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 15 years of management by
Barry Bingham, Jr. The following year Jones won the annual
Pulitzer Prize for Specialized Reporting (predecessor of the
Pulitzer Prize for Beat 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 (1951–2010) wrote long books about two newspaper dynasties, beginning with the Binghams in 1991 and focusing on
Barry Bingham, Sr.,
The Patriarch: The Rise and Fall of the Bingham Dynasty (Summit Books, 574pp). 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." Jones and Tifft followed
The Dynasty with a 1999 book about the history of
Adolph S. Ochs and his descendants,
The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind the New York Times (Little, Brown, 870pp). Jones's third book,
Losing the News: The Future of the News That Feeds Democracy (
Oxford, 2009, 234pp), explored the changing U.S. media landscape and its implications for American democracy. Writing for the
Nieman Reports, Jones asserted that despite market pressures, "authentic journalistic objectivity" must remain at the center of the future of news reporting. Writing for
The New York Times, Sir
Harold Evans, former editor of the
Sunday Times of London, called Jones a "bringer of light in the encircling gloom." From 1995 until 1997, Jones was host of
NPR's
On the Media From 1996 until 2003, he was executive editor and host of
PBS's
Media Matters. Jones was a
Nieman Fellow in 1982. Currently, Jones sits on the organization's advisory board. He also sits on the boards of the International Center for Journalists, the
Sigma Delta Chi Foundation and other journalism-related boards. Jones and his late wife were named Honorary Doctors of Humane Letters by Washington and Lee University, his alma mater. In 2011, he was elected to the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2014 inducted into the Tennessee Journalism Hall of Fame. ==Personal life==