Editorial Board

Andrea Breemer Frantz, Ph.D., is department head and associate professor of communication at Robert Morris University in Pittsburgh.  She has spent the past two and half decades teaching journalism and communication at the undergraduate level and has been active in AEJMC’s Civic and Citizen Journalism and Community Journalism Interest Groups.  Her interest in community journalism stems from her first experience in the field as a reporter for a small, family-owned newspaper in Grinnell, Iowa, and subsequent freelance work.  In addition, other passions include a deep dedication to First Amendment education and student mentoring projects that link with community initiatives, and new/social media initiatives, in particular, how media technology advancements may be help drive curriculum change.

Dr. Reader worked as a reporter, photographer, columnist, copy editor, and opinion page editor for a number of community newspapers in central Pennsylvania before leaving the profession to teach journalism at the collegiate level. He has taught journalism at The Pennsylvania State University (his alma mater), the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University. His research has been published in journals including Newspaper Research Journal, Journal of Mass Media Ethics, Journalism: Theory, Practice, and Criticism, Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, and Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly. He is co-author (with Steven Knowlton, Dublin City University) of Moral Reasoning for Journalists (second edition) and is co-editor (with John Hatcher, University of Minnesota Duluth) of the forthcoming book, The Foundations of Community Journalism (under contract with SAGE). At Ohio University, he teaches courses in news editing, media ethics, and community journalism. He is a founding member and past chair of the Community Journalism Interest Group of AEJMC, and is an academic partner and steering-committee member of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues.

Dr. Bentley is a veteran community newspaper journalist who is now an associate professor at the Missouri School of Journalism’s print and digital news program and was a 2009-2010 Fellow of the Reynolds Journalism Institute. He was in the newspaper industry for two decades as a reporter, editor, ad manager and general manager before earning his doctorate at the University of Oregon in 2000. He has a master’s degree from the University of Texas and undergraduate degrees from Shasta College and Pepperdine University. His research and teaching focuses on mobile phone journalism, citizen journalism, audience analysis and editorial writing.

Dr. Cuillier is an associate professor in the University of Arizona School of Journalism, chairman of the Society of Professional Journalists’ Freedom of Information Committee, and incoming head (for 2011-12) of the AEJMC Law & Policy Division. Before entering academia, he was a reporter and editor at community newspapers in the Pacific Northwest. His courses taught have included reporting, computer-assisted reporting, access to government information, media law, ethics. He applies quantitative methods in examining issues in freedom of information, political communication, and psychological aspects of journalism. With Charles Davis, he co-authored The Art of Access: Strategies for Acquiring Public Records, published in 2010.

Fisher is an instructor at the University of South Carolina, where he has been on the faculty since 2001, and executive editor of The Convergence Newsletter. He has also taught at Ohio State University, where he was a Kiplinger Fellow and earned a master’s in journalism. Fisher spent about 30 years as a practicing journalists in radio, TV, newspapers and the wire service, the last 18 at the Associated Press, where he was a managing correspondent and news editor. His specialities include newsroom organization, management and new media models; digital reporting and presentation; social media; editing; and community and hyperlocal journalism. Fisher founded the Hartsville Today site, one of the original online local site. He is the past head of the Community Journalism Interest Group of AEJMC; co-author of Principles of Convergent Journalism (2009), which is going into second edition; and author of the Common Sense Journalism monthly column that has been used by press associations and other news organizations around the country.

Dr. Littau has almost 10 years of experience in journalism after working at newspapers of different sizes, specializing in editing and writing both in print and online, most recently at the Los Angeles Daily News until 2004. He earned his M.A. in journalism from Missouri in 2007 and his Ph.D. in journalism from Missouri in 2009. While at Missouri, he helped launch MyMissourian.com, one of the first citizen journalism sites in the U.S. and the first ever launched within the university system as a vehicle for both practical experience and research. Littau studies sociological concepts of community, particularly in the area of social capital as it relates to measures of community strength and democratic function. His specific interest in media is online media. Beyond traditional community, he specializes in virtual communities of interest that exist both in online spaces and as groupings around social media.

Dr. Hatcher has worked as a journalist, educator, newsroom trainer and writing coach since 1992. He earned his Ph.D. from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications in the fall of 2007. He taught journalism to graduate and undergraduate students at Syracuse from 2003 to 2006. Before that, he was education director at the Center for Community Journalism, based at the State University of New York at Oswego, where he taught a course that produced on online community newspaper. Dr. Hatcher has visited newspapers across the nation and conducted workshops at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies and the American Press Institute. He still works as an independent consultant and freelance journalist. From 1992 to 2003, he worked for The Daily Messenger, a small daily newspaper in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. As a freelance writer, he has published articles in the American Journalism Review, the Columbia Journalism Review, Mother Jones and numerous online publications.

Elizabeth K. Hansen is interim chair and Foundation Professor in the Department of Communication at Eastern Kentucky University, where she has taught since 1987. Her research interests include community journalism, media ethics, media law, and media effects. Since 1991, her Community Journalism classes at EKU have conducted more than a dozen research studies for Kentucky community newspapers. Hansen is the former head of the Community Journalism Interest Group of AEJMC. She was a member of the Advisory Board that founded the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues and now chairs the Institute’s Steering Committee made up of its 28 academic partners in 18 states. Hansen has worked for community newspapers in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Kentucky. Before coming to EKU, she taught at Iowa State University, the University of Southern Mississippi and the University of Kentucky. She is a member of the International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors and the national Boards of Directors of the Society of Professional Journalists and the Sigma Delta Chi Foundation. She holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Arkansas, a master’s degree in journalism and mass communication from Iowa State University, and a Ph.D. in communication with emphases in media law and ethics from the University of Kentucky.

is Professor, Director of Journalism, and the founding holder of the Shirley Papé Chair in Emerging Media in the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon. He is a fellow with the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, an affiliate fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, and a recent visiting fellow at the University of Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. He is Chair of the International Communication Association’s Journalism Studies Division, the world’s largest group dedicated to the study of journalism.

Lewis’ research focuses on the social implications of emerging technologies, with emphasis on what such dynamics mean for journalism—from how news is made (news production) to how people make sense of it in their everyday lives (news consumption).

Tommy Thomason is the founding director of the Texas Center for Community Journalism. Dr. Thomason began his career in journalism in the early 1970s with the Associated Press, working as a sportswriter in Arkadelphia and Little Rock, Arkansas. He has also worked in public relations in Dallas and as a copyeditor for several regional magazines. Dr. Thomason has taught journalism at five universities and has been at TCU since 1984. In 1987, he was one of the winners of a national Teaching Award in Journalism Ethics from the Poynter Institute of Media Studies. He was the founding director of the TCU Schieffer School of Journalism and stepped down from that position in 2009 to found TCCJ. He was one of the original researchers on the media treatment of crime victims in the 1980s, and he was co-director of the first national symposium on crime victims and the news media, which was televised nationally on C-SPAN, and a symposium on coverage of sex crimes, Sex in the Media: The Public’s Right to Know vs. the Victim’s Right to Privacy. He maintains an interest in writing at all academic levels, and frequently speaks to elementary school teachers about writing workshops for children. He is the author of six books on teaching writing.