Joe Saltzman, a Palos Verdes Estates resident for 35 years, has been named the national Journalism & Mass Communication Teacher of the Year by the Scripps Howard Foundation.
A professor of journalism at the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at the University of Southern California, Saltzman will be awarded the Charles E. Scripps Award at the keynote session during the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) convention in St. Louis Aug. 10. He also will be recognized at the Scripps Howard Foundation’s National Journalism Awards dinner May 3 in Cincinnati.
Saltzman, who is director of the Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture (IJPC), a project of the Norman Lear Center at USC Annenberg, will receive a $10,000 cash prize and the Charles E. Scripps Award at the keynote session in St. Louis. The Scripps Howard Foundation’s National Journalism Awards are considered among the most prestigious awards in American journalism.
“This is an incredible honor, totally unexpected” said Saltzman when notified of the award. The 71-year-old professor has taught at USC for 44 years. He said this award would not have been possible were it not for his Alhambra High School English and journalism teacher, Ted Tajima, and that the award was really a tribute to him.
“Ted made everything I have done possible. In 1955, I was a junior and he found me standing in the hallway crying my eyes out. He asked me what was the matter. I told him that the high school counselor just told me I wasn’t college material and that I should follow in my dad’s footsteps – and become a window cleaner. My dream of being the first person in my family to go to college was over.
“Ted was furious and went to see that high school counselor. When he came back, he told me that together, we would work to get me into the best school of journalism on the West Coast – the University of Southern California – and with a scholarship as well. And he made it happen. If it weren’t for Ted, I probably would have ended up a window cleaner.
“If I hadn’t gone to USC, I would have never met Barbara, my wife of 49 years, or gone on to a wonderful career in journalism. When I wonder why I’ve spent the last 44 years teaching at USC, I think back to Ted. I know I became a teacher because of his influence on me. I wanted to do for future journalists what he had done for me.”
Tajima died in March at 88 and Saltzman said he would accept the award in his memory.
Saltzman said the $10,000 prize will be donated to The Jester & Pharley Phund, www.thejester.org, a nonprofit dedicated to helping ill children, especially those with cancer, and igniting a love for reading among students nationwide.
The charity is based on his late son David Saltzman’s best-selling children’s book, The Jester Has Lost His Jingle. David wrote and illustrated The Jester as his senior project at Yale before his death from Hodgkin’s disease in 1990. His desire was to give The Jester, with its upbeat and hopeful message, to children facing serious challenges.
Saltzman said he wanted to thank Geneva Overholser, the director of the USC Annenberg School of Journalism, who nominated him, and “all the students I have ever taught, especially those who carry the Ted Tajima legacy into the 21st century.”
In 1974, after an award-winning career as a CBS news producer and documentarian, Saltzman created the broadcasting sequence for the USC School of Journalism, including the entire curriculum, all of the syllabi, and the requirements for getting a BA and an MA in broadcast journalism. He also recruited all of the adjunct faculty to teach the classes and in the next few years taught each class himself to fine-tune the syllabi. The following year he did the same thing for the print curriculum.
Saltzman has won many teaching and alumni awards, including the University of Southern California Associates Award for Excellence in Teaching in 1977. He won the University of Southern California Division of Social Sciences and Communication in the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences Annual Teaching Award in 1988. He won the University of Southern California School of Journalism Alumni Association’s Distinguished Alumni Award in 1995 and the coveted Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism Distinguished Alumni award in 2005.
Colleagues say Saltzman has few peers in the classroom. He has taught for 44 consecutive years at USC and his teacher-evaluation average is a remarkable 4.7 on a 5.0 scale. During this period he received more than 35 perfect 5.0 ratings, many in required classes in the School of Journalism.
“I am proud of students who went on to distinguished careers in journalism, such as Peter Boyer, a PBS documentary producer and Newsweek columnist, Sherri Cookson, an HBO documentary producer, Steve Randall, executive editor of Playboy magazine, Kevin McKenna at the New York Times, Sherry Stern and Steve Clow at the Los Angeles Times, Clara Germani at the Christian Science Monitor, and Dan Birman, a documentary producer and now a faculty colleague,” Saltzman said. “But I am equally proud of students who learned how to write and think creatively in my class and went on to use those skills as a lawyer, doctor, legislator, social worker, teacher, parent.”
Saltzman believes that what he has done outside the classroom “has made me a better teacher inside the classroom. Working in journalism enables me to give students an understanding of the reality of the news business, the problems they will face and ways to solve those problems.”
In the last two decades, Saltzman has developed a brand new academic field, the Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture. Not only are his IJPC Website and Online IJPC Database considered the world-wide resources in the field, but he also has taken this research into classrooms around the world. Class materials created by Saltzman are being used by faculty at more than two dozen universities. He is also a co-founding editor of the peer-review The IJPC Journal.
“I believe that research should always inform teaching,” Saltzman says. “Academic research is most valuable when it can be used in the classroom to develop new scholars for the field. One of the most important aspects of my work on The Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture is the creation of the Student Research Paper section on the IJPC Website (www.ijpc.org), showing how faculty and students can work together to create new areas of scholarship. For me, good teaching means bringing new concepts and ideas into the classroom for students to dissect, discuss, absorb and integrate into their work.”
Saltzman’s IJPC panels have become popular fixtures at AEJMC conferences for the last eight years. He has created two-hour-plus videos on such subjects as the image of the broadcast journalist, the female journalist, the war correspondent and the gay journalist. In August, he will introduce “The Image of the Public Relations Practitioner in Movies and Television, 1901 to 2011.”
