CU Hires Three Pulitzer Winners

Along the way, Sheeler mentioned his interest in teaching to Paul Voakes, the dean of CU's school of journalism and mass communications, who's been in the news over the latest dust-up involving firebrand student Max Karson and the online Campus Press (see blogs.westword.com/latestword for more). "At one point, I said, 'Why don't we hire you as a part-time instructor of one course, a fairly standard reporting course, in the fall of '07 and see how you like it?'" Voakes recalls. After Sheeler took over the class, he'd tell Voakes how much fun he was having whenever they'd bump into each other. Still, Voakes wasn't ready to make an offer quite yet. "I reserved judgment until I saw the student evaluations of his teaching — because, well, you know," he says. "But they were the highest numbers I've seen as a dean. They just knocked my socks off." Shortly thereafter, Sheeler received an inquiry about teaching at another institution. Voakes responded by contacting several university donors, and between their contributions and additional resources, he was able to cobble together enough money to fund a two-year contract.

On the surface, this development practically gushes irony. Sheeler, after all, is the very type of person newspapers need to retain if they're going to survive and thrive in the future — but instead of sticking around at the Rocky, he's heading to CU, where he'll ready students for a profession they may not even recognize by the time they pick up their diplomas. However, he and Voakes see things in much more positive terms. For one thing, students keep enrolling in journalism programs regardless of uncertainties surrounding the profession. According to Voakes, CU caps journalism enrollment at 600 undergraduates, and over the past five years, the number of students in pre-journalism categories has never dipped below 800. And although Voakes concedes that fewer students "show an interest in paying their dues at a community or rural paper and then working their way up to the Post or the Rocky," he says a similar amount "are learning these skills so they can go into entrepreneurial work that's more web-based — and I'm thinking that's not such a bad thing." With this shift in mind, CU is tweaking its curriculum to emphasize the sort of multimedia and cross-platform skills that the 21st century demands.

At the same time, Sheeler believes that the art of storytelling will be as important tomorrow as it is today. "No matter what medium we're reporting in, somebody's got to be there to write the stories," he says, "and I think that's where journalism is going to be headed. You need to give people a reason to really invest their time in a story, and to do that, you have to write it well."

The basic reporting class Sheeler taught last fall, during which he "tried to get everyone away from the inverted pyramid and talked about really crafting true stories," only reinforced this philosophy. As such, he doesn't believe he's abandoning newspapers just because he's split from the Rocky. He's simply supporting them in a different way.

"I'd like to instill a passion for storytelling in fifteen or twenty students at a time," he says. "And even if only a few of them go out there with that same passion to tell stories, journalism will still be all the better for it."