Cole Campbell Dies in SUV Accident
A few days ago I wrote about the death of friend and mentor Donald Murray, today I am heart broken to have to write about the death of Cole Campbell, another friend and mentor. The Reno Gazette-Journal reports:
Cole Campbell, dean of the journalism school at the University of Nevada, Reno, was killed today in a single-car rollover in southwest Reno. The accident occurred just before 10 a.m. near South McCarran Boulevard and Caughlin Parkway, Reno police said.
In my 30 years in newspapers, I never met a journalist as deep thinking and as brilliant as Cole; of course, that was played out after he left newspapers to become a fellow at the Kettering Foundati
on, which wallows in deep thinking, and then later when he was selected as the dean of the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno.
For me, I started practicing civic journalism first and then started to think about it. Cole, thought deeply about everything he did, and while he was an early practitioner of civic or public journalism, he was also among its most intellectual thought leaders. Here is an American Society of Newspaper Editors roundtable report on Cole’s thoughts in 1996 when he was editor of the Norfolk Virginian Pilot:
To the public journalist, readers are not just consumers, but citizens participating in the life of the community connecting “disparate elements to make sense of the world.”
In Cole’s mind that’s what journalism was suppose to do, help citizens in democratic societies make sense of life often via deliberation.
His footprint runs all through the PJNet.org, even to the initial online forums before there was a PJNet.org. Here he writes in November, 2002:
I think this society should be for journalists who in fact already identify themselves as interested in the relationship between journalism and democracy, who have been on the journey or realize they want to go on the journey to explore this relationship.
Why did you begin this work? Why did I? In most cases, journalists drawn to this work have experienced readers/listeners/viewers expressing their alienation from our journalism and have tried to figure out why that alienation occurs and what we can do about it.
That was Cole’s calling “to figure out why that alienation occurs and what we can do about it.” He was often criticized for the stance, but today, of course, everyone wants to know more about audience alienation and what we can do it about. Cole’s death takes away one very important thinker to help us figure it out. On the other hand, everyone who was a part of the civic journalism movement stands on the shoulders of his ideas and constructs. And those thoughts today carry over into the citizen journalism movement, which Cole once reminded me was not synonymous with civic journalism. He wrote:
We should take care to discern which kinds of citizen journalism build civic capacity and create publics or public relationships and which kinds serve other functions. An expanded interest group can study and teach and serve all kinds of civic, public and citizen journalism, but we should take care not to conflate them as all one and the same.
Of course, he was right, and those little comments often helped me focus my ideas. That’s why when I thought of the Journalism and the Public: Restoring the Trust project I turned to Cole and the Reynolds School of Journalism to be partners. In that conference and in the early PJNet.org planning meetings I would ask him to be the moderator because he was even tempered and quickly could help the rest of us synthesize our ideas.
On Friday afternoon, I emailed another colleague and mentioned Cole Campbell’s name. Then I got an email from Donica Mensing, a professor at UNV, Reno, who helped with the Restoring the Trust project, with the very sad news.
As I write this I am shocked and saddened. I will miss him dearly.
I will close with two of his quotes that most resonate with me and the work I do here. First from our Journalism and the Public: Restoring the Trust final report:
we ought to be thinking about…our ambiguous relationship to the people we serve. We don’t know whether to blame them, serve them, ignore them, or how we ought to be treating the people who populate the communities we serve. We don’t know whether to think of them as clients, as customers, or as citizens.
Then from an IM interview here at the PJNet.org:
I have no doubt that citizens…either will become our collaborative partners or will marginalize us as bit players in the give-and-take of common life. So I think journalism as a calling — and journalism schools as a support system for that calling — must grapple with how to meld the best of professional practice (values, methods of inquiry and investigation) with public practice (collaboration, accountability, deliberation).
Update: A full obituary can be found here.
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