Michael R. Smith

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SOME OF THE TOPICS DISCUSSED DURING THE INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL R. SMITH INCLUDE:

• One of the first hurdles is you have to get a PhD, which is a research degree.
  
• The only thing for sure we know about communication is we tend to get it wrong.
• Communications is one of those rare fields that we do accept professional experience. 
• For people who are interested in blogging; you need to understand that most people are really not that interested in your opinion.
• It takes an enormous amount of effort to write in a detached way and to have a sense of neutrality. 
• We have to work very hard to source our information.
• All of us would profit from shadowing somebody who is a professor.

ADDITIONAL DETAILS ABOUT MICHAEL SMITH

Dr. Michael Ray Smith is professor of Communication Studies at Campbell University. In an independent search, journalismdegrees.org recognized Smith as one of “Top 50 journalism professors for 2012.” The list was created using independent research with the sole purpose of being a resource.

Also in 2012 Campbell University selected him from 216 professors for its first university-wide teaching excellence award. In 2001-2002 he was recognized as professor of the year.

In 2011 World Journalism Institute, Manhattan, named him the John McCandlish Phillips Scholar. Philips was the internationally-known reporter for The New York Times in the 1960s.

Smith earned a Ph.D. from Regent University and taught at state and private universities, at graduate and undergraduate schools and is a professor of communication studies at Campbell University.

An award-winning journalist and photographer, he has been quoted in the New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, The Philadelphia Inquirer, USA Today, The Arizona Republic, The Christian Science Monitor, The Louisville Courier-Journal, Editor & Publisher, Christianity Today, Writer’s Digest and many other periodicals. He has been a guest on radio and TV including French TV 24, a Paris-based television broadcast, and online sites such as Ourblook.com.

He has written five books, 12 journal articles and hundreds of articles for the popular press. FeatureWriting.Net explores popular writing and The Jesus Newspaper explores the idea of the Christian journalist. His A Free Press in Freehand: The Spirit of American Blogging in the Handwritten Newspapers of John McLean Harrington 1858-1869 was released in 2011. He reviews articles for two peer-reviewed journals and is active in two national communication associations.

He was a featured speaker at many writer conferences. Michael spent a decade working in the newsroom and more than two decades working in the classroom.

In 2008 Shippensburg University, his graduate school, honored him as a Distinguished Alumnus of the Year, the highest award presented by the university. That same year Prince George’s Community College in suburban Washington, D.C., recognized him as one of its top 50 graduates.

Michael and Barbara Smith, Lillington, N.C., have two adult daughters. Shannon, married, works in public relations in Kingsport, Tenn., and Taylor, is a French student at the Sorbonne, Paris.

As an educator, I am in a relentless quest to be a better teacher. I’ve seen students laugh with me, a joy, and I’ve seen students look bewildered, a burden. Nearly 15 years ago, William G. Christ of Trinity University in San Antonio presented a paper at an AEJMC convention on teaching models. He used a series of metaphors to capture the student-educator dynamic. The metaphor that worked best for me was his idea of the teacher as a tour guide who had traveled a road often and knows when to highlight certain vistas and when to allow the participants to struggle as part of the growth process that is the journey. That metaphor works well in the journalism classroom where simple ideas such as the use of a variety of leads must be balanced with the idea that communication is a complex system where meaning can be hijacked more easily than it can be tamed.

You can also find additional information about Michael Ray Smith at this link.

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