with students and faculty.
A native of California, Jim Newton has spent much of his life writing about the state, especially its politics, government and legal affairs. He was born in Palo Alto and went to Dartmouth College, where he majored in government and graduated with high honors in 1985. Following graduation, Newton clerked for James Reston, senior columnist for The New York Times. In that position, Newton researched and edited Mr. Reston's twice-weekly column, helped prepare a collection of those columns for publication and worked with Reston in the early stages of his memoir.
After spending another year with the Times' foreign desk in New York, Newton became a reporter at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he was responsible for coverage of Mayor Andrew Young and Atlanta City Hall, and where he was introduced to leading members of the civil rights movement.
He left for the Los Angeles Times in 1989, and has spent the past twelve years at the center of the state's recent history. He covered the Los Angeles Police Department from 1992 through 1997, a period that included the 1992 riots, the federal trial of the LAPD officers who beat Rodney King and the murder trial of O.J. Simpson. He also was the paper's lead reporter responsible for federal law enforcement and for the mayoral administration of Richard J. Riordan. In 2001, he was named California Government and Politics Editor, in charge of Los Angeles and Sacramento government coverage, including daily dispatches from the state Capitol, features and investigative projects.
He was written hundreds of newspaper and magazine stories and is the recipient of numerous awards. Among others, he shared in The Times' Pulitzer Prizes for coverage of the 1992 riots and the 1994 Northridge Earthquake. He was named Times Mirror Journalist of the Year in 1995. He is currently on leave from The Times and under contract with Riverhead Books (Penguin USA) to write a biography of Earl Warren, three-term governor of California and Chief Justice of the United States from 1953 to 1969.
Newton lives in Pasadena with his wife, Karlene Goller, a First Amendment lawyer; their son, Jack, a first grader; and their dog, Rosie.