Center for Public Integrity director delivers eighth annual Huck Boyd Lecture

Bill Buzenberg, the executive director of the Center for Public Integrity in Washington, D.C., delivered the eighth annual Huck Boyd Lecture in Community Media at Kansas State University on Sept. 20. Buzenberg spoke about the need for independent, investigative journalism and its role in the democratic process.

The purpose of the lecture is to recognize the role of community journalists in helping to keep their communities strong.

Buzenberg became executive director of the watchdog investigative journalism organization, the Center for Public Integrity, in January 2007. He has been a correspondent, editor, and news executive at newspapers and in public radio for more than 35 years.

Most recently, as senior vice president of news at American Public Media / Minnesota Public Radio, Buzenberg launched such programming initiatives as American RadioWorks, public radio's major documentary and investigative journalism unit, and Speaking of Faith, public radio’s signature program on religion. He also began Public Insight Journalism, an innovative use of technology to draw knowledge from the audience.

Buzenberg was vice president of news and information at National Public Radio from 1990 to 1997. He was responsible for launching Talk of the Nation, as well as the expansion of All Things Considered and the extension of NPR's newscasts services to 24 hours a day. During his tenure, the NPR News Division was honored with 9 DuPont-Columbia Batons and 10 Peabody Awards. Buzenberg joined NPR in 1978 as the first reporter to help start Morning Edition. For 11 years, he was a foreign affairs correspondent based mostly in Washington, D.C. He was named London bureau chief in 1986 and became NPR's first managing editor in 1989.

He began his journalism career in newspapers, working for a brief time for the Manhattan Mercury and the Topeka Daily Capital, as well as for five years on the Colorado Springs Sun where he was City Editor in the early to mid 1970s.

Buzenberg was a Peace Corps volunteer in Bolivia from 1968 to 1970.

He has won numerous awards, including the prestigious Edward R. Murrow Award, public radio's highest honor. He was co-editor of the memoirs of the late CBS News President Richard Salant. Salant, CBS, and the Battle for the Soul of Broadcast Journalism was published in 1998 by Westview Press.

A graduate of Kansas State University, Buzenberg has also studied at the University of Michigan as part of its mid-career professional journalism fellowship program, in the M.A. program at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Bologna, Italy, and as a Fellow at the Institute of Politics at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.

Dos Mundos publisher delivered seventh annual Huck Boyd Lecture on Sept. 21, 2006.

Clara A. Reyes, the editor and publisher of Dos Mundos (Two Worlds) in Kansas City, was the speaker for the seventh annual Huck Boyd Lecture in Community Media on Thursday, Sept. 21, 2006.

The purpose of the lecture is to recognize the role of community journalists in helping to keep their communities strong.

Reyes was born in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico, the daughter of Mauro and Clementina Rodriguez and the fourth of 10 children. She received her primary, secondary and higher education in Guadalajara. She is a graduate of the University of Guadalajara.

In 1964, Reyes first visited the Kansas City area to further her education in her first career, dentistry. She met Manuel Reyes and, after a brief courtship, he followed her to Guadalajara, pursuing marriage. She accepted his proposal and the two made their home in Overland Park, Kan.

Reyes, who spoke primarily Spanish when she moved to the United States as a young wife, quickly discovered that tasks most U.S. residents consider simple can be monumental challenges for one who does not know the English language or the fast-paced U.S. culture. Tasks such as opening a checking account or paying a telephone bill proved perplexing. She desired some sort of bicultural, Spanish-language aid to help her adapt to her new country.

After spending several years as a student, homemaker, mother of two, real estate agent and learning how to progress the hard way, Reyes concluded Kansas City's growing Spanish-speaking population needed a bilingual newspaper to educate Hispanics on handling the necessary tasks of American life.

In 1981, Clara Reyes founded Dos Mundos, the first Hispanic bilingual newspaper in the four-state region, with the support of her husband and children.

She and her husband are the majority shareholders of their family-owned business. She serves as the newspaper's publisher and editor.

Over the past 20 years under her guidance, Dos Mundos has grown just as the area's Hispanic population and Kansas City's community awareness of Hispanic issues has grown. Published weekly, Dos Mundos contributes to improving the community's environment by serving as an innovative, important and beneficial source of information and education.

The newspaper's staff has grown to 15 people, including part-time and free-lance employees. In addition, the newspaper's content has grown to include local, national and international news and its circulation has grown to more than 20,000. The newspaper's readership goes beyond the Midwest to include the nation's capital and parts of Latin America.

Under Reyes' leadership, Dos Mundos also has won awards from the National Association of Hispanic Publications in such categories as front-page design and bilingual formatting and recently they received the lifetime achievement award. Furthermore, Reyes has gained recognition in the Kansas City area for her knowledge of political, educational and cultural issues concerning her readers. Individual honors she has received include the U. S. Small Business Administration Advocate of the Year Award.

For her efforts, she has received numerous honors from such groups as the local MANA group, the Azteca Cultural Society, the Mattie Rhodes Foundation, the Small Business Administration, the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, GI Forum and other agencies that serve the Hispanic community.

She was honored by the Kansas City Business Journal as a recipient of the "Women who Mean Business" award. The Kansas Department of Commerce awarded her with the Kansas Woman-Owned Business of the Year.

She is a role model who has paved the way for other women in business. Reyes believes the success of her newspaper has been her most outstanding business accomplishment. She believes she has succeeded in this challenge only by the grace of God and the help of her wonderful family and friends. She believes the future of women in business will soon be without limits.

Susan Edgerley has gone from the Little Apple to the Big Apple and back again.

Edgerley, who is the metropolitan editor for the New York Times, graduated from Kansas State University in 1976 and returned in October as the speaker for the fifth annual Huck Boyd Lecture in Community Media.

Her presentation, “The New Community Journalism,” focused on the evolving role of community journalism and how its principles are being applied not only in small towns, but in big cities like New York as well.

“The New York Times became a hometown newspaper [following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001],” she said. “For us, it was local. There’s a portion of our 9/11 reporting that speaks intimately to the community.”

She talked about reporters who could not make it into Manhattan to work that day, so they interviewed people streaming across the Brooklyn Bridge as the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center burned, and later collapsed, behind them. She spoke about Times employees who lost spouses and children when the towers fell, and she discussed how the Times painstakingly compiled biographies of everyone killed in the New York attacks that day.

“The ‘Portraits of Grief’ that Edgerley described in her speech showed that even large metro papers can reach out to their communities by using names and faces of ordinary people in their coverage,” said Gloria Freeland, director of the Huck Boyd National Center for Community Media.

Edgerley also talked about how the training she received in her classes at K-State and at the student newspaper, the Collegian, aided her in her first job at the Arkansas City (Kan.) Traveler before moving on the Wichita Eagle. She was later hired as the assistant managing editor at the Philadelphia Daily News and then as a copy editor for the New York Times in 1989. Edgerley became the executive editor of the New York Times News Service in 1997 and was appointed deputy metropolitan editor of the New York Times two years later. In 2003, she was hired as the metropolitan editor.

Previous speakers for the Huck Boyd Lecture were former U.S. Senator and presidential candidate Bob Dole, the late Sen. Paul Simon, broadcaster Bill Kurtis and National Geographic photojournalist Jim Richardson.

Listen to her lecture and past Huck Boyd Lectures at the Division of Continuing Education’s (DCE) Web site.

Photojournalist Jim Richardson delivered fourth Huck Boyd Lecture in Community Media

Photojournalist Jim Richardson discussed the importance of community media and showed slides of his travels at the fourth annual Huck Boyd Lecture on Community Media at Kansas State University on Sept. 18.

Richardson, a Kansas native, displayed photos from Scotland, Kenya, China, Cuba, Kan. and many other places. In his photography, he tries to capture the beauty and importance of the commonplace that he first noticed as a youth.

Since 1985, Richardson has worked primarily for the National Geographic Society. As a freelancer on contract, he has worked regularly for more than 20 years for the Society's National Geographic Magazine and is a contributing editor for the National Geographic Traveler Magazine. For both publications, he has researched and photographed stories that have taken him from the tops of active volcanoes to below the surface of boggy wetlands.

The lecture was sponsored by the Huck Boyd National Center for Community Media in the A.Q. Miller School of Journalism and Mass Communications at Kansas State University.

In conjunction with his lecture, Richardson also visited several journalism classes at K-State.

Listen to Richardson's lecture and past Huck Boyd lectures by clicking on the Division of Continuing Education's (DCE) Web site.

Paul Simon delivered second annual lecture

Former Sen. Paul Simon of Illinois presented the second annual Huck Boyd Lecture in Community Media at 1:30 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 10, 2001,in the Union Forum Hall on the Kansas State University campus. His lecture was sponsored by the Huck Boyd National Center for Community Media in the A.Q. Miller School of Journalism and Mass Communications and the University Distinguished Lecturers Committee, both at Kansas State University.

Simon is director of the Public Policy Institute and a professor in the College of Mass Communication and Media Arts at Southern Illinois University, where he teaches classes in political science, history and journalism at the Carbondale campus. He joined the faculty at SIU in 1997 Ñ just weeks after retiring from the U.S. Senate. The Public Policy Institute opened its doors in 1997 and promises to "find new ways of solving some very old problems," said Simon.

Simon's speech emphasized the role community media plays in developing an informed public. Simon holds more than 50 honorary degrees and has written 19 books.

Former Sen. Bob Dole was the inaugural speaker for the October 1999 Huck Boyd Lecture in Community Media. The lecture series is named for McDill "Huck" Boyd, former publisher of the Phillips County (Kan.) Review in northwestern Kansas. Boyd worked for the betterment of his community, county and state, and he also was active in politics, representing Kansas on the Republican National Committee for 20 years until his death in 1987.

Dole Gives Inaugural Lecture

Former Senator and Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole delivered the inaugural Huck Boyd Lecture in Community Media on Oct. 25, 1999, in Kansas State University's McCain Auditorium to a near capacity crowd. The lecture was dedicated to longtime Kansas businessman, politician, journalist and small-town advocate McDill "Huck" Boyd.

"When you lose your community newspaper, you can lose your entire community because that independent voice is gone," Dole told the audience.