HU Welcomes Acclaimed Journalist Bill Kovach to lecture on reporting
and national security

Hampton, VA -

Acclaimed journalists Bill Kovach and Les Payne will be keynote speakers during the 30th Annual Media Symposium March 4 at Hampton University’s Scripps Howard School of Journalism and Communications.

The symposium theme is “Remembering the Past, Redefining the Future: Thirty Years of Excellence,” which honors professionals who continue to pave a way for future communicators. Media executives visit HU and share their experience, wisdom and knowledge in journalism and communications, as well as give students an opportunity to interact and network with professionals. Sessions will feature an alumni panel discussing “Trying to Survive in the Real World,” and “Real World Survivors.” Career sessions will focus on opportunities in print, broadcast, advertising, public relations and media management.

In addition to Kovach and Payne, other symposium guests will include Judith Clabes, president and CEO of the Scripps Howard Foundation; Ron Carrington, a Hampton alumnus who coordinated the first symposium; Robert Robinson, deputy managing editor of Sports, USA Today; Drew Berry, general manager of WMAR-TV in Baltimore; and Kendra Hatcher, director of strategic research and Insight for Starcom MediaVest Group Worldwide/New York.

Kovach, originally scheduled to appear earlier this month, will give a free lecture to students and the public entitled “Journalism in a Time of Crisis” on March 4 at 9:30 a.m. in the Hampton University Student Center Ballroom C. The lecture immediately follows a continental breakfast from 9 a.m. until 9:30 a.m.

Kovach, who is chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists and retired curator of the Nieman Foundation’s journalism fellowships at Harvard University, will discuss the relationship between journalists and the government in a time of crisis, journalistic independence, distinctions between being a journalist and being an American, and evaluating the national security implications of reporting. A journalist and writer for 43 years, his early career included reporting for the Nashville Tennessean, covering the civil rights movement, southern politics and Appalachian poverty.

In 1968, after a year of study on a journalism fellowship at Stanford University, he joined the New York Times where he worked for 18 years, eventually becoming chief of the Times Washington Bureau. He later was editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for two years, during which time the paper won two Pulitzer Prizes.

Payne will deliver the symposium’s luncheon address March 4 at 11:30 a.m. in the University Student Center Ballroom. A Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, Payne is associate managing editor for national, science, and international news at Newsday, and a columnist for the Tribune Media Services. Payne has recently been given responsibility for Newsday's Queens edition. His news staffs have won every major award in journalism, including three recent Pulitzer Prizes.

As a reporter, Payne won a Pulitzer Prize when along with other reporters, he put together the 1974 series, "The Heroin Trail,'' which traced the international flow of heroin from the poppy fields of Turkey to the veins of drug addicts in the New York City area. Payne spent more than six months in Europe on the story, reporting from Istanbul, Ankara, Munich, Cyprus, Nice, Paris, Athens, Rome, Corsica, and Marseilles. The 33-part Newsday series also was published in book form.

As an investigative reporter, Payne has covered Long Island migrant farm workers, involuntary sterilization, illegal immigrants, The Black Panther Party, the Symbionese Liberation Army and the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. He covered the kidnapping of newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst and authored "The Life and Death of the SLA,'' a book about his investigative account of the revolutionary band that terrorized the West Coast.

For more information, please contact Rosalynne Whitaker-Heck, interim director, Scripps Howard School of Journalism and Communications at (757) 727-5405, or e-mail rosalynne.whitaker-heck@hamptonu.edu.