Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, is the recipient of the 2010 DeWitt Carter Reddick Award, recognizing outstanding people in the field of communication. It is one of the highest honors given by The University of Texas at Austin College of Communication.
He will accept the award during the College of Communication Honors Day Convocation, for which he is the keynote speaker, at 5:30 p.m., today, at the Texas Union Ballroom. The title of his speech is “State of the News Media 2010–The New News Consumer.”
Rosenstiel designed and directs the Project for Excellence in Journalism, which uses empirical research to evaluate and study the performance of the press. He also serves as vice chair of the Committee of Concerned Journalists, an initiative engaged in conducting a national conversation among journalists about standards and values.
A journalist for more than 20 years, Rosenstiel is a former media critic for the Los Angeles Times and MSNBC’s The News with Brian Williams, and a former chief congressional correspondent for Newsweek magazine.
He is the author, with journalist Bill Kovach, of “The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect” (Crown 2001), which is a required text in almost every journalism school in the country and has been translated into more than 18 languages, and “Warp Speed: America in The Age of Mixed Media” (Century Foundation 1999). He also is the author of “Strange Bedfellows: How Television and the Presidential Candidates Changed American Politics” (Hyperion 1993) and “We Interrupt This Newscast: How to Improve TV News and Win Ratings, Too” (Cambridge University Press 2007).
DeWitt Carter Reddick was the first dean of the College of Communication. He also was director of the School of Journalism from 1959 to 1965, teaching thousands of journalism students, including Walter Cronkite, Lady Bird Johnson, Ben Sargent and Karen Elliott House, from 1927 until his retirement in 1975.
Established in 1974, the DeWitt Carter Reddick Award recognizes excellence in the field of communication. Past Reddick Award recipients include Walter Cronkite, Molly Ivins, Nicholas Lemann, Bill Moyers, William S. Paley, William J. Raspberry, Helen Thomas, Ted Turner and Bill Wittliff, among others.
