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Category: 2000s

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Joseph Angotti – Former Medill Broadcast Faculty

joe angotti head shot

Revered former faculty member Joe Angotti died on January 25, 2026.

He was 87.

In 2005, Joe and his wife, Karen, co-founded Rainbow Riders Therapeutic Riding Center in Monmouth, IL where the Angotti’s had moved into a house built on Karen’s father’s former 12 acres, Bowman Meadow Farm.

Rainbow Riders is a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing safe, professional, and affordable therapeutic horseback riding and un-mounted horsemanship opportunities that contribute positively to the physical, cognitive, emotional, and social well-being of children and adults with special needs in the community. Our team of experienced instructors and volunteers work together to create a supportive environment for our riders, where they can build confidence, develop new skills, and make meaningful connections with the horses and other riders.

When Joe and Karen were raising their three sons Drew, Mark and Joe, in various cities over the years, the Angottis made sure they spent time in Monmouth during the summers, where they also learned to ride horses.

Here’s what Joe’s Medill community members had to say about one of the school’s most beloved faculty member:

Sheinelle Jones (BSJ00)

My name is Sheinelle Jones, and I have the honor of saying that I was one of the countless students Professor Angotti touched with his wisdom and kindness. In his class at Northwestern University, he made us all better writers and storytellers. I’m *constantly*…. to this day, sharing my favorite memories from his class. In fact, just last week, I was sharing a memory from his class with my colleagues from The TODAY Show. In that moment, there were two of his former students on set – as I was with another Medill alum- Joe Fryer. We both cherished our days in Professor Angotti’s class. To his family, I’m sending you so much love. Please know he touched so many of us in countless ways – and his legacy lives on in all of us. ❤️

Joe Fryer (BSJ00)

“Professor Angotti joined Medill just in time for my senior year, and I’m so grateful our Northwestern lives overlapped. It’s not just because he literally brought Tom Brokaw into our classroom. It’s not just because he coordinated having our class featured prominently in a Dateline special. It’s because he cared deeply about all of us, freely sharing his volumes of broadcasting experience and knowledge, before giving us that final push out of the university nest as we embarked on our careers. His leadership and mentorship helped make the Northwestern News Network the envy of schools nationwide. Thank you, Professor Angotti, for making our profession better – one student, one class at a time.”

Mike Lowe (BSJ01, MSJ02)

Joe Angotti, who mined his legendary career at NBC News for countless lessons to teach young journalists, perhaps saved his most practical lecture for last. Every year, he would gather the seniors in the Louis Hall TV studio, and he would draw a graph of intersecting lines on the board. One pointing up. The other, pointing down. Underneath the graph he would write the words “suffer fools gladly.” His point was that in our careers, we would encounter people who “may not be the brightest bulbs.” He told us not to dim our lights to their levels. To respect others, and not engage in needless arguments. Then pointed to the graph: “you’ll see those same people when you’re on your way up, and they are on their way down.” Aside from the solid career advice, he taught me invaluable lessons about reporting including the memorable nugget “report long, write short.” I was fortunate to call him a professor, mentor, and friend.

Ben Harper (BSJ03, MSJ03) and  Dani Carlson Harper (BSJ06)

Professor Angotti was the definition of gravitas. His lived experience was legendary—you wanted to be around him to absorb whatever advice or anecdotes he might share. And being on the receiving end of his slightly bemused grin when he’d come to clear up something we *might* have done at NNN to cause a phone call from the administration felt like you’d earned a bit of his respect, too.

Larry Stuelpnagel – Medill Clinical Associate Professor Emeritus

Joe was an enthusiastic advisor. He strongly supported what was then called the broadcast program. Yes, he had a twinkle in his eye and heart.

Jack Doppelt – Medill Professor Emeritus

I recall vividly a heart wrenching exchange Joe and I had in 2002 when he was leading the Medill global program in Paris. It brought us closer together than I had anticipated, and provided a connection we savored after that. A few years later, Joe left Medill and moved to Monmouth, about 200 miles west of Chicago. We kept in touch a bit, enough for me to discover that he and his wife Karen opened Rainbow Riders, a therapeutic and recreational riding program for children with special needs. Back then, I promised to visit them on their farm. Here’s a story I kept as my bookmark to remind me to visit. I never got there. My loss.

David Nelson – Medill Professor Emeritus

For the record: I bought and brought the bocce balls [Yes, there was bocce playing happening at Medill. 

Joe bought and brought the sausages and chianti. Early games were on the 3rd floor outside of the then faculty lounge in what we used to call MTC. [Now MFC]. I do not remember Joe losing a single game. Perhaps the chianti worked.

Loren Ghiglione – Professor Emeritus and former Dean

I loved the few bocce games I played. My Italian name didn’t help me. I lost every time. I’m sorry to hear about Joe’s death. What he did after he left Medill tells you a lot about the quality of man. Helping kids, nothing better.

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Adam Amaro (BSJ07, MSJ07)

Adam Amaro died in January 2020.  Most recently he had been living in Portland, Oregon working at  KOIN-TV as a news producer. He produced the weekend 5:30, 6:00 and 11 p.m. newscasts and collaborated with reporters, managers, anchors, photographers, editors, and graphics artists to create powerful and informative shows.  Prior to moving to Portland he was a producer at KTBC-TV in Austin where he produced the 9 p.m. hour-long newscast. He also field produced various “7 On Your Side” pieces.

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Darran Simon (MSJ04)

Darran Simon

Published in the Washington Post – April 10, 2020

Byline: Adam Bernstein, Washington Post
Photo: Darran Simon while at CNN Digital. (Jeremy Freeman/CNN)

Darran Simon, a journalist who developed an expertise reporting on trauma during a wide-ranging career that had recently brought him to The Washington Post, where he covered District politics and government, died April 9, 2020. He was 43.

Simon was born in England and spent his childhood in the South American nation of Guyana and in New Jersey. In his professional life, he displayed restless curiosity as well as deep compassion for people who had endured natural catastrophe and man-made violence.

“I am drawn to writing about suffering and trauma,” he once noted, “because I am in awe of the human spirit’s ability to persevere.”
After two years as the Miami Herald’s minority affairs reporter, he moved to New Orleans in 2007 as an education reporter for the Times-Picayune, compelled to document the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. “Down the road, 35 years from now, when memories are all I have,” he told the University of Rhode Island alumni magazine, “I’ll be able to look back at this time and remember this experience.”

He wrote about school reconstruction and covered accountability issues as well as the upending of students’ lives in a city of dramatic inequities even before the storm. “History often depends on who is telling it,” he said. “My role is to try to understand it and paint a full picture.”

A reserved and conscientious reporter, he went on to cover crime for the Philadelphia Inquirer, was a general assignment reporter for Newsday, and was a senior writer with CNN Digital in Atlanta focusing on national and international breaking news before starting March 2 on The Post’s Metro staff.

In covering the city government’s preparations for handling the coronavirus outbreak, he reported on official pronouncements as well as delivering humane accounts of local victims of the disease, including a former “Jeopardy” contestant.

“Darran had an immediate impact at The Post with his talent, grace and earnest devotion to his work,” said Mike Semel, The Post’s top metro editor. “He was here barely a week when the city he was covering shut down because of coronavirus. But he forged ahead and found great stories to tell.

“Despite his short tenure,” Semel continued, “we entrusted him to write the main coronavirus news story several times over the past couple of weeks — taking feeds from his colleagues and weaving those into a coherent story. He worked so well with everyone and was a graceful, fluid writer. But beyond that, he was just a nice guy with an electric smile.”

Darran Anthony Simon was born in London to Guyanese students on March 18, 1977. He lived in Guyana until he was 9 before the family settled in Iselin, N.J. His mother is a middle-school teacher and his father, an accountant, is a securities regulator for the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority.

At the University of Rhode Island, Simon was on the men’s track and field team, won awards for student leadership and shared a top prize from the Association of Social and Behavioral Scientists for a comparative study on black student activism in the 1970s and the 1990s. He graduated in 1998 with a bachelor’s degree in English and, energized by his work on the campus newspaper, received a master’s degree in 2004 from Northwestern University’s journalism school.
His marriage to Karin Pryce ended in divorce. Survivors include his parents, Stephen Simon and Jacqueline Simon, both of Iselin; a brother; a sister; and a grandmother.

Simon brought particular sensitivity to follow-up interviews after a tragedy that served to humanize statistics. One example, for CNN, was a profile of the spiritual leader who took over the flock of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., after a white supremacist killed nine members, including its pastor, in 2015.

In July 2019, Simon was among 15 journalists chosen from about 300 applicants for the week-long Ochberg Fellowship at Columbia University journalism school’s Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma.
Dart Center Executive Director Bruce Shapiro called him a “quiet, curious and very deeply engaged journalist” who had spent years writing about survivors of violence in some of the toughest cities in the United States, from New Orleans to Camden, N.J., and how they cope with those experiences.

For all his drive to make loss more intimate, or perhaps because of it, Mr. Simon was also known as a roving epicure with a sharp understated cool to his wardrobe and an ear for sumptuous music. On his website,  Simon described himself as a “a foodie and a jazz lover who will travel anywhere for a good meal and a horn section.”