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Alex S. Jones is an American journalist who has been director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government since July 1, 2000. Jones is also a lecturer at the school, occupying the Laurence M. Lombard Chair in the Press and Public Policy. He won a Pulitzer Prize for journalism in 1987.
Jones covered the newspaper industry for The New York Times from 1983 until 1992. His prize-winning story "The Fall of the House of Bingham" concerned events that ended in 1986 with the sale of Louisville, Kentucky media—two newspapers and three broadcast stations—after fifteen years of newspaper management by Barry Bingham, Jr. Next year Jones won the annual Pulitzer Prize for Specialized Reporting, recognizing that work as "a skillful and sensitive report of a powerful newspaper family's bickering and how it led to the sale of a famed media empire." He and his wife Susan E. Tifft wrote two long books about newspaper dynasties, beginning with the Binghams in 1991 and focusing on Barry Bingham, Sr., The Patriarch: The Rise and Fall of the Bingham Dynasty. A review in the Los Angeles Times called it "the best kind of family history — one so packed with archival fact and telling anecdote that a reader can be excused for believing that at times he or she understands the Binghams far better than they seem to have understood themselves." They followed with Adolph S. Ochs and his descendants in 1999, The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family behind the New York Times —a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His third, much shorter book was published by Oxford in 2009, Losing the News: The Future of the News That Feeds Democracy.
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