J-School picks Pulitzer Prize winner
for Pollner Professorship

By Rachel Cook
J-School Web Reporter

John Woestendiek, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning reporter for the Baltimore Sun, will be the seventh T. Anthony Pollner Distinguished Professor at the J-School.

"I was thrilled and surprised to get the call," Woestendiek said. He applied for the position because he enjoys teaching and he sensed something special in Montana in past visits, he said.

John Woestendiek

"I loved it," he said, "I noticed that people just seem a little more free wheeling."

Woestendiek and his dog Ace will head to Missoula in the fall. As a Pollner professor, Woestendiek will give a lecture, teach a seminar and work with the staff of the Montana Kaimin.

The Pollner Professorship was created by an endowment from the family and friends of Anthony Pollner, a 1999 graduate of the UM School of Journalism who died in 2001.

"I think [the Pollner program] has developed very well," Alice Thorpe, Pollner's mother, said. "We're very pleased with the direction it has taken."

This year the Pollner Professorship had 27 applications, the most the program has ever received, said Carol Van Valkenburg, chair of the Print Department. A committee that includes past Pollner professors and members of Pollner’s family chooses the Pollner professor.

Henriette Lowisch, 2006 Pollner professor, credits the program's uniqueness with attracting "such an incredibly talented and classy field of applicants this year."

"[Woestendiek] was most passionate about coming to teach at the J-School," Lowisch said. "His heart really seems to be in it, as reflected by the working title of his proposed seminar, 'Journalism with Heart'."

In his proposal for a seminar, Woestendiek said he hopes to work on a project with the class that will teach students to work in the field and get “to the heart of the story.”

“We’ll learn that, as reporters, we have obligation to treat every human with dignity, both during our contact with them and in the story we write,” Woestendiek wrote in his proposal.

Besides his "exceptionally distinguished professional career," Woestendiek was chosen for the professorship because of “really positive reviews” he received about his ability to relate to young people, Van Valkenburg said.

In addition to winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1987 for investigative reporting, Woestendiek was a finalist in 1994 and 1995 and has 32 years of journalism experience. He has spent the past six years as a feature writer at the Sun. He also taught feature writing as an adjunct professor for a semester at the College of Notre Dame in Baltimore.

Woestendiek said he hopes to bring his experience of "learning how to relate to [people] on more than a surface or superficial level" to his students.

Lowisch had some words of advice for the next journalist to take on the Pollner Professorship.

"Get ready to rediscover what journalism is and should be about," she said.

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