The University’s Manship School of Mass Communication released its 2015-16 report which included updates on various ongoing research projects, a letter from Dean Jerry Ceppos and awards for various students, graduates and faculty of the Manship School.
The Newspaper and Online News Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication named professor Jay Shelledy 2016 Educator of the Year.
AEJMC, the nation’s largest organization of journalism professors, presented Shelledy with the award at its annual conference in Minneapolis in August, according to the Manship School’s report.
“You saw how proud we were of it,” Ceppos said, pointing to Shelledy’s name on the cover of the report. “I think it’s recognition that he’s a very special person, and we’re that right in thinking that he’s special. The sort of legendary status he’s built up over the years is just remarkable.”
Shelledy heads multiple journalism projects at the University, including the Civil Rights Era Cold Case Murders Project and the Wrongful Conviction Project. Both projects involve digging deeper into court cases of the past which had concluded with incorrect sentences.
Shelledy said he believes his journalistic projects are what pushed him to win the award.
“If you’re talking about what this person is doing, you’ve got three bright shiny objects. I suppose that got their interest,” Shelledy said about AEJMC. “It’s really nice for the school to get [the award].”
The Civil Rights Era Cold Cases Project is a Manship School effort to bring closure to unsolved Civil Rights-era, Ku Klux Klan-related homicides in Louisiana and southern Mississippi, according to the LSU Cold Case Project website.
The project was created after a law was passed which allowed the FBI to investigate about 100 racial murders from the civil rights era.
Manship students have been investigating a number of these previously unsolved cases since 2010.
According to the Civil Rights Cold Cases Project website,“to date, every civil rights murder case that has been reopened and successfully prosecuted was the direct result of an investigation initiated by a journalist. The greater goal and ultimate hope of the project is that the stories we tell, even about cases that can no longer be prosecuted, will bring reconciliation for individuals, for communities and for the nation.”
Other award winners announced in the report included JoLena Broussard who won the Ruth Edelman Public Relations Student Society of America Award for Achievement in Women’s Leadership Development.
The report also featured Amy Brittain. She is on the Washington Post staff, which was recently recognized with a Pulitzer Prize for “its revelatory initiative in creating and using a national database to illustrate how often and why the police shoot to kill and who the victims are most likely to be,” according to the Manship report.