Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Steve Woodward is joining the UBC Graduate School of Journalism for the coming academic year 2015-2016.
Woodward brings to the school more than three decades of experience as an editor and reporter for major metropolitan daily newspapers in the U.S., with a track record in pioneering new approaches to journalism.
“I’m absolutely thrilled by the opportunity to teach at this renowned journalism school with its world-class faculty and students,” he said.
Woodward comes to the University of British Columbia from Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Wash., where he taught journalism, transmedia, communication ethics, and media and culture for two years.
“The students will benefit greatly from Steve’s wealth of experience and from his passion to explore new directions for journalism,” said UBC Journalism director, Alfred Hermida.
Multimedia teaching
As a sessional instructor, Woodward will teach in the school’s foundation first-year course, Integrated Journalism, which prepares students to tell stories with impact across all media.
Students gain hands-on experience to learn how to think and operate like a professional journalist in a multimedia environment.
He will also teach the undergraduate Journalism 100 course in the Media Studies stream of the Coordinated Arts Program.
The course explores how technological, social and cultural changes brought about by new media are transforming how people learn about the world around them.
Award-winning track record
Woodward began his career at The Kansas City Star in Kansas City, Mo. He was part of the newspaper’s team that won the Pulitzer Prize for General Local Reporting on the 1981 Hyatt Regency Hotel skywalks collapse that killed 113 people.
He went on to spend 20 years at The Oregonian as an editor and reporter. During his time there, he won a National Headliner Award for coverage of the Enron scandal and several awards for his coverage of the first Roman Catholic archdiocese bankruptcy in the wake of priest sex-abuse scandals. The U.S. Small Business Administration named him Oregon’s Journalist of the Year for his coverage of the Y2K computer crisis.
He left the newspaper industry in 2008 to turn his attention to new forms of digital storytelling and to journalism education as an entrepreneur and instructor.
Woodward has an M.A. from the University of Missouri School of Journalism and is a member of the Asian American Journalists Association.
