It is often said that there is no apprenticeship in journalism, and Richard Roth's “history, story and narrative” presentation will talk about his own experience as a rookie reporter coming of age in a foreboding American prison called Attica, one part of an American system that holds more than 2 million people captive, more than in any other nation. Roth was one of two newspaper reporters inside the prison yard at Attica during the September 9-13 riots in 1971, serving on the Select Observers Committee, and his subsequent writing about Attica earned him a 1972 nomination for the Pulitzer Prize.
Professor Roth gave this Keynote Presentation at The 8th Asian Conference on Media, Communication & Film (MediAsia2017) in Kobe, Japan.
Richard Roth
Professor Richard Roth has been at Northwestern University in Qatar from its beginning in 2008. Before that, he was Associate Dean, then Senior Associate Dean, of the Medill School of Journalism on the Northwestern campus in Evanston, Illinois for 10 years. Roth has been an educator since 1990, except for a brief stint as a guest editor at The Wall Street Journal in New York at the time that publication launched its online edition, then called wsjie.com, now wsj.com. Before going to The Journal, Roth was tenured on the English faculty at DePauw University in Greencastle, Ind., where he also served as the adviser to the student newspaper, The DePauw. Before academe, Roth was a newspaperman, having been Editor-in-Chief of the Tribune-Star in Terre Haute, Ind., and a reporter at the late and lamented Buffalo (N.Y.) Courier-Express. He has won dozens of awards for his reporting and writing. Roth has served on the national board of directors of the Society of Professional Journalists, was an international vice president of The Newspaper Guild, president of the Indiana Associated Press Managing Editors association, and academic adviser to the US Project for Excellence in Journalism. He currently serves on the Dean’s Council for the College of Graduate and Professional Studies at Indiana State University, is a member of the National Security Journalism Initiative advisory board at the Medill School of Journalism and is a member of the Advisory Board for the Mass Communication Program at Qatar University.
