When veteran news executive Wanda Lloyd retired from daily newspaper work in 2012, she decided against leaving more than 40 years of experience on the shelf to gather dust. A few months after exiting her position as executive editor of the Montgomery Advertiser, Lloyd began her new role as chair of the mass communications department at Savannah State University in Georgia.
“I wanted a different and new challenge,” says Lloyd, who also serves as an assistant professor. “I felt I could bring some knowledge and resources to the students and school [that they] may not have had access to” in the past.
Lloyd’s transition from a ranking position in the newsroom to one in the classroom is just one example that is becoming increasingly common. These days, more seasoned journalists are finding their place in a community that has historically snubbed them — academia. Howard, Morgan State, Florida A&M, North Texas State, Hampton and Savannah State universities are leading the pack of institutions that have recruited seasoned journalists and news executives within the past year for positions in their departments of journalism and/or communication as deans or department chairs.
“The universities are beginning to realize great academics teach theory and great practitioners teach the how,” says DeWayne Wickham, chair of the new School of Global Journalism and Communications at Morgan State. “The academic community is recognizing to be competitive, they have to be capable of helping these kinds [of students] become talented practitioners.”
Learning from experience
Wickham says he has tried to form a faculty at the School of Global Journalism and Communications that possesses the skills and firepower from an industry that has changed dramatically since his days as a journalism student at the University of Maryland, where he got his start more than 30 years ago as state editor for The Diamondback, the independent student paper at the university.
