The Public Interest News Foundation welcomes Julius Weinberg as a new member of its board of trustees.
Julius Weinberg is Chair of Ofsted and co-Chair of the Buckinghamshire Cultural Partnership. He was also Vice Chancellor of Kingston University until 2017.
He qualified in Medicine and trained first as an Infectious Disease Physician and then in Public Health. He also worked in Zimbabwe and in Bosnia for the World Health Organisation during the war. Following a move into Higher Education, he was at City University before moving to Kingston University in 2011. A serial consumer of distance education, he also has degrees in Art History, Education and Psychology.
Julius championed freedom of speech as a Vice-Chancellor and found himself in debates with the Prime Minister and Home Affairs Select Committee about how best to implement the “Prevent” strategy.
On his appointment, Julius said:
‘We need a broad base of good journalism to build and support communities and to develop the audiences, decision makers and citizens of the future.
We live in complicated times, so people need high quality explanations of, and investigations into, what is going on around them so that they can make informed choices and hold others to account.'
As a Public Health Doctor, I realised that good journalism about health issues was one of the most powerful ways of influencing health; as a university Vice Chancellor I tried to champion freedom of speech and the need for open debate.
Becoming a member of PINF enables me to support the issues I hold important. We need a broad base of good journalism to build and support communities and to develop the audiences, decision makers and citizens of the future.’
Julius joins PINF’s four existing trustees: the former Chair of the House of Lords Communications Committee, Lord Inglewood; the Deputy Editor of news website The Conversation, Jo Adetunji; Journalism Innovation and Leadership Consultant and co-founder of LinkedIn’s Editorial Team, Isabelle Roughol; and the President of the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), Patrick Swaffer.
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