AP News, January 8th, 2007
Cole Campbell, a newspaperman and journalism professor known for his futuristic approach to media, died after his vehicle overturned on an icy road. He was 53.
Campbell was a former editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, Va., and became head of the journalism school at the University of Nevada, Reno, in 2004.
He died shortly after the crash Friday, Reno police said.
Campbell was "an innovator, a daring thinker," said Roy Peter Clark, vice president and senior scholar at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla., where Campbell was a fellow in 2000.
Warren Lerude, former editor and publisher of the Reno Gazette-Journal and a professor at the UNR, described Campbell as "the type of journalist, as an editor and educator, who embraced the future."
"He was leading the faculty, students and staff in defining the new technology and the continuing ethical questions that arrive not only in traditional media but in new media as well," Lerude said.
One of the best examples of Campbell's vision was the school's first-year graduate program in environmental journalism, which focused on Lake Tahoe, school officials said.
The program took a multimedia approach to storytelling while stressing the value that serious journalism can have in solving major issues, said Larry Dailey, one of the university's journalism professors.
"He had an undiluted optimism. He was very concerned about the future of the industry, but he lived his concern in such a way where those around him couldn't help but change that concern into optimism," Dailey said.
Campbell was a John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University, a graduate of the Advanced Executive Program of the Media Management Center at Northwestern University and a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He had said his goal at UNR was to boost the school to prominence in journalistic ethics and innovation.
He is survived by his wife, Catherine, one son and a daughter.
