Category: Class Notes

WWL-TV Evening Anchor & Investigative Reporter Katie Moore was honored with a crystal pillar at the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences national News & Documentary Awards in September 2023 in the Outstanding Regional Report: Investigative Reporting category. Moore’s national honor was for a series of investigative reports she did on the horrific conditions more than 800 nursing home residents endured during Hurricane Ida and the business dealings of the nursing homes’ owner. Moore has received 8 regional Emmy Awards throughout her TV News career.

Rebecca Bowman, Vivek Shankar and Michelle McGovern – all Medill graduates – met in Seoul, where Rebecca and Vivek live, while Michelle was vacationing with her family. Vivek works at The NY Times Asia desk, Rebecca is a freelance writer and editor and Michelle is the General Counsel of a health tech company.

Benoit Denizet-Lewis, an associate professor at Emerson College and a longtime writer with The New York Times Magazine, received a Public Scholar Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The award will allow Denizet-Lewis to take a one-year leave from Emerson to complete his fourth book, “We Don’t Know You Anymore,” about transformation and identity change in turbulent times. The book will be published by William Morrow in the USA and Penguin Press in the UK.

Brett Kurland was named an assistant dean at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism & Mass Communication in December 2021.

As assistant dean, Kurland oversees the school’s 11 capstone professional immersion programs, Cronkite’s signature faculty-led, student-powered experiences in which students learn by doing. These hands-on experiences include daily news and sports operations, a strategic communications agency, a content creation studio, and an innovation and entrepreneurship lab. Kurland also leads training and onboarding for faculty associates, helping them learn everything from school policies to best practices in teaching.

He also helps lead the Cronkite School’s bachelor’s and master’s degree programs in sports journalism, including oversight and management of sports journalism curriculum, course design, hiring, training, and supervising faculty, and managing student award submissions.

Kurland, a professor of practice at Cronkite since 2014, is the lead instructor for Multimedia Journalism Skills, a foundational, intensive first-semester class for all Cronkite graduate students pursuing master’s degrees in mass communication, master’s degrees in investigative journalism and master’s degrees in sports journalism in which students learn how to write, capture and produce photo, video, audio, social, and web content.

In June 2023, David Plazas (MSJ, ’00) received the Society of Professional Journalists’ annual Sigma Delta Chi Award for Excellence in Editorial Writing. Plazas, the Opinion and Engagement Director of The Tennessean, advocated for LGBTQ+ rights in a state whose lawmakers have been intent on restricting them. SPJ has granted this prize since 1932 to recognize excellence in journalism.
https://www.spj.org/sdxa22.asp

Vidya Krishnamurthy was named Chief Communications Officer and Senior Adviser to the President at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, a private charitable foundation in Menlo Park, CA. She was previously Director of Communications at the same organization, and before that, was the first-ever Communications Director at the Pew Research Center in Washington, DC, where she served for nearly a decade.