News 2004-2005
School of Mass Communications receives major grant to train high school journalism teachers
The School of Mass Communications is one of four programs to receive a full grant from the American Society of Newspaper Editors to fund journalism workshops for high school teachers.
The School of Mass Communications, now in the second three-year cycle of the ASNE high school institutes program, competed with 27 accredited journalism schools nationwide to garner $510,000 for 2001, 2002 and 2003 to administer the two-week summer training program. The latest gift of about $500,000 funds the ASNE program for 2004, 2005 and 2006.
The USF ASNE Institute is led by associate professor and grant author Randy Miller.
"The USF ASNE Institute program brings together our faculty and leaders in journalism to provide an intensive, hands-on workshop for high school teachers from across the country," said Edward Jay Friedlander, School of Mass Communications director. "It has been a great experience to see first-hand how this program makes a positive impact on journalism education in the nation. My colleagues and I are pleased to be selected to continue our work for the next three years."
USF will have received nearly $1 million from ASNE and the Knight Foundation by the conclusion of the program in 2006. USF thus far has trained 101 teachers from 32 states since 2001 from as near as Chamberlain High School in Tampa to as far away as Hawaii. ASNE Institutes have trained more than 500 teachers from 47 states, of whom nearly half teach at schools in which minorities make up at least 40 percent of the student body.
The goal of the ASNE Institutes program is to better inform teachers about news values and ethics, as well as about the daily operations of news outlets. The program also aims to train teachers in basic writing, editing and design skills to better advise their students and to strengthen their school newspapers.
"USF's selection for this institute is yet another clear demonstration of our continuing effort to make programs that significantly impact the community part of our pursuit of academic excellence," said Kathleen M. Heide, interim dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. "It also shows that our academic programs are remarkably successful when compared with top-caliber programs at other major universities." Along with USF, the journalism schools selected for full grant funding from the ASNE program are the University of Texas at Austin, the University of California at Berkeley, and Kent State University in Ohio.
Funding for ASNE's high school journalism initiative comes from the Miami-based John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
School of Mass Communications names distinguished editor as 2005 Clendinen professor
The University of South Florida’s School of Mass Communications has named former Miami Herald editor Jim Hampton as the James A. Clendinen Professor in Editorial and Critical Writing.
The USF Clendinen professor teaches a class in editorial and commentary writing and lectures on a topic related to editorials and commentaries. Hampton’s course is offered during the 2005 spring term.
Under Hampton’s 21-year charge of the Herald’s opinion pages, the editorial staff garnered two Pulitzer Prizes--one in 1983 for editorials on the nearly 2,000 Haitian boat people who arrived in 1982, subsequently detained for illegal immigration, and another in 1996 for editorial cartoonist Jim Morin’s work. Until his retirement in 1998, he also served as director of the Miami-based Inter American Press Association participating in three investigations of alleged government suppression of the press in Panama, Venezuela and Peru, respectively.
Hampton stayed busy following retirement as a freelance writer and editor. In 2002, he wrote the final report on the governor’s blue-ribbon commission investigating the case of Rilya Wilson, a 5-year-old who disappeared from state custody in Miami. Hampton also wrote a major paper for the Foundation for Child Development in 2003 on Florida’s success in amending the state constitution by petition to mandate free pre-kindergarten classes.
Born into a coal mining family in East Kentucky, Hampton earned a bachelor of arts degree in journalism from the University of Kentucky and a master of arts degree in communication and journalism from Stanford University, where he was inducted into the Hall of Distinguished Alumni and the Journalism Hall of Fame.
The School of Mass Communications and the Tampa Tribune select the Clendinen Professor each year. The guest faculty position honors Clendinen, who served for a half century as a Tribune editor and chairman of the editorial board. He won a dozen first-place awards for editorial writing from the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors and was named president of the National Conference of Editorial Writers in 1966. After his death in 1991, Clendinen’s friends, family and employer endowed a professorship in his name. NCEW also contributes to the Clendinen Professor fund each year.