Categories
2010s Class Notes Featured Class Notes

Kalyn Kahler (BSJ15)

Kalyn Kahler reported and hosted an investigative podcast series called “Spiraled” which tells the story of Packers legend Kabeer Gbaja-Biamila and several other ex-NFL players, like Colts star Robert Mathis, who joined an extreme religious group and left their wives and children behind to follow the group’s charismatic leader. Gbaja-Biamila was a local hero in Green Bay until a very strange and public incident turned him from a Packer to a pariah. As she figured out what happened to Kabeer, Kahler dug into the controversial history of the group, and uncovered more ex-NFL players who had a similar spiral. The podcast is an extension of Kahler’s three-part investigative series for Sports Illustrated, which was named an honorable selection in Best American Sports Writing, and won the Pro Football Writers Association’s annual enterprise award.

You can find “Spiraled” wherever you listen to podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/spiraled/id1763809519?i=1000666769306

Categories
2000s Class Notes Featured Class Notes

Craig Tiede (MSJ06)

Craig Tiede graduated from the University of Virginia Darden School of Business in May 2024 as a member of the Class of 2024 Global Executive MBA program. He was conferred a degree in Master of Business Administration.

Categories
1980s Class Notes Featured Class Notes

Amy Wilen-Buckman (BSJ86, MSJ86)

Amy Wilen-Buckman received the Philadelphia Public Relations Association’s 2024 PRoActive Community Service Award. The award is given to a PR professional who dedicates their time to support the betterment of their community and serves as an exemplary model of selfless service. Buckman is the Director of School and Community Relations for the Lower Merion School District.

Categories
2000s Class Notes Featured Class Notes

Matthew Rolnick (IMC08)

Matthew Rolnick recently tag teamed with Hulk Hogan to join Real American Beer. Matthew is the Senior Vice President of Partnerships and Events. Real American Beer has secured retail partnerships with ABC Fine Wine & Spirits, Albertsons, Safeway, Sam’s Club, Total Wine & More, Walmart and more. The product is an “American-style” light lager brewed with 100% North American ingredients. Real American Beer’s mission is to bring America together, one beer at a time.

Categories
1980s Class Notes Featured Class Notes

Leigh Ann Winnick (BSJ84)

Leigh Ann Winick was named Lead Medical Producer for CBS Network News. She was previously medical producer for CBS Mornings. Earlier this year, Winick was awarded Best Television report from the American Association for Cancer Research.

Categories
1980s Class Notes Featured Class Notes

Susanni Douville (MSJ80)

Susanni Douville is retiring from the U.S. District Court for the District of Maine on July 31, 2024, after 26 years as a career law clerk to three successive U.S. Magistrate Judges. After obtaining her M.S.J. from Medill in 1980, she worked as a copy editor at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, The Washington Post, and the Hartford Courant before switching career gears and obtaining her J.D. from Yale Law School in 1990. She looks forward to decompressing, spending more time with family and friends, including her husband, John R. Hull, Jr., and daughters Kate and Christie Hull, and being able to savor sunrises (with coffee) and sunsets (with wine) at home in Harpswell, Maine, instead of commuting on I-295.

Categories
2000s Featured Class Notes

Ian Douglass (MSJ06)

Ian Douglass was inducted into the Pro Wrestling Authors Hall of Fame in June.

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Books

Muddy the Water

Matt Barrows (MSJ97)

When a popular fishing captain is murdered on his own trawler, everyone in Haversport, Massachusetts, knows the culprit is a young deckhand named Ben Broome, including Detective Lillian Grimes. But Ben has discovered the perfect hiding place: as a reporter writing for the tiny Coastal Packet, a newspaper down in South Carolina.

A half-eaten body washes in, becomes the biggest story in the paper’s history and brings cunning, charismatic Ben unexpected success. But it also leads Grimes closer to the truth. She soon teams up with hungry rival reporter Florence Park to hunt Ben down before he can charm—or kill—his way to freedom.
Shown from three perspectives, killer, detective, and reporter, Muddy the Water brings readers inside the newsroom of a struggling small newspaper on the bucolic South Carolina coast and speaks to the concept of identity—and whether anyone ever shows their true self.

Categories
Books

Everybody Needs an Editor

Melissa Harris (BSJ02)

Melissa Harris is co-author of the new book “Everybody Needs an Editor: The Essential Guide to Clear and Effective Writing,” written with Jenn Bane and edited by Mark Jacob. The book, published by Simon Element, is a guide for contemporary times, advising readers how to use ChatGPT without sacrificing their humanity, how to write emails that will actually get opened, and how to deliver a presentation that will keep colleagues off their phones.

One of the key points in the book is that Artificial Intelligence doesn’t mean people can stop worrying about the quality of their writing. It actually means the opposite – people must write extremely well to stand out from the crowd. And if they use AI, they have to know how to edit it to avoid disaster.

The book is fun to read – not at all preachy. As Publishers Weekly put it: “The authors can be delightfully snarky, such as when they caution against turning nouns into verbs and ridicule a job posting that used ‘laddering’ as a verb: ‘Garage the laddering. Unless you need to reach a kitten who is treeing.’”

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Magazine Issues

Medill Magazine Issue 106

Issue 106 focuses on faculty at Medill, including the Northwestern Prison Education Program and the new George R.R. Martin Writer’s Workshop.