News from the Cronkite School

The Carnegie Corporation of New York and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation are giving the Cronkite School a $7.5 million grant to direct a bold, experimental digital media program at 12 leading U.S. universities.

Seeking to change the way journalism is taught in the United States, the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation are investing more than $11 million in the expansion of a national initiative to adapt journalism education to the challenges of a struggling news industry. Three new journalism schools – including the Cronkite School – are joining the effort of redefining journalism education and training a new generation of journalists capable of reshaping the news industry.

Ian Lee and Emily Falkner are among 12 ASU graduates who have been named 2008 Fulbright Scholars. Lee will be studying in Cairo, Egypt, and Falkner will be a teaching assistant in the Slovak Republic.

Cronkite students are documenting the lives of immigrants in South Africa during a two-week reporting trip supported by a grant from the Howard G. Buffett Foundation. The 10 Cronkite students are joined by students from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Assistant Professor Xu Wu, who teaches public relations in the Cronkite School, is in China advising media organizations, government agencies and research institutes on China’s response to the catastrophic earthquake that struck the country last month. Wu is a specialist in crisis communications.

A Cronkite student documentary on Muslim students at ASU has won two awards for excellence in national and international competitions. “Holy Hunger in the Midst of Plenty,” won a Telly Award and a Videographer Award of Distinction.

The Cronkite School placed in the top 10 in the national Hearst Journalism Awards program for 2007-2008 – the seventh consecutive year that the school has finished in the top 10. Students placed in every category -- broadcast news, multimedia, photography and writing.

Jason Manning, political editor of washingtonpost.com, one of the nation’s leaders in digital media, is moving west to become director of Student Media at Arizona State University.

For the third consecutive year, Cronkite students have finished first in the Society of Professional Journalists’ highly competitive intercollegiate news contest.

N. Christian Anderson III, who led the Orange County Register to two Pulitzer Prizes as editor and later became the newspaper’s award-winning publisher, will join ASU this fall as the Edith Kinney Gaylord Visiting Professor in Journalism Ethics.

Former St. Louis Post-Dispatch Editor Ellen Soeteber, the school’s Edith Kinney Gaylord Visiting Professor in Journalism Ethics, delivered the keynote convocation address to the 187 newest Cronkite graduates.

ABC News announced the launch of ABC News on Campus, a partnership with the Cronkite School and four other top journalism schools across the country to educate and mentor talented college students.

Newly promoted Associate Professor Carol Schwalbe is the recipient of this year’s ASU Faculty Achievement Award for Excellence in Classroom Performance.

Aaron Brown will continue his teaching role as the first Walter Cronkite Professor of Journalism while he returns to TV as the new host of the PBS series “Wide Angle.”

Jim Lehrer and Robert MacNeil, the PBS news anchor tandem who epitomize the best of thought-provoking and in-depth broadcast journalism, will be this year’s recipients of the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism.

Eight/KAET-TV, the Arizona PBS station that reaches 1.3 million viewers each week, will air two specials created by Cronkite School.

For the eighth consecutive year, the Cronkite School dominated the Society of Professional Journalists’ regional student competition, winning a remarkable 51 awards – nearly half of all the awards given in the Region 11 SPJ Mark of Excellence competition.

Five Cronkite School students were part of a team from The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com that won first place in this year’s Best of Gannett national award for breaking news coverage. The team was recognized for coverage of the July 27 crash of two TV news helicopters that killed four.

Norm Ginsburg, a longtime CBS executive who taught part time at the Cronkite School for more than 20 years, died Thursday after a short illness. He was 83.

The Cronkite School will unveil two major journalism diversity projects at the UNITY: Journalists of Color convention in Chicago this summer. The projects, funded by the McCormick Foundation, consist of a Web-based clearinghouse for research on news diversity issues and a census of ethnicity of the Washington press corps.