Hearst Visiting Professionals

Mark Hinojosa, director of new media for the Detroit News, visited the school in spring 2009.

The Cronkite School established the Hearst Visiting Professional Program in 1992 with the help of a generous grant from the William R. Hearst Foundation. Since then, the Cronkite School has brought dozens of leading journalists — Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters, top newspaper editors, digital media innovators and TV news anchors — to campus. While at the school, these established professionals speak to classes, meet with faculty, and deliver a major address in First Amendment Forum to students and faculty about their areas of expertise.

Hearst Visiting Professionals include:

2011-12
Kim Barker
Kim Barker recently finished her term as the Edward R. Murrow Press Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, where she studied, wrote and lectured on Pakistan and Afghanistan and U.S. policy. She was the South Asia bureau chief for the Chicago Tribune from 2004 to 2009 and was based in New Delhi and Islamabad. She began covering the region after Sept. 11, 2001, and spent two years on a project called “Struggle for the Soul of Islam," a series about Islam that sent her to Iran, Pakistan and Indonesia.

Charles Lewis
Charles Lewis is a national investigative journalist; a former ABC News and CBS News 60 Minutes producer, best-selling author and founder or co-founder of several nonprofit organizations, including the Center for Public Integrity and its International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. Under his leadership, the center published about 300 investigative reports from 1989 through 2004 and won more than 30 national journalism honors. Lewis was named “one of the 30 most notable investigative reporters in the U.S. since World War I” by the Encyclopedia of Journalism. He has been a Ferris Professor at Princeton University and a Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard University.

Eric Newton
Eric Newton is senior adviser to the president of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Since joining the foundation in 2001 as journalism program director, he has developed some $300 million in grants to advance quality journalism, freedom of expression and media innovation worldwide. Before coming to the Knight Foundation, he was founding managing editor of the Newseum, an interactive journalism museum in Washington, D.C. Newton began his journalism career as a newspaper editor in Northern California. During his tenure as managing editor of the Oakland Tribune, the newspaper won 150 journalism awards, including a Pulitzer Prize.

Steve Rubel
Steve Rubel is executive vice president of global strategy and insights for Edelman, the world’s largest independent public relations firm. In this role, he studies the future of media and helps clients unify their communications strategies across traditional, emerging, owned and social channels. In addition, Rubel acts as a highly visible Edelman thought leader and writer on media, technology and digital culture. He has been named to several prestigious lists, including PR Week’s 40 Under 40 and Forbes.com’s Web Celeb 25.

2010-11
Michel Du Cille joined The Washington Post in 1988 as picture editor and has been assistant managing editor for photography since 2007. He has won three Pulitzer Prizes, including one Pulitzer Prize for Public Service that he shared with writers Anne Hull and Dana Priest for an investigative series that exposed the mistreatment of wounded Iraq war veterans at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

Kenny Irby is senior faculty for visual journalism and director of diversity programs for the Poynter Institute. He founded the photojournalism program at Poynter in 1995 and has been the organization’s visual journalism group leader for over a decade. Irby chaired the photography categories for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize and is a founding member of the Best of Photojournalism Committee. Irby counts the National Press Photographers’ highest recognition, the Sprague Award, in 2007, among his many honors.

Marcia Parker is the West Coast editorial director for Patch.com, a hyperlocal journalism network owned by AOL. Previously, she was assistant dean at University of California, Berkeley’s Graduate School. She managed the launch of California Watch, a reporting effort of the nonprofit Center for Investigative Reporting, served as director of programming for a new AOL channel, and has consulted for Yahoo! and AllVoices.com.

Dan Schawbel is the managing partner of Millennial Branding LLC and the author of best-selling book, “Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success.” He has more than 85,000 followers on Twitter and was named by BusinessWeek as one of the top 20 entrepreneurs to follow. He has spoken for universities including Harvard and MIT and for corporations including Time Warner and CitiGroup.

Hilary Schneider is EVP, Americas Region for Yahoo!, where she is responsible for advertising sales, partnerships and programming across Yahoo!'s North, Central and South American operations. Previously, she was CEO of Knight Ridder Digital, where she later co-managed the company’s newspaper and online business.

Paul Steiger is the editor-in-chief, president and chief executive of ProPublica. He also is chairman of the Committee to Protect Journalists and a trustee of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Previously he was managing editor of the Wall Street Journal from 1991 to 2007. From 1998 to 2007, he served on the Pulitzer Prize board. He has won a number of honors for public service in journalism, including the National Press Club’s Fourth Estate Award.

2009-10
Kathleen Bade, anchor for Fox 5 in San Diego and an alumna of the Cronkite School, has won multiple Emmy Awards in her 15-year career in broadcast news. Prior to Fox, she worked at the CBS affiliate in San Diego and the Fox and CBS affiliates in Phoenix.

Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and Cronkite School alumna Julie Cart of the Los Angeles Times won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in the category of Explanatory Reporting for her five-part series on the growth and cost of wildfires. Cart has been a national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and a reporter for United Press International.

Vanessa Fox, entrepreneur, SEO expert and creator of Google’s Webmaster Central, has been called a “cyberspace visionary” by Seattle Business Monthly and named one of Seattle’s 2008 top 25 innovators and entrepreneurs.

Mei-Ling Hopgood is a freelance journalist based in South America. She has written for National Geographic Traveler, The Miami Herald and The Boston Globe. An article she wrote about her reunion with her Chinese birth family won a national award from the Asian American Journalists Association and formed the basis of her memoir, “Lucky Girl.”

As editor of The Oregonian, Sandy Rowe led the paper to five Pulitzer Prizes before her retirement in 2010. She won the 2003 Benjamin Bradlee Editor of the Year Award and has served as president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, chair of the Knight Foundation Journalism Advisory Board and chair of the Pulitzer Prize Board.

David Sasaki is the director of Rising Voices, a project of Global Voices Online. As such, he curates an international network of blogs and other citizen media.

Jim VandeHei is the co-founder of Politico and the first representative of a primarily online news organization to be elected to serve on the Pulitzer Prize board. Previously, he covered Capitol Hill for The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post.

2008-09
Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Renee C. Byer is a senior photojournalist with The Sacramento Bee. Her photos have been published in Newsweek Asia, Paris Match, Marie Claire, El Mundo, Days Japan, Rangefinder, Business Week, People and others.

Award-winning reporter and Cronkite alumnus Babak Dehghanpisheh was named the Baghdad bureau chief for Newsweek in late 2006 and has covered Iraq since. Dehghanpisheh was embedded early in the conflict and was one of the few journalists to gain access to Abu Ghraib.

Longtime digital media leader Mark Hinojosa is the director of new media for The Detroit News and has also served as associate managing editor for new media for the Chicago Tribune.

Susan Page, Washington bureau chief, for USA Today, and her husband, Carl Leubsdorf, Washington bureau chief for The Dallas Morning News, have covered and directed news coverage of numerous presidential campaigns over the past three decades.

Mara Schiavocampo was the first digital journalist on network television, appearing as the digital correspondent for NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams. Her multimedia reports also appear on MSNBC and the Today Show. Prior to this role, she contributed to ABC News, NPR and Ebony magazine, among others.

2007-08
Houston Chronicle immigration/border reporter Susan Carroll covered immigration issues in Arizona for the Tucson Citizen and The Arizona Republic prior to joining the Chronicle. She has received two Reporter of the Year awards from the Arizona Press Club and was a Border Justice Fellow at the Annenberg Institute for Justice Journalism from 2003 to 2004.

Jason Manning has held positions including politics editor for washingtonpost.com and local-national editor for PBS’ Online NewsHour. Manning has also worked at usnews.com, where he produced the US News college rankings on the Web and assisted in the magazine’s 9/11 coverage. Following his visit as a Hearst Professional, Manning was hired by ASU to direct Student Media.

Julia Wallace, the first female editor of the Atlanta Journal Constitution, was previously managing editor of The Arizona Republic and has worked at USA Today, the Chicago Sun-Times and the Salem (Ore.) Statesman Journal.

2006-07
Jennie Buckner retired as editor of The Charlotte Observer in 2004. Since then, she has been a visiting professor at Davidson College, where she has taught classes in journalism ethics and critical issues in mass media. During her 11 years at the Observer, the paper won numerous state and national awards, including being a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Public Service.

Christine Devine is an award-winning weekday anchor for KTTV-TV in Los Angeles. Her work has won eight Emmy awards. The Cronkite alumna was inducted into the Cronkite Alumni Hall of Fame in 2001. The following year she received an ASU Founder’s Day achievement award, one of the most prestigious awards given by the ASU Alumni Association.

Ricardo Sandoval, assistant metro editor at The Sacramento Bee, has spent most of his professional life reporting on immigration issues. In 1997, while reporting for the San Jose Mercury News, he and two coworkers wrote an investigative article that won awards from the Overseas Press Club and the Inter American Press Association for reporting from Latin America. Later, while reporting for The Dallas Morning News, Sandoval and his wife, Susan Ferriss, co-authored the book “The Fight in the Fields: Cesar Chavez and the Farmworkers’ Movement.”

Keith Woods, a former editor at The New Orleans Times-Picayune, is the dean of the faculty at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies and one of the nation’s leaders in journalism diversity issues.

2005-06
Karen Kasmauski is an award-winning National Geographic photographer who has won top honors in the annual Pictures of the Year competition as well as special recognition in the Magazine Photographer of the Year category. Her book “Impact: From the Frontlines of Global Health” was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

Dr. Maria Simbra, a health science reporter for KDKA-TV in Pittsburgh, also is a practicing physician. She reports on health care issues that affect Pittsburgh-area viewers and maintains a private practice as a board-certified neurologist.

Mark Trahant of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer is one of the nation’s leading Native American journalists. He is the first Native American to serve as the top editor of a major metropolitan newspaper (Salt Lake Tribune) and was CEO of the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education.