Two veteran journalists have been named Reynolds Visiting Business Journalism Professors at California State University, Fullerton, and the University of Oklahoma under a $1.67 million grant from the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation. They are Dick Weiss and Joe Winski.
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 2014 are:
- Dick Weiss at the University of Oklahoma. He is an award-winning writer, editor and writing coach with more than three decades of experience at newspapers, much of it at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. After leaving the Post-Dispatch in 2005, Weiss started his own company WeissWrite LLC, a writing, editing and coaching service for anyone with a story to tell. He also is one of founders of the St. Louis Beacon, one of the leaders in nonprofit online journalism. Weiss has conducted writing workshops at newspapers and universities nationwide, many on behalf of the Reynolds Center.
- Joe Winski at Cal State Fullerton. His career in business journalism spans from The Wall Street
Journal to Bloomberg News, with stints in between at the Chicago Tribune and Crain Communications. He spent the last 18 1/2 years of his career at Bloomberg, holding positions including bureau chief in Chicago, Tokyo and Washington before becoming managing editor for the Americas and then managing editor overseeing Bloomberg’s initial coverage of government regulation and government contracts. Before Bloomberg, he was a reporter and columnist for Crain Communications in Chicago, a business reporter for the Chicago Tribune, and a reporter and editor in the Chicago bureau of The Wall Street Journal. He began his career as a reporter at The Pantagraph in Bloomington, Ill.
The professorships will enable students at the two 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.
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. Three professors taught in spring 2013 at Central Michigan University, Elon University and Louisiana State University. The Reynolds Visiting Professorships are modeled on successful programs at Washington and Lee University and the Cronkite School. The Reynolds Center also sponsors a four-day seminar for prospective business journalism professors, for which fellowships are available to attend for its eighth annual session Jan. 2-5, 2014.
Besides teaching courses in business journalism, visiting professors will help establish partnerships with local media and contribute to BusinessJournalism.org, the Reynolds Center’s site to help journalists cover business better. The program also includes funding for student internships and guest lectures by professional business journalists.
