NPC Luncheon: David Simon

David Simon, journalist and creator of the popular HBO drama, The Wire, spoke on the future of professional journalism at a National Press Club luncheon on Monday, June 8. Simon, in testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet on May 6, said he believes "[nothing] can save high-end, professional journalism."
Simon, 48, is a Baltimore-based reporter, author and television producer. Born in Washington, he came to Baltimore in 1983 to work as a crime reporter at The Baltimore Sun. While at the paper, he reported and wrote two works of narrative non-fiction, Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets and The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood, the former an account of a year spent with the city homicide squad and the latter, a year spent on a West Baltimore drug corner.

Homicide became the basis for the NBC drama which aired from 1993 to 1999 and for which Simon worked as a writer and producer. The Corner became an HBO miniseries and won three Emmy Awards in 2000. A subsequent HBO drama, The Wire, aired from 2001 to 2008 and depicted a dystopic American city contending with a fradulent drug war, the loss of its industrial base, political and educational systems incapable of reform and a media culture oblivious to all of the above.

Also in 2008, Simon served as a writer and executive producer of HBO's Generation Kill, a miniseries depicting U.S. Marines in the early days of the Iraq conflict. He is currently at work on a drama about post-Katrina New Orleans entitled "Treme." Simon also does prose work for The New Yorker, Esquire and The Washington Post.