Phil Meyer to Retire, New Knight Chair Sought
Phil Meyer, author of the Vanishing Newspaper and the Knight Chair at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication, will retire next year. According to a John S. and James L. Knight Foundation press release, the chair currently held by Meyer will be:
expanded to embrace the digital age with a new title and an endowment boost of $200,000.
Now called the Knight Chair in Journalism and Digital Media Economics, it will focus on 21st Century economic models that will preserve and improve the ability of journalists to produce news in the public interest.
It adds:
The new Knight Chair, who will be selected after a national search, will help create entrepreneurial projects designed to keep news operations profitable. This professor also will create innovative courses and practical research, all available to others on the Internet, and work with other Knight Foundation grantees on seminars and programs on journalism and digital media economics.
In March 2008, Carolina will host a symposium in Meyer’s honor to address how journalism educators can best serve journalism in the information age. “Raising the Ante: The Internet’s Impact on Journalism Education” will further the research that determines how the Internet affects the news media and mass communication.
Of course, Meyer has been one of the top forward thinking professors in the field of journalism and, as his book title suggests, long before most he prognosticated that the news industry was in deep trouble. Read the IM Interview I did with him in 2005.
