Dr. Elliot King | Author, Teacher, Journalist.
I am a professor of communication at Loyola University Maryland, where I teach journalism, media culture and society and a couple of reporting classes. I also established the first digital media lab at the university. When I was in high school, I was on a school tour of the old Philadelphia Bulletin when a report came across the teletype that a major earthquake had hit the San Fernando Valley north of Los Angeles. From that moment on, I knew I wanted to be a journalist. My life course didn’t take a straight line but I eventually got an M.S. from the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University.
After a short and unhappy stint as a political press secretary, I got a job at a start-up computer magazine and within a couple of months I was a technology reporter. I also freelanced for a wide range of publication including The Los Angeles Times and Ad Week. My next stop was being the West Coast reporter for a trade publishing house based in Philadelphia. I reported on some big industries like consumer electronics, advertising and interior design and some small fields like the business forms industry. The quality was not the best but the work was fun. One day I could be interviewing the CEO of a $2 billion company and the next day I would be attending a conference of mom-and-pop print shops.
During this time, largely to get more control of my writing, I entered a Ph.D. program at the University of California, San Diego, where Michael Schudson was my dissertation advisor. I also became the editor-in-chief of a monthly professional journal called Scientific Computing and Automation. In that role, I attended the third World Human Genome conference, several fascinating meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the largest general scientific association in the world, and covered significant projects such as the Grand Challenges in scientific computing, an effort to apply computing power to the largest scientific problems in the world. I was also a very early adapter to the Internet and then the World Wide Web. Those were good times.
After I received my Ph.D., I continued to be an active journalist, reporting extensively on large-scale information management issues, primarily for a magazine called Database Trends and Applications. I also co-authored a book in the mid-1990s about how journalists could use the Internet. My latest book, Free for All: The Internet’s Transformation of Journalism (Northwestern University Press, 2010) is the first comprehensive history of the development of online journalism and intertwines the development of computers as the third great communications platform with a history of the efforts to use that platform for journalism.
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