Dr. Rick Kenney
Scripps Howard Endowed Professor of Journalism

Dr. Rick Kenney is the Scripps Howard Endowed Professor of Journalism, beginning in Fall 2009. He is a former journalist and editor at the Baltimore Evening Sun; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; St. Petersburg Times; South Florida Sun-Sentinel; Palm Beach Post; Lakeland, Fla., Ledger; Winter Haven, Fla., News Chief; Jacksonville Journal; and Prince George’s, Md., Journal. He has won national, regional and state awards for newspaper design and won his first national prize, for sports writing, in college at age 18.

Dr. Kenney has taught journalism since 1992 and has held full-time faculty positions at the University of Central Florida, Troy State University and Florida Southern College. He has won six prizes, three in national competition, for his teaching and innovations in the classroom.

He is a frequent trainer at national conventions of the American Copy Editors Society. He directed a Dow Jones Newspaper Fund intern residency program for copy editing interns from 2002 to 2008 and was a guest lecturer in Penn State’s DJNF program in 2009.

Dr. Kenney has also been an Ethics Fellow with the Poynter Institute since 2003, when he became the nation’s first journalism professor to earn that distinction, which had previously been reserved for professional journalists.

He earned a Ph.D. in Mass Communication from the University of Georgia. His research, which centers on news coverage of marginalized groups, has been published several times in the Journal of Mass Media Ethics. His recent scholarship has focused more narrowly on Negro Leagues baseball

Dr. Kenney won the James E. Murphy Memorial Top Faculty Paper Award from the Cultural and Critical Studies Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication in August 2009 for his study of news coverage of the Czech Romany people, which was also the subject of his doctoral dissertation. His book, COPY! The first 50 years of the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund,was published in 2009.