Three of the nation’s top newspaper professionals and one of the nation’s top emerging scholars in broadcast and multi-media have joined the Philip Merrill College of Journalism, Dean Tom Kunkel announced.

The Baltimore Sun’s Sandy Banisky, The Washington Post’s Leslie Walker, ESPN’s Kevin Blackistone and Dr. Ron Yaros, currently of the University of Utah, will begin teaching in the fall as the Abell Professor in Baltimore Journalism, the Knight Visiting Professor in Digital Innovation, the Shirley Povich Chair in Sports Journalism and as an assistant professor, respectively.

“Sandy, Leslie, Kevin and Ron join the Merrill College faculty at an exciting transition,” said Kunkel. “With the opening of the new journalism building late next year, the arrival of the new dean, and the ongoing ramifications of the changing media industry, we sought four top candidates who could be major players in helping us ‘launch the next era of news.’ We are fortunate to hit it out of the park on all four, and I’m very confident they will all be outstanding additions to the school.”

Three of the new faculty members — the Knight Visiting Professor, the Abell Professor and the Povich Chair — are funded in part from private sources. More than $2.1 million has been raised to date by the Merrill College for these positions.

Joining the faculty:

• Sandy Banisky, an editor at The Baltimore Sun, joins Merrill as the Abell Professor in Baltimore Journalism. Banisky is currently deputy managing editor for news at the Sun, where she has worked as an editor and reporter for three decades. Kunkel said in a note to the faculty that “there are few if any journalists around who know that city better than Sandy, which is crucial since this new position calls for using the city as a ‘living laboratory’ for our students in producing high-quality public affairs journalism.”

  Banisky graduated from Boston University and then went on to get a law degree from the University of Baltimore. In addition to the Abell course, which she will teach each spring and fall, she will teach a second course each semester back at the J school.

  The work of the Abell Professor will help train journalism students in sophisticated public-policy journalism by exploring and producing reports on Baltimore issues. This professorship is a natural expansion of the Merrill College’s focus on public affairs, but one that centers exclusively on Baltimore news and issues. The Abell Professor is named in honor of the Abell Foundation and the former owners of the Baltimore Sun, and their historic commitment to Baltimore and journalism in Maryland.

• Kevin Blackistone, one of sports journalism’s most prominent and multi-talented voices, joins the Merrill College as the Shirley Povich Chair in Sports Journalism.

  Kevin grew up in nearby Hyattsville, Md., and went on to graduate from Northwestern before launching his journalism career, nearly 20 years of which was spent at the Dallas Morning News. After beginning work there as a news reporter, Kevin came to national prominence as a top sports columnist. In that role he covered virtually every major sporting event. In late 2006 he returned to Hyattsville after taking a buyout from the Morning News.

  Today he writes regularly for AOL Sports, contributes to the Politico, provides commentary on NPR’s “All Things Considered” and appears as a panelist on ESPN’s popular “Around the Horn” program. He expects to bring that multi-format expertise to his teaching here.

  Named in honor of the legendary Washington Post columnist and editor Shirley Povich, the Povich Chair will be a prominent sports journalist who can advocate for excellence in sports reporting. It is funded in part through the generous gifts of Povich’s children — David, Lynn and Maury — and was previously held by former Washington Post sports editor George Solomon, who will continue at Merrill as a visiting professor.

• Leslie Walker joins Merrill as the Knight Visiting Professor in Digital Innovation, a special two-year appointment partially funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The Knight Visiting Professor will teach several courses a year devoted to digital, multimedia journalism and will also consult the college, its centers and the national magazine American Journalism Review in navigating the evolution of the digital world.

  Walker was vice president and editor of washingtonpost.com, which she ran for several of its crucial formative years. She returned to the print newsroom and for eight years she was the “.com” columnist for the Post. In that capacity she interacted with literally every major player in the Web and digital environments, and she continues to have ties to many of them.

• Ron Yaros joins the faculty as an assistant professor. He is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Utah, where he supervises the Newsbreak Student Newscast and operates the Lab for Communicating Complexity Online.

  Yaros’ research explores the relationships of multi-media, its content and its audience — specifically how non linear forms of new media affect the audience’s interest in and comprehension of content about science, health, technology and the environment. His research projects include Web tracking and interdisciplinary collaboration with colleagues in cognitive psychology, education psychology, health sciences and the physical sciences to explore how individuals process important but complex information. He holds a Ph.D. in Mass Communication from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.