Three veteran journalists have been named the Reynolds Visiting Business Journalism Professors at Central Michigan, Elon and Louisiana State universities under a $1.67 million grant from the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation.
The five-year program will ultimately create 11 visiting professorships at 11 different schools. It is administered through the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
The visiting professors who will teach in the spring semester of 2013 are:
- Dianne M. Finch at Elon University. Finch was multimedia manager for the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT. She was previously a health and science reporter for New Hampshire Public Radio and a reporter for Bloomberg News in Boston.
- Noelle Knox at Louisiana State University. Knox is a media consultant in Brussels, where she had once been a foreign correspondent for USA Today. She has also been real estate editor for the Associated Press, a business writer for USA Today and a freelance contributor to The New York Times.
- Micheline Maynard at Central Michigan University. Maynard served as senior editor of Changing Gears, a project funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. She is a former senior business correspondent and Detroit bureau chief for The New York Times and held similar positions for USA Today.
The professorships will enable students at the three universities to get valuable training in a specialized and increasingly critical area of journalism, said Andrew Leckey, president of the Reynolds Center and the Reynolds Chair in Business Journalism at the Cronkite School.
“We are delighted with the quality and commitment of the three professors and universities in this second year of the program as we seek to improve the quality of business journalism,” Leckey said. “Last year’s inaugural visiting professors did an outstanding job, and we are enthusiastic about the opportunity ahead of the incoming professors.”
The inaugural group of Reynolds Visiting Business Journalism Professors taught in spring 2012 at Colorado State University, Grambling State University, the University of South Carolina and Texas Christian University. The Reynolds Visiting Professorships are modeled on successful programs at Washington and Lee University and the Cronkite School. The Reynolds Center also has sponsored a four-day seminar for prospective business journalism professors for the past six years.
Besides teaching courses in business journalism, visiting professors will help establish partnerships with local media. The program also includes funding for student internships and guest lectures by professional business journalists.
