Nancy Williams

Assistant Professor, Department of Journalism & Communication
At USU since 1987

Specialty Areas:
Print Journalism, public affairs reporting, media ethics, computer-assisted reporting

Contact:
(435) 797-3292
(435) 797-3973 Fax
nancy.williams@usu.edu

Academic Degrees:
-- M.S., Communication, Utah State University, 1987
-- B.A., Liberal Arts, Utah State University, 1984

Spring 2009 classes:
JCOM 2160, Intro to Online Journalism
JCOM 2170, Reporting Public Affairs
JCOM 4010, Media Ethics

Nancy Williams' resource pages:
Anatomy of a Crime

Williams, the Department of Journalism and Communication's print journalism coordinator and media ethics specialist, is a veteran editor and writer who came to university teaching from the world of newspapers. She worked from 1976 to 1983 at Logan's daily newspaper, The Herald Journal, where she edited and wrote the Focus sections and was editor-in-chief of the paper's weekly magazine, Valley. In 1981 she won top honors for investigative reporting from the state chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, for a six-part series on child abuse, and the following year won honors for columns and feature writing. She has written for the Deseret News, United Press International, Associated Press and the National Catholic News Service, served as assistant editor for design of the Utah Journalism Review, and won regional and national awards for every category of writing and editing except sports, which she avoids like the plague.

In 1984, USU offered her a teaching assistantship to pursue a master's degree, and she accepted thinking it would be that long-awaited chance to contemplate her belly button and philosophize. (First, however, she had to complete 20 quarter hours and finish the bachelor's degree she'd begun in 1964.) As luck would have it, the Communication Department acquired its own weekly newspaper (The Cache Citizen) the same quarter Williams arrived on the scene, and she became managing editor and later faculty executive editor for the 11 years the university was involved with the paper. She never was able to focus on her belly button, though she can now philosophize as well as anyone.

Williams was hired as a lecturer in 1987 and assistant professor in 1989. During grad school she developed and taught the department's class in newspaper production and design, and redesigned the Cache Citizen from broadsheet to tab format. With emeritus professor Nelson Wadsworth she developed Comm. 210, the department's famous "boot camp" public-affairs reporting class that still sifts the wheat from the chaff.

She led the Citizen to recognition by the National Newspaper Association in 1986 as one of 128 Blue Ribbon Newspapers in the nation, and twice to General Excellence winner in the Utah Press Association's annual Better Newspaper competition. She has been named a Mortar Board "Top Prof" four times in the last seven years.USU print journalists working with Williams have won hundreds of awards in professional competiton as well as student press contests, and have gone on to win top national internships, scholarships and jobs within the profession. She coordinates the department's internship program, serves on the undergraduate curriculum committee and the USU Women's Center grants and scholarship review committee.

Research/Professional Activities:
Williams is currently doing research on diversity in the field of media ethics. She's also studying gender, power and community relationships in on-line virtual spaces, especially those on Musenet (Multi-User Science Education Network) devoted to K-12 educational goals, and is a mentor at MicroMuse -- http://www.musenet.org where she has helped create a coding class for new members. She is a member of the Women and Gender Research Institute at USU.

She has presented a paper at the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics annual meeting in Washington, DC, attended the 10th Teaching Ethics in Journalism workshop at University of Missouri-Columbia, and given a public lecture at the University of Montana on ethics in community journalism. She received the Quintus C. Wilson Ethics Award from the Utah Headliners chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists in 1992.

Off campus, Williams is a board member for CAPSA (Citizens Against Physical and Sexual Abuse), a member of the Logan Canyon Coalition, a volunteer for Reach to Recovery and a member of Bridgerland Audubon Society, for which she runs the bird Hotline and writes a column for the monthly newsletter. A semi-native of Los Alamos, NM, she now lives in Logan.

Quotes:
"The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire. Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved."
-- Marge Piercy

"...you taught me that I can be a fair (a more realistic expectation than "objective") in my reporting without abndoning the moral code that I lived the rest of my life by."
-- Bonita Clark, former student

"To bless whatever there is, and for no other reason but simple because it is, that is what we are made for as human beings. Whether we understand this or not matters little. Whether we agree or disagree makes no difference. And in our heart of hearts we know it"
-- David Steindl-Rast, OSB

"Sooner or later you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right."
-- Grateful Dead

"We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine."
-- H.L. Mencken