Adam Clayton Powell III is CCLP’s Director of Washington Programs, leading CCLP’s initiative on election cybersecurity, in association with USC’s schools of business, engineering, law and public policy and the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. With support from Google, this bipartisan initiative provides in-state training in all 50 states to reinforce election integrity and build defense against digital attacks.
He currently coordinates CCLP’s Washington DC programming, which includes monthly public forums on such subjects as public diplomacy, national security and the future of communications.
Before his move to Washington in 2010, he served as USC’s Vice Provost for Globalization, working closely with faculty and deans to advance the university’s globalization initiative, expanding USC’s international presence, opening new USC facilities in Shanghai and Seoul, and promoting the university throughout the world.
Powell previously served as Director of the USC Integrated Media Systems Center [https://imsc.usc.edu/], a National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center located in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. Powell also worked extensively in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and the U.S. on training programs in digital media for journalists, educators and policymakers.
Earlier roles include Vice President/Technology and Programs of the Freedom Forum [https://www.freedomforuminstitute.org/freedom-forum/] and the Newseum [https://www.newseum.org/], creating a global Internet education program; Working Group member, Internet Policy Institute, helping develop briefing papers for the President of the U.S. and other policymakers; Executive Producer at Quincy Jones Entertainment; and Vice President for News and Information programming at National Public Radio [https://www.npr.org/].
Earlier Powell spent sixteen years at CBS News and at CBS-owned television and radio stations in New York City, including serving as a reporter and producer at WCBS-TV, then News Director of all-news WINS radio, increasing its audience to become the #1 radio station in New York, before returning to CBS network news as Manager of News Operations, then Manager of Special Events and Political Coverage for CBS News for the 1980 election, and finally Coordinating Producer of the CBS Morning News.
Powell is the author of Reinventing Local News: Connecting Communities through New Technologies (Figueroa Press, 2005); co-author of a study of the Internet and politics, Lethargy ’96: How the Media Covered a Listless Campaign (Freedom Forum, 1997), and is contributor to numerous books including Demystifying Media Technology (Mayfield, 1993), Radio: the Forgotten Medium (Transaction, 1995), Briefing the President: What the Next President of the United States Needs to Know about the Internet (Internet Policy Institute, 2000), The Digital Divide (MIT Press, 2001), Democracy and New Media (MIT Press, 2003), America’s Dialogue with the World (Public Diplomacy Council, 2006), and Local Voices/Global Perspectives (Public Diplomacy Council, 2008).
Powell had also written for publications including The New York Times and the Columbia Journalism Review, and he has appeared on broadcasts including CNN and the PBS News Hour.
The winner of the Ohio State Award for a series of reports on Iran for CBS News and of the 1999 World Technology Award for Media and Journalism sponsored by The Economist, Powell is a Senior Fellow at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, where he taught the first course in 2003, and is a member of the Public Diplomacy Council of the United States, of which he served as President from 2015 until earlier this year.
Contact Powell at acpowell@usc.edu