UA professor receives honor

National award recognizes efforts for diversity in journalism

A University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, journalism professor has been named the recipient of the 2017 Barry Bingham Sr. Fellowship.

Gerald Jordan, 68, an associate professor of journalism, will receive the $1,000 award at the American Society of News Editors' annual convention in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 10.

The award is given each year to an educator to recognize efforts that encourage minority-group students to study journalism.

Last year, Jordan received the Arkansas Press Association's Distinguished Service Award. The association cited Jordan for being "actively involved in diversity efforts at the U of A, working with three chancellors to recruit, retain and support talented African-American and other minority students, staff and faculty."

Jordan helped establish the Lemke Journalism Project, which was designed to bring more minority-group students interested in journalism to the university.

In 2010, he received the Silas Hunt Legacy Award, presented for contributing to the diversity of the institution and for professional achievement. He also received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Northwest Arkansas Martin Luther King Jr. Planning Committee.

Jordan earned a bachelor's degree in journalism at UA in 1970 and a master's in journalism from Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., in 1971. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., in 1982.

He joined the UA faculty in 1995, after working for The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Kansas City Star and The Boston Globe.

Other winners of the Fellowship are:

• James Hawkins, Florida A&M University (1990).

• Larry Kaggwa, Howard University (1992).

• Ben Holman, University of Maryland (1996).

• Linda Jones, Roosevelt University, Chicago (1998).

• Ramon Chavez, University of Colorado, Boulder (1999).

• Erna Smith, San Francisco State (2000).

• Joseph Selden, Penn State (2001).

• Cheryl Smith, Paul Quinn College (2002).

• Rose Richard, Marquette University (2003).

• Leara Rhodes, University of Georgia (2004).

• Denny McAuliffe, University of Montana (2005)

• Pearl Stewart, Black College Wire (2006).

• Valerie White, Florida A&M University (2007).

• Phillip Dixon, Howard University (2008).

• Bruce DePyssler, North Carolina Central University (2009).

• Sree Sreenivasan, Columbia University (2010).

• Yvonne Latty, New York University (2011).

• Michelle Johnson, Boston University (2012).

• Vanessa Shelton, University of Iowa (2013).

• William Drummond, University of California, Berkeley (2014).

• Julian Rodriguez, University of Texas at Arlington (2015).

• David Armstrong, Georgia State University (2016).

NW News on 08/28/2017

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