On Jan. 30, 2010, Alan Bjerga (M.A. '98) was formally inaugurated as the 103rd president of the National Press Club at a gala held in his honor. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., swore in Bjerga, a fellow Minnesotan.
On Jan. 30, 2010, Alan Bjerga (M.A. '98) was formally inaugurated as the 103rd president of the National Press Club at a gala held in his honor. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., swore in Bjerga, a fellow Minnesotan.
In his inaugural address, Bjerga said, "Our conflicts, and our climate, only grow more heated (tonight notwithstanding) and free speech and a free press are still abstractions in many parts of the world, including the places where more than 1 billion people will go to bed hungry tonight. Those places need good journalists. They need watchdogs. They need people who can comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. When the public trust is broken, or where a catastrophe occurs ... journalists continue to do what they are entrusted to do--find the story that people need to know, and tell it. Business models and technology change but the values we as journalists uphold do not. That is what the National Press Club has been about for more than 100 years, and that's what we're about in 2010."
Bjerga, who grew up on a farm in northern Minnesota, covers agricultural policy for Bloomberg News. In 2009, he won awards from the Overseas Press Club of America, the New York Press Club, the Society of American Business Editors and Writers and the North American Agricultural Journalists (NAAJ) for his work in Ethiopia on famine and U.S. food aid. He previously worked in the Knight Ridder Washington bureau, where he won NAAJ's top writing award in 2005. He began his career with the St. Paul (Minn.) Pioneer Press and also reported for the Sioux Falls (S.D.) Argus Leader and Wichita (Kan.) Eagle.
