First Poynter KSU award goes to Poynter’s point person

When the first Poynter KSU Excellence in Media Ethics award was handed out today (Thursday, Sept. 18), it seemed almost pre-determined that it would go to Bob Steele. 

Bob Steele

After all, he IS the Nelson Poynter Scholar for Journalism Values who has taught hundreds of workshops and thousands of journalists and media leaders at Poynter seminars since 1989. 

And the Poynter Ethics faculty moderates the KSU Poynter workshop.

Colleges all over the country do this mutual back-scratching and back-patting thing, so it's not only at Kent State. If a celebrity will show up at a college graduation, they'll give him an honorary doctorate even if he can't spell the words.

The Poynter KSU Media Ethics Workshop in Kent is the 10^th organized by former BJ editor Jan Leach, on the Kent State faculty – a role many ex-BJ management people wind up with.

Steele continued in the Poynter Values Scholar role after he joins his alma mater, DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, as the Eugene S. Pulliam Visiting Distinguished Professor of Journalism. He teaches journalism ethics classes to DePauw students and also serves as a scholar-in-residence at DePauw’s Janet Prindle Institute for Ethics.

He co-authored “Doing Ethics in Journalism,” originally published by The Society for Professional Journalists. He spent ten years as a broadcast journalist.

The Poynter KSU Media Ethics Workshop is a one-day training program for professionals, educators and students which examines media ethics. It is moderated by the Poynter ethics faculty.

KSU’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication is in its 77^th year.

The BJ’s Bruce Winges and Doug Oplinger and the PD’s Connie Schultz have participated in previous Poynter KSU Ethics workshops.

The first time I met Nelson Poynter, the St. Petersburg Times owner, was for the monthly ushering of new Times personnel into his grandiose office (much more pretentious than John S. Knight’s corner office, which is another reason JSK towered over Poynter and other newspaper owners for decades).

The custom was to round up everyone who had been employed within the 30 most recent days and have Poynter welcome us to his royal playground and give us a glimpse of his philosophy.

He’s not John Knight. But, then, who is or was?

I will give Nelson Poynter this: His newspaper was lightyears ahead of the BJ and most other newspapers when it came to technology, particularly the German printing presses. 

I was at the St. Pete Times (they hate and ban using “Pete”) in 1966-67 and it was 20 years later before the BJ achieved the level of color quality that I worked with in St. Petersburg.

We all have our areas of superiority.