I may be the only faculty member to have worked in all of the school's daily newsrooms including my own statehouse news bureau (MDN), the Columbia Missourian, KOMU-TV, KBIA, KFRU (where the school once operated a newsroom) and the Washingtion bureau.

For many of my years with the school, I've been the leader for innovation at the school.

Along with my colleague Brian Brooks (no relation except for dear friendship), I led the school into the digital era -- by designing, programming, installing and managing the school's first microcomputer networks. I established the school's first WiFi accessible newsroom. I initiated the school's entry into the re-emerging democracies of the old Soviet empire. I established and managed for more than a decade the school's first faculty-approved student exchange program with a foreign university. I developed the school's first converged Web site that integrated into a single Web page the daily headlines of the school's newsrooms.

Finally, I brought journalism convergence to the school. It started, of course, with MDN -- which was the school's first newsroom where broadcast and print students work together in coverage on a daily basis. I later expanded that approach in establishing a news-coverage partnership between the Missourian and KBIA.

For most of my years with the school, I also have been the statehouse correspondent for KMOX Radio in St. Louis. Having covered Missouri government since 1970, I am dean of the statehouse press corps. I founded the state's press corps' organization, the Missouri Capitol News Association, which allocates statehouse resources allocated to the news media.

I started my career as a broadcast journalist and have worked for KFRU Radio in Columbia, KLZ Radio/TV (now KMGH) in Denver and NPR in Washington, D.C. where I covered Congress during the early stages of Watergate.

The Journalism School's State Government Reporting Program teaches journalism students in public policy journalism. My students interact as journalists on a daily basis with legislators, statewide elected officials, agency heads, judges and lobbyists in covering stories for a wide array of outlets in Missouri.

In addition to my state government journalism responsibilities, I have become very active in international journalism efforts. Countries in which I have worked include Bosnia, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, France, Hungary, India, Italy, Kyrgyzstan, Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Russia, Spain, Sri Lanka and Uzbekistan. I have held a dual faculty appointments with the University of Navarra School of Public Communication in Pamplona, Spain, and the International School of Media and Entertainment Studies in Dehli, India.

Immediately after collapse of the Iron Curtain, I pursued a number of efforts to assist development of journalism and journalism training in Eastern and Central Europe. I founded an international consortium of journalism schools to provide assistance to journalists and journalism educators in the Baltics and Poland. I also worked very closely with the journalism unions in southern Poland in development of a journalism support and training center. These efforts began when I became the first member of the school's faculty (along, again, with my dear colleague Brian Brooks) to travel to Central Europe after collapse of the Iron Curtain.

Finally, I'm a computer system designer and programmer. Those efforts began when I developed the first newspaper pre-production computer system for a daily, general circulation newspaper. A few years later, I authored a research and development project with IBM that resulted in the largest research grant awarded to the University of Missouri system at that time. Through that project, I spent several years consulting with IBM, newspapers and newspaper system vendors on network and system design in the U.S. and Europe.

As part of those international computing efforts, I designed and installed the first journalism network system at the University of Navarra's Public Communication School under a grant from IBM Spain that I co-authored in collaboration with IBM Europe.

My current digital design focus is on development of NW2 (Newsroom without Walls). It's a completely Web-based system for news-story production and newsroom management.