Richard Campbell
Why did you choose Northwestern?
Northwestern offered me a fellowship in addition to my national Danforth Fellowship. I was also drawn by the reputation of Martin Maloney and his interest in popular culture (sadly, he died in 1980 –the summer before I entered the Radio/TV/Film PhD program). Northwestern was also within commuting distance of Milwaukee, where my family lived and my wife worked.
How would you describe your research and/or work to a non-academic audience? What was it then and/or what it is now?
I was interested in investigating the relationships between fact and fiction, particularly the role of storytelling in journalism. I objected to the notion that news reports were objective in any scientific sense but rather used narrative devices to make sense of the world. My first book, Sixty Minutes and News: A Mythology for Middle America (University of Illinois Press, 1991) grew out of my Northwestern dissertation.
Tell us who or what inspired your research and/or work.
My dissertation and research were interdisciplinary, inspired by Clifford Geertz, Horace Newcomb, Victor Turner, Northrup Frye, Claude Levi-Strauss, Herbert Gans, John Cawelti, James Carey, David Eason, Douglas Gomery, John Fiske, Gaye Tuchman, Michael Schudson, David Thorburn, Stuart Hall, and Joan Didion. I was also influenced by Frank McConnell, particularly his class that I took at Northwestern and his book on storytelling and mythmaking.
What are you most proud of in your career to date?
I am most proud of my 48-year career as a teacher, first in the Milwaukee Public Schools (where I taught high school English, advised the school newspaper, and coached girls' basketball), and then at five different colleges and universities. My textbook, Media and Culture: Mass Communication in a Digital Age, is in its 13th edition and remains the nation's leading media survey text. It is co-authored by two of my former University of Michigan students. These days I am most proud of my former students who have gone on to journalism careers across the country, including at the Columbus Dispatch, the Dayton Dayton News, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Washington Post, NPR, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Tell us about a current achievement or something you're working on that excites you.
My current work involves Stats + Stories, a podcast collaboration between the statistics and media departments at Miami University. Now in its 8th year, with more than 190 episodes, we recently won the 2021 Communication Award from the Mathematical Association of America. My other work in retirement includes supporting the digital Oxford Observer newspaper and Report for Ohio–initiatives aimed at getting more young journalists real-world experience covering under-reported areas in rural and urban communities. I am also the executive producer of Training for Freedom: How Ordinary People in an Unusual Time & Unlikely Place Made Extraordinary History, a 2019 documentary on Oxford’s role in the historic events of Freedom Summer in 1964.
In 2019, I received Miami’s Benjamin Harrison Medallion Award "For Outstanding Contribution to the Education of the Nation."
What advice would you give your younger self or someone considering a similar path?
In addition to telling students to develop their writing and read more ... and widely, I draw from my commencement speech for the 2019 winter graduating class at Miami: "Spend a lot less time on social media. Don’t walk and smartphone at the same time. Look up. Make eye contact. Engage in your local community, wherever you end up. And if that community doesn't have enough news outlets – do what our journalism program did ... and start one. And, PLEASE, read more than one version of a news story.... A Pew Research study more than a decade ago found that the least informed citizens in the U.S. were people who got all their news from just one place. Finally, if you decide to marry, marry an editor who can fix your writing..." I would also add–take a journalism class and a statistics course.