Ben Holden
Ben Holden
Director,
Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Courts and Media
Mail Stop 358
University of Nevada-Reno
Reno, NV 89557
775-327-8270
775-327-2160 -- fax
706-332-8426 -- cell
Holden is a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal who wrote law-related articles ranging from a profile of the prosecutor in the 1996 murder trial of rapper Snoop Doggy Dogg to sentencing issues arising from the Rodney King beating case, to a co-bylined piece on jury nullification in the 1995 O.J. Simpson double-murder trial. The Journal nominated the O.J. nullification story for the Pulitzer Prize.
More recently, Holden, 46, has been executive editor of the Columbus (Ga.) Ledger-Enquirer, a post he has held for 5-1/2 years. Earlier, he was deputy managing editor of the (Palm Springs) Desert Sun and senior editor for business and sports at the Reno Gazette-Journal, both Gannett newspapers. Prior to Gannett, Ben was assistant to the president of the McClatchy Co., the Sacramento-based newspaper publisher. McClatchy owns the Columbus newspaper.
After graduating from Boalt Hall, the law school at the University of California, Berkeley, Holden practiced law with Cooper, White & Cooper, one of the Bay Area's top media-law firms, and with the firm formerly known as Weissburg and Aronson, in Los Angeles. He is licensed to practice in California and Georgia. Holden is a graduate of the University of Missouri's School of Journalism and also received a master's degree in business administration from UC Berkeley.
Holden is a long-time member of the National Association of Black Journalists; a 2001 graduate of the Advanced Executive Program of the Media Management Center at Northwestern University, and serves on the advisory board of the University of Missouri’s daily newspaper, The Columbia Missourian. He also is a member of the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.
Among his accomplishments in Columbus, Holden helped establish the Columbus Scholars Project, which has identified five deserving but disadvantaged fifth graders and matched them with long-term mentors and college funding to see them through college graduation in the spring of 2021. He plans to continue his involvement with the Columbus Scholars Project.
