USA Today, “Radio Rookies” Win First America’s Promise Journalism Awards

The Journalism Center on Children & Families presented the 2009 Casey Medals for Meritorious Journalism on Tuesday, October 27 at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. The Center’s co-host, the America’s Promise Alliance, presented the first America’s Promise Journalism Awards for Action and Awareness. They were chosen from the pool of 2009 Casey Medal winners.

More: Watch video from the awards ceremony.

COLLEGE PARK, Md. – Television personalities Maury Povich and Connie Chung will moderate a panel on the value and challenges facing intercollegiate athletics at the fourth annual Shirley Povich Symposium, Wednesday, November 11, at 7:30 p.m. in the Colony Ballroom of the Stamp Student Union at the University of Maryland.

The symposium is titled “Intercollegiate Athletics: Pro/Con: the Joys and Challenges of College Sports.” A free-flowing exchange of ideas is expected among panelists William E. Kirwan (chancellor of the University System of Maryland), University of Maryland athletic director Deborah A. Yow, University of Maryland men’s basketball coach Gary Williams, Maryland graduate Stephon Heyer of the Washington Redskins, Michael Wilbon of The Washington Post and ESPN’s Scott Van Pelt.

C.D. Mote, Jr., president of the University of Maryland, and Kevin Klose, dean of the Phillip Merrill College of Journalism, will make opening remarks.

The event was established to honor the late Shirley Povich, who was a sports columnist for The Washington Post for 75 years and for many years the sports editor of the newspaper. Mr. Povich died in 1998. The event is co-sponsored this year by the University of Maryland’s Phillip Merrill College of Journalism and the Maryland Society. The Maryland Society is exclusive to donors who make cumulative lifetime gifts or pledges of $100,000 or more to the University of Maryland.

The program is free and open to the public. Reservations may be made by e-mailing: events@ur.umd.edu or calling 301-405-4638 by November 4.

COLLEGE PARK — Work on Knight Hall is wrapping up and the College is speeding toward a spring semester opening in our new home, but there’s one critical issue that needs to be resolved before we move in.

We need a name for our new cafe.

The College is sponsoring a name-the-cafe contest that is open to all students, alumni, faculty and staff. The winning name will adorn the cafe that will be an integral part of the great hall, the main gathering space in our new building. (See architectural renderings of the building here.)

The business school named its cafe, Rudy’s, for its dean at the time. The computer school and the libraries reflected their disciplines, Bytes and Footnotes, respectively. What can you come up with for journalism’s cafe?

Send your suggestions to cafename@jmail.umd.edu by Friday, Nov. 6. Enter as many times as you like. A committee of students, faculty and alumni will narrow the choices to a few finalists for a vote in November.

Dean Kevin Klose will buy the winner a cup of coffee at the cafe and, if it’s a really good name, he might kick in for a bagel, too.

While you’re thinking about the name, take a minute to get inspired by surfing around our building site and clicking on the construction site update photos for the latest look at the building.

Knight Hall is a $30 million, 50,000-square-foot state-of-the-art building that will bring the Philip Merrill College of Journalism and its affiliated professional centers under one roof for the first time. It will be the first “green” building on campus, and is currently on track to get a LEED Gold rating from the U.S. Green Building Council.

While it will be high-tech our new home will be friendly and open at the same time, filled with glass and meeting spaces like the cafe. It will also have a touch of the building that has been our home for more than 50 years: The “Journalism” letters have already been stripped off the front of our current building and will be mounted in the vestibule of Knight Hall.

Construction is expected to be completed this winter, and the College will be offering classes in our new home on Jan. 25, the start of the spring 2010 semester.

Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Jack Nelson, a founding member of the Board of Visitors at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism and former Washington bureau chief for The Los Angeles Times, has died.

Nelson died Wednesday, Oct. 21, of pancreatic cancer at his home in Bethesda, Md., according to his obituary in The Times.

Nelson joined the Board of Visitors in 1983 when it was formed by then-Dean Reese Cleghorn, and served until 2001. He was one of 13 journalists and news executives named to the board shortly after Cleghorn became dean.

Working with faculty and College administrators, the board by 1985 had crafted a five-year plan — “Toward 1990: Creating a Model Professional School” — that was hailed by other schools, and became the blueprint for action that pushed the College to national prominence.

Nelson served on the board for 18 years, stepping down in 2001, the same year that he retired as The Times’ Washington bureau chief. He said at the time that he felt board members should be working journalists and his retirement compelled him to step aside.

Nelson was succeeded on the board by The Times then-bureau chief Doyle McManus, now a columnist who remains on the board today.

COLLEGE PARK — For a third year, the State Department picked the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism as one of 11 leading j-schools to host a group of international reporters under the Edward R. Murrow Program for Journalists.

The College hosted 12 Arabic-speaking journalists from North Africa and the Near East from Oct. 1-7, drawing on its location to assemble an ambitious program of business, government and media visits in Baltimore, Washington and Annapolis.

Fellows met with state government leaders in Annapolis, visited newspapers and community sites in Baltimore and got into newsrooms of national and international news organizations in Washington. Included in the trip were visits to the al Jazeera and Alhurra newsrooms, meetings with Washington Post beat reporters and the National Public Radio’s ombudsman, and editors of the Associated Press and the Afro-American.

The Murrow fellows also spent time on the College Park campus, discussing elections and government reporting in this country and getting sessions on database and other reporting with the College’s Pulitzer Prize-winning faculty.

And the fellows had the chance to watch the Maryland-Clemson football game and take in the 16th-century sights of the Maryland Renaissance Festival.

The visitors are mid-career editors and reporters from print, broadcast and online news outlets stretching from Algeria to Oman and from Iraq to the Sudan.

They were among about 150 journalists from around the world who arrived in Washington in late September for meetings with government officials, journalists and scholars before splitting up and heading out to colleges across the country. The fellows then went to separate U.S. cities for community meetings — Maryland’s fellows went to Chicago — and gathered one last time in New York for more meetings before heading home Oct. 17.

This is the Merrill College’s third year in the Murrow program, a public-private partnership between the State Department, the Aspen Institute and leading U.S. schools of journalism that brings foreign journalists to this country to examine journalistic principles and practices and interact with professional journalists and experts in the field.

Other schools in the program this year included Marquette University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Oklahoma, the University of Southern California and Syracuse University, among others.

Amanda Anderson, a student in the Merrill College, has won a 2009 Murray Scholar award, the Jim Murray Memorial Foundation announced.

The scholarships, named after sportswriter Jim Murray, are awarded to second and third year print journalism students on eligibility and a written essay. A panel of sports journalists chose the winners.

Anderson and four other journalism students won a $5,000 scholarship in this year’s contest. It is the second year in a row that a Merrill student has taken the award — Kyle Goon won in 2008.

Linda McCoy-Murray, president and founder of the Jim Murray
Memorial Foundation said, “We are cultivating the ‘cream
of the crop’ at prestigious journalism schools in the nation.
The Murray Scholars are marvelous ambassadors for the Foundation and inspire each other to strive for a higher standard in their writing and journalistic integrity, especially in this new age of electronic media.”

Murray, one the founders of Sports Illustrated, won a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1990, and won the National Sportswriter of the Year Award 14 times. Murray was also inducted into the writers’ wing in Cooperstown Baseball Hall of Fame in 1988.

A writer for American Journalism Review, the national journalism magazine published by the Merrill College, has won the National Press Club’s Arthur Rowse Award for Press Criticism. The award to AJR senior contributing writer Sherry Ricchiardi is for the best media criticism published in magazines, newspapers, newsletters or online.

Ricchiardi, who often writes for AJR about foreign coverage, was honored for articles she wrote in 2008 about the media’s lack of coverage of the war in Iraq; how well the media scrutinized the Bush administration’s allegations against Iran; coverage of the war in Afghanistan; and the Chauncey Bailey Project, a joint effort by a coalition of West Coast news outlets to investigate the murder of Oakland journalist Chauncey Bailey.

Ricchiardi, who has been writing for AJR since 1992, previously won a Rowse award in 2003 and received an honorable mention in 2006.

“We’re very proud that Sherry has received this well-deserved honor,” said Rem Rieder, editor and publisher of AJR. “She is a wonderful journalist who is truly passionate about what she does.”

AJR has dominated the Rowse Awards since their debut.

The full release is below: » More

The Journalism Center on Children and Families, a non-profit affiliate of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism, has announced the recipients of the 15th Annual Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism. Among the winners are The Boston Globe, KLOR-TV (Springfield, MO) and the Akron Beacon Journal. The medals are presented by the Journalism Center on Children & Families and funded by The Annie E. Casey Foundation.

Other news organizations taking top honors in the 15th annual contest include USA Today, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Newsweek, Long Island Press, The Charlotte Observer, Roanoke Times, WNYC-FM and Public Policy Productions. The Washington Post wins its third consecutive Casey Medal; both The Dallas Morning News and Seattle Post-Intelligencer win their second consecutive medals.

All winners receive a Casey Medal and $1,000 at a ceremony in Washington, D.C. Over 600 journalists from across the nation entered this year’s contest. Judges sought masterfully reported, compelling stories that cut through compassion fatigue on socially significant topics; demonstrated enterprise and thorough research; and showed evidence of impact.

The Journalism Center on Children & Families is a nonprofit affiliate of the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism. Since 1993, the Journalism Center has helped more than 14,000 journalists cover critical social issues by providing training, resources, story ideas and more. This year, the center has received support from The Annie E. Casey Foundation, Challenge Fund for Journalism, Ethics & Excellence in Journalism Foundation, Ms. Foundation for Women, McCormick Foundation, W.K. Kellogg Foundation and individual donors.

Read the complete release.

BALTIMORE, Md. – The Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland held a symposium on June 2 to discuss what happens to local news if the major metropolitan daily newspaper shuts down, and what news options might takes its place. » More

Two of Merrill’s faculty members have been promoted, effective at the start of the new academic year. Dr. Susan Moeller has been promoted to professor from associate professor and Dr. Carol Rogers has achieved the rank of professor of the practice.

Dr. Rogers, who just stepped down from long-time service as the college’s director of doctoral and research programs, has been on the faculty since 1994. As the former head of the Office of Communications for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Dr. Rogers specializes in science journalism and communication. She also served as the editor for the journal Science Communication. The University employs the title professor of the practice for individuals who have demonstrated excellence in the practice, and leadership, of specific fields. In granting the title, the University agrees with the College that Dr. Rogers has attained national and international prominence in the field of science journalism, and that she has demonstrated superior teaching ability.

Dr. Moeller has built quite a track record of achievement since she joined the College as an assistant professor in 2001. Last year she won one of the prestigious Carnegie Scholar awards, which provided a $100,000 grant to study how the media report the intersection of Islam and terrorism. She was also honored by the Board of Regents with a Regents’ Faculty Award for teaching in 2008. She founded the International Center for Media and the Public Agenda (ICMPA), and was founder and is the lead faculty member of the Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change. Her most recent book, Packaging Terrorism: Co-opting the News for Politics and Profit, was published by Wiley-Blackwell last year. Before joining Merrill, Susan was director of the journalism program at Brandeis, taught at Princeton and Pacific Lutheran University, and was a fellow at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center.