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Sheri Venema

Sheri Venema stepping down

By Kimball Bennion and Bess Davis
J-School Web Reporters

Professor Sheri Venema will leave the University of Montana School of Journalism on May 10 after more than 10 years of teaching students to become journalists engaged with the world around them.

Veterans of Venema’s media and cultures, media law and online reporting classes said she could both crack the whip and a smile.

“I thought she had an ability to kind of put people in their place, but at the same time she could have fun,” said Rachel Cook, a senior in print journalism who took several classes with Venema.

Cook said Venema was both challenging and innovative as a professor, always willing to explore new ideas in her online news class. She brought a passion for journalism to the school with a good balance between experience and intellect, Cook said.

Her no-nonsense approach to journalism made her classes interesting and memorable, students said.

“She doesn’t cut any slack,” said Marianne McCormack, a senior in broadcast journalism. McCormack said that was a good thing, “because in the real world, you’re not going to get cut slack.”

McCormack was in Venema’s media and cultures class.

“She always had an interest in creating new courses,” said Carol Van Valkenburg, the chair of the school’s print department. Van Valkenburg said Venema was dedicated and adventurous, always working to improve herself and her students.

Venema was challenging, according to her students. McCormack remembered one assignment designed to move students outside of their comfort zones as reporters. They had to go to a place where they knew they would be uncomfortable, interview people and write a story.

McCormack said she chose to go to an assisted living facility where she attended a cooking class with its residents. She said that experience will likely help her in her career.

“I wouldn’t have tried it if I weren’t forced to do it,” McCormack said. “I was nervous at first, not knowing what they were going to say, but it turned out to be a kick.”

Venema was raised in Grand Rapids, Mich., and began working as a reporter, first at the Baltimore News-American, then, in 1986, for the Hartford Courant in Connecticut.

“I grew up as a reporter there,” Venema said, referring to the Courant.

But in 1992, Venema came to Montana looking for a change from the East. After seeing the University of Montana and its journalism school, she called the dean and asked for a job. She quit her job at the Courant and worked as an adjunct professor in Montana for three years.

“The J-school is really pretty unique in the field of journalism education,” Venema said recently in a phone interview from her new residence in Maryland.

 Instead of just teaching theory like other schools, it “teaches kids how to be journalists, and that’s impressive,” she said.

She left Missoula when her husband, Michael Downs, began graduate school at the University of Arkansas. After working at the Arkansas Democrat Gazette in Little Rock, Venema returned to UM in 1999 as a fulltime professor until her last semester in the fall of 2007. She taught reporting, editing, feature writing and media law. She also started the media in cultures and online news classes.

Venema said she resigned because she wasn’t able to work out a job-sharing arrangement with the school. Downs, who had been a visiting assistant professor at the school for seven years, accepted a job beginning fall semester 2007 teaching creative writing at Towson University in Maryland. Venema stayed to teach fall semester at UM and was on a leave of absence over spring semester. Venema had hoped to continue that arrangement, but the faculty and the dean decided the school needed the continuity of a full-time faculty member.

Venema lives with her husband in Baltimore. She is working on a book under the working title, “Children of Guru Ma.” It is about a non-mainstream religion in Montana called the Church Universal and Triumphant.

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