News from the Cronkite School

Twenty percent of all examined newspaper articles about common neurological conditions had medical errors or exaggerations, according to a new study by Mayo Clinic physicians and Cronkite School researchers.

The Cronkite School will be housed in a new, state-of-the-art journalism complex in downtown Phoenix by 2008 thanks to voters’ overwhelming approval of $223 million in bond money to help fund ASU’s new Downtown Phoenix campus.

A top journalist will join the Cronkite School each spring semester as the Edith Kinney Gaylord Visiting Professor of Journalism Ethics thanks to a generous gift from the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation.

Carol Schwalbe won the Broadcast Education Association’s Best of Competition for an innovative and in-depth Web site she created for her Online Media class.

The National Association of Hispanic Journalists selected the Cronkite School to conduct an in-depth analysis of coverage of Latinos by the nation’s three leading news magazines.

Ray Artigue, a longtime member of the Cronkite Endowment Board and a member of the Cronkite Alumni Hall of Fame, is stepping down from his job as senior vice president of the Phoenix Suns to join ASU’s W.P. Carey School of Business as executive director of its MBA Sports Business program.

A team from the Cronkite School will conduct an in-depth photojournalism project in Mexico exploring the plight of children living in the borderlands region thanks to a generous gift from the Howard G. Buffett Foundation.

Cronkite School students spent part of their Christmas holiday participating in an experimental collaboration between the school and the Arizona Republic. Students equipped with laptops provided azcentral.com users with real-time reports about traffic at the airport and area malls. Republic editors declared the experiment a success in this story in Gannett News Watch.

Michiko Howlett, a Cronkite student and news director of the campus radio station, won first place for radio feature reporting in the nation’s most prestigious intercollegiate journalism competition, the Hearst Awards.

The Cronkite School took first place for newspaper feature writing in the nation’s most prestigious intercollegiate journalism competition, with students taking first and 16th place.

Dean Christopher Callahan presented former Regent Donald Ulrich the first-ever Dean’s Award for Outstanding Service in recognition of Ulrich’s years of advocacy on behalf of the Cronkite School.

Tim J. McGuire, the former editor of the Minneapolis Star Tribune and a leading voice in newspapers for more than 20 years, will join the Cronkite School as the Frank Russell Chair in August.

Dan H. Fellner, a Cronkite School faculty associate, has received a Fulbright Scholar grant to teach journalism and public relations at Moldova State University in Chisinau, Moldova, for five months beginning in January.

Paul Schatt, an Arizona Republic editor who taught news reporting to hundreds of journalism students at Arizona State University over the past 30 years, died at the age of 60.

William Pitts won the Society of Professional Journalists’ Mark of Excellence award for in-depth radio reporting for his examination of military training in a Phoenix suburb.

Two major-market television news anchors are the newest members of the Cronkite School Alumni Hall of Fame. Ellen Leyva, a 1986 graduate of the school, is a 5 p.m. co-anchor on KABC-TV in Los Angeles. Katie Raml, a 1999 graduate, is a 5 p.m., 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. co-anchor on ABC15 in Phoenix.

Dave Barry, the Pulitzer Prize-winning humor columnist for the Miami Herald, will receive the 2005 Walter Cronkite Award for journalistic excellence.

Christopher Callahan, who helped lead the University of Maryland’s journalism program to national prominence as the school’s associate dean, will become the founding dean of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University in August 2005. The Cronkite School, which has been part of ASU’s College of Public Programs, will become a separate unit on July 1.