The Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy has chosen four journalists to be Joan Shorenstein Fellows for the upcoming semester, the center announced Tuesday.

The fellows—CNN correspondent Jill Dougherty, business journalist Robert Lenzner ’57, author Diane McWhorter, and former Nieman Fellow and magazine writer Steve Oney—will spend the semester researching and writing a paper on a topic of their choice.

“I think they are superb,” Shorenstein Center Director Alex S. Jones said. “They come from a variety of different places, backgrounds, and interests.”

A former business manager of The Crimson, Lenzner has been an editor for Forbes Media for the past 22 years. He has also written for the Boston Globe and the Economist and previously worked on Wall Street for almost a decade.

During the upcoming semester, Lenzner said he plans to assess how the media covered the issues leading up to the financial crisis and its aftermath today.

“[The financial crisis] is the most important event in financial history, and it has tremendous ramifications for everybody,” Lenzner said. “Even though we’ve made some improvements…it’s still a perilous situation. I’m trying to look at how good of a job did the media do in holding the hands of 350 million people.”

Dougherty has worked for CNN for 30 years as U.S. affairs editor for CNN International, Moscow bureau chief, White House Correspondent, and most recently foreign affairs correspondent.

“I work in TV on tight deadlines, and we have to get things done immediately, and just to have that ability to just wrap my mind around something is very exciting,” Dougherty said.

Dougherty has followed the Russian media very closely throughout her career, she said, and as a fellow, she plans to conduct research on the relationship between the Russian government and media.

Other Shorenstein fellows include Oney, a former Neimen fellow who has contributed to Playboy, The New York Times, and Esquire, will study former NPR programming director Bill Siemering and his relationship with American broadcasting. McWhorter, a Pulitzer Prize winning non-fiction writer and contributor to the New York Times, will conduct workshops on opinion writing.

McWhorter and Oney could not be reached for comment.

The Shorenstein Center has funded semester-long research projects for journalists and scholars in media or politics since 1986, according to the Shorenstein Center website. A $5 million gift last fall allowed the center to expand its focus and add a new fellowship, while it also changed its name to reflect the new mission.

Jones emphasized the dual mission of the program.

“[Fellows] are here to do pieces of serious work that are published,” he said. “However, there is another mission. They create a community that makes them accessible to Harvard students.”

—Staff writer Selina Y. Wang can be reached at selinawang@college.harvard.edu.