- Pritzker Fellows
- Former Fellows
- Shailagh Murray
Shailagh Murray
Former Senior Advisor to President Obama
Biography
Shailagh Murray spent nearly six years shaping communications strategy inside the Obama White House, most recently serving as Senior Advisor to President Obama from 2015 to 2017. Previously, she was Vice President Biden’s deputy chief of staff and communications director.
In her White House roles, Shailagh oversaw a long-term communications planning process and led efforts to vastly expand engagement opportunities for the President and Vice President to include social media products, documentaries, podcasts, book reviews and academic journals, and comedy shows and sitcoms.
Shailagh joined the Obama administration in 2011 after working as a foreign correspondent, congressional correspondent, and national political reporter for The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. Over the course of her journalism career, she covered the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe; the expansion of the European Union; three presidential elections and three mid-term election cycles; and every major debate in Congress during the presidency of George W. Bush, including the Iraq War.
Born in upstate New York, Shailagh grew up in Charlottesville and Richmond, Va. She has a BA in humanities from University of Missouri-Columbia and a Masters in Journalism from Northwestern University. She has two college-age daughters and an Airedale, and lives on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., with her husband Neil King Jr.
Seminars
“Reinventing Political Communications”
These seminars will chart how the White House transformed its approach to communicating with the American people, bringing to life in new and creative ways the Obama presidency and its impact on American life.
This session will track of the dawn of the social media age, which happened in real time during the Obama presidency. We’ll look at choices we made about how to engage; the opportunities social media presented as a shiny new set of communications tools; and the challenges and limitations we discovered along the way. We will endeavor to understand how social media took an ugly turn in the past two years, increasingly becoming a conduit for political attacks and fake news.
Special Guest: Lindsay Holst, former Director of Digital Content at the White House (2013-2016)
For years, the White House relied on the same tired playbook to sell policy stories: fact sheets, background briefings, op-eds, Oval Office photo-ops. For all the effort, we got little reward: Traditional Washington newsrooms mostly ignore substance in favor on conflict. So we looked beyond the briefing room and found a gold mine of new partners like HBO/Vice, National Geographic, and adventurer-celebrities like Anthony Bourdain and Bear Grylls. This session will feature a case study of the acclaimed HBO/Vice documentary about President Obama’s trip to a federal prison.
Special Guest: Alex Detrick, Vice Communications Director & Chief Collaborator on Four White House/VICE Documentary Projects
It’s challenging once a president takes office to keep him connected with the American people. Network interviews tend to be overly formal and driven by the news of the day. Off campus forays, to a Starbucks or sandwich shop, are painfully contrived. Meanwhile, the human side fades from public view. Reintroducing Americans to Barack Obama the man – an older, wiser version of the phenom they met in 2004 -- was one of our primary goals for the last two years of his presidency. We’ll explore the communications tools we used to do that, primarily non-traditional interviews.
Special Guest: Jeanne Marie Laskas, Award-Winning Writer