RIP Earl Conn, Ball State j-school dean emeritus

Earl Conn, Ball State's longtime journalism department head and founding dean of the College of Communications, Information and Media, died Sunday at age 82.

Great guy. He always liked to show off his sportswriting work from the early 1950s, which included coverage of some farm kid basketball player from a tiny school that's now a part of a consolidation ... a farm kid by the name of James Dean. As in Hollywood legend James Dean.

Link: http://www.thestarpress.com/article/20090920/NEWS06/90920033/Former+BSU+dean+Earl+Conn+dies

 

Earl taught me a ton on how the media works, how to work the craft, and most importantly, how to keep an open mind about the media.

I don't agree with everything the BSU journalism department advocates, but that's kind of the point. You're going to run into opposing viewpoints, opposing definitions of what the media is, etc. Earl tried to impart that to all BSU journalism grads, sometimes very dramatically.

He showed a documentary on the porn industry during Journalism 201 over a two-week period for the once-a-week night class. Several students walked out, others made a hue-and-cry about how he'd show something like that during a media class.

He refused to budge about not showing it and for those who remained when it was over, he asked why we thought he showed it. No one really had the right answer. He then explained that what we saw was a form of media. A non-traditional, non-newsgathering form of media, but media nonetheless. He said that anything that disseminates information to someone who couldn't receive it otherwise was a form of media. It's something that's stuck with me to the present.

RIP to the man who handed me my diploma way back when. His legacy is the many BSU journalists who carry on his vision.

 

Sounds like a great guy. I had a professor like that too. I had the good fortune to have Dr. Brown for an advanced newswriting class the semester he quit smoking. ...