Photo of Adam Clayton Powell III

Adam
Clayton
Powell III

Senior Fellow
Executive Director, USC Election Cybersecurity Initiative
With more than 50 years of experience in media and journalism, Adam Clayton Powell III now leads a bipartisan USC initiative providing election cybersecurity training in all 50 states.
Academic Program Affiliation: 
Photo of Adam Clayton Powell III
With more than 50 years of experience in media and journalism, Adam Clayton Powell III now leads a bipartisan USC initiative providing election cybersecurity training in all 50 states.
Expertise: 
Arts and Culture, Business, Computation and Informatics, Digital Media, Diversity and Inclusion, Global, Management, Politics, Public Diplomacy, Race and Ethnicity, Science, Technology and Innovation
Center Affiliation: 

Adam
Clayton
Powell III

Senior Fellow
Executive Director, USC Election Cybersecurity Initiative
Academic Program Affiliation: 

Tabs

Adam Clayton Powell III is executive director of the USC 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.

Powell is a senior fellow and director of Washington programs for the USC Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership and Policy. He is also a senior fellow at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, and is a member of the Public Diplomacy Council of the United States, of which he served as president from 2015 until 2019. Before his move to Washington in 2010, he was USC’s Vice Provost for Globalization, opening new USC facilities in Shanghai and Seoul and supporting USC initiatives worldwide. Previously he was Director of the USC Integrated Media Systems Center, a National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering.

Earlier roles include Vice President/Technology and Programs of the Freedom Forum and the Newseum; Executive Producer at Quincy Jones Entertainment; and Vice President for News and Information programming at National Public Radio.

Previously Powell spent sixteen years at CBS News and at CBS-owned television and radio stations in New York, including as writer for Walter Cronkite for CBS News space coverage; News Director of all-news WINS radio, leading it to be the #1 station in New York; Manager of News Operations for CBS News; Manager of CBS News Special Events and Political Coverage for the 1980 election; and Coordinating Producer of the CBS Morning News with Charles Kuralt.

Powell has also written for publications including The New York Times and the Columbia Journalism Review.

Awards and honors:

World Technology Award for Media and Journalism, The Economist (1999).
Ohio State Award for a series of reports on Iran for CBS News (1979).
Associated Press Award for Best Local News (1975).

Books

Local Voices/Global Perspectives. (Public Diplomacy Council, 2008)

America’s Dialogue with the World, contributor. (Public Diplomacy Council, 2006)

Reinventing Local News: Connecting Communities through New Technologies, author. (Figueroa Press, 2005)

Democracy and New Media, contributor. (MIT Press, 2003)

The Digital Divide, contributor. (MIT Press, 2001)

Briefing the President: What the Next President of the United States Needs to Know about the Internet, contributor. (Internet Policy Institute, 2000)

Lethargy ’96: How the Media Covered a Listless Campaign, co-author. (Freedom Forum, 1997)

Demystifying Media Technology, contributor. (Mayfield, 1993)