Neal Shine Lecture Thursday features the Detroit Free Press team that broke the Kwame Kilpatrick scandal

Wow. I have been delinquent. Too much has been going on, and I let my blog slide.

Sorry!

Thursday we are hosting what is the biggest event of the term—the 8th annual Neal Shine Ethics Lecture. The Detroit Free Press team of M.L. Elrick (a J-School alum), Jim Schaefer (an Ohio State alum—we still like him despite that!) and visual journalist Brian Kaufman are the featured speakers for the lecture: Watchdog Journalism Detroit Style: The Kwame Kilpatrick Mayoral Scandal. Be there at 4 p.m., in 145 CAS. If you miss it, you will be able to see it later on www.mogulus.com/SpartanTV. The late Neal Shine would have been so proud of his staff and their excellent, ethical reporting work. And there is likely more to come! Miss you, dear friend. You were the greatest editor ever and the soul and conscience of the Free Press. Your legacy lives on with this lecture.

Last weekend, we held our Knight Center for Environmental Journalism fundraiser, Green on the Screen featuring more than a dozen environmentally oriented documentaries including two produced by students in our classes and two more children’s films produced by alums. It was a great, green weekend.

Major Jeremy Whiting was recently honored as a Future Journalism Teacher by the Journalism Education Association at its meeting in St. Louis last weekend.

Alum Derek Wallbank and current J-School adjunct faculty member Christ Andrews, both formerly of the Lansing State Journal shared top honors in The Excellence in Statehouse Reporting award, known in the group as a "Cappie," was for their "State Employees: Under Siege?" report, which ran earlier this year. The duo won in the category of single report for newspapers under 75,000 circulation. The report, which came a few weeks after the LSJ published a database of most state employees' salaries, was designed as an in-depth look at the state employee compensation system - particularly how state workers compared to professionals in other states and to the private sector.

Our curriculum revision team led by Darcy Greene is putting the final touches on reinventing journalism education. The grand roll out will be at the J-School faculty meeting next month. Then we start the approval process.

Our proposed M.A. in Journalism Education is nearing the final approval process thanks to the excellent work of Cheryl Pell and Lucinda Davenport and our colleagues in the College of Education, especially Associate Dean Cass Book and Secondary Ed chair Suzanne Wilson. Both are true facilitators of great ideas.

We finished next year’s schedule, are actively engaged in a search for a new tenure line faculty member in digital journalism and have started our search for a new dean for the College.

Then there was the election. Our students were all over it broadcasting for four hours live from four remote locations on SpartanTV. If you missed it you can check it out at www.mogulus.com/spartanTV. Great job by our students (including some from the Telecom Department), the CAS IT folks and faculty members Bob Gould and Troy Hale. Meanwhile, other J-School students and others were blogging live to The Detroit News and still others were covering polls and coverage for other news organizations.

Whew! It’s been busy. I will do better on keeping you updated.