URI Journalism Faculty

	Linda Lotridge Levin began writing for her hometown daily in Michigan when she was in high school, and this passion for finding out what was going on and why led her to major in journalism and minor in political science and history at Michigan State University. (She later earned a master of science degree in journalism from Boston University.) After graduation from Michigan State, she headed East, where she was hired as a reporter for The Providence Journal. She also was a photo editor. She married one of the newspaper’s editors, Len Levin, and after the birth of the first of their two daughters, she left to be a freelance writer and editor. In 1980, she began teaching journalism part time at the University of Rhode Island while she wrote a nationally syndicated health and medicine column. In 1983, she joined the faculty full time. Today she is a full professor of journalism and chair of the department. Her teaching specialities are media law, history of American journalism, advanced reporting and media criticism. She has spent the last decade writing about First Amendment issues, in particular the area of access to public information, and is the author of several books and monographs and a number of newspaper and magazine articles. She has been a fellow of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, the American Press Institute and the Annenberg Washington Program. She has received three grants to work with journalists, first in the Soviet Union and then in Russia.She is a former president of the Rhode Island Press Association and is a board member and founder of ACCESS/Rhode Island, a coalition of organizations devoted to open government. In 1999 she was given the Yankee Quill Award by the New England Society of Newspaper Editors and the New England Society of Professional Journalists and was inducted into the Academy of New England Journalists. Her latest book is The Making of FDR: The Story of Stephen T. Early, America's First Modern Press Secretary.
	Barbara F. Luebke has been teaching journalism for 34 years. Prior to joining the URI faculty in 1989, when she was hired to chair the department, she taught at the University of Missouri, the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and the University of Hartford. In 1998-99, she was Dean of Undergraduate Studies at Fitchburg (Mass.) State College. Her first journalism job was as a reporter at a small daily newspaper in central Wisconsin. She also has been a copy editor, assistant news editor, news editor and assistant features editor at newspapers in Wisconsin, Missouri and Connecticut. Dr. Luebke, who holds a Ph.D. in journalism from the University of Missouri, has published numerous scholarly articles, including research on the images of women in the media in Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly and Sex Roles. Her research on Elias Boudinot, the first native American newspaper editor, has appeared in books and scholarly journals. She is co-author, with Mary Ellen Reilly, of Women Studies Graduates: The First Generation, published in 1995 by Teachers College Press. Dr. Luebke has participated in seminars at the American Press Institute, the Poynter Institute and the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center. In 1994, she studied at the HERS-Bryn Mawr Summer Institute for Women in Higher Education Administration. Her teaching specialties are editing, feature writing and the literature of journalism. Dr. Luebke serves as the department's webmaster.She is the university's Faculty Athletics Representative to the NCAA and a member of the NCAA Committee on Athletic Certification.
	Barbara Meagher (Smith) joined the facultyin 2003 after two years as an assistant professor at the University of Connecticut. Before that, she had an outstanding 21-year career as a television news reporter. She got her start in television news in Plattsburgh, N.Y., where she was a news reporter and 11 p.m. anchor for WPTZ-TV. From 1983 to 2001, she worked at ABC6 in Providence, where she developed a specialty investigating government waste in a segment called "You Paid for It!" She also worked regularly as a substitute anchor. She is a member of Investigative Reporters & Editors, has written several articles for RI Lawyers Weekly and has worked as a host/reporter for WRNI, Rhode Island's NPR station. She is a founding member of ACCESS/RI -- a coalition of organizations and interested individuals who are working to ensure that public records and public meetings remain open and accessible to the public -- and in September 2003 was elected president of the group. She earned her M.S. degree in Broadcast Journalism from Boston University.
	Kendall Moore joined the faculty in 2003. Over the past decade, she has worked as a field producer with ABC News/Discovery Health, the Discovery Channel; producer and national project coordinator with PBS, P.O.V.; and, medical reporter for Reuters. Recently she spent a year on a Fulbright Scholarship to the University of Dar Es Salaam in Tanzania. There she taught nonfiction/fiction writing and television production in addition to producing educational television programs on the AIDS epidemic. She manages a non-profit media organization, Communipod Media, designed to create access to the media for traditionally underrepresented groups. She earned an M.A. in Media Studies from The New School for Social Research.
	John Pantalone, a reporter and editor at weekly newspapers in Rhode Island for over 25 years, teaches Introduction to Mass Media, Media Issues, and news reporting and writing classes. He has been on the faculty as a full-time lecturer since Fall 2000 and taught part time for several years before that. Former regional editor for Art New England, he also served as editor of Newport Life magazine for two years and has written on a freelance basis for a number of magazines and newspapers in New England. He is a native of Providence and has lived in Rhode Island all his life. A graduate of the URI Journalism Department, he says: "I am committed to passing on the skills I learned as a journalism student, reporter and editor, especially those relating to accuracy, clarity and aggressiveness in the traditional watchdog role of the press. At the same time, I try to emphasize the current crisis in journalism ethics and the crucial need for ethical behavior among journalists." He earned his master's degree in Media Studies from Rhode Island College in May 2005. His thesis examined the nature of media coverage of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and he is doing further research on media coverage of the war as well as the use of ombudsmen and public editors at newspapers.
	Per-course instructors are Bill Corey, Kristen Cyr, Brian Jones, Tony LaRoche and Peter Lord. Corey works as the night Metro Editor at the Providence Journal, where he edits locally written stories and helps to lay out and produce the daily paper. He's been at the Journal for more than six years, and previously worked as a copy editor and political reporter for the Standard-Times of New Bedford, Mass. Bill is a 1991 graduate of the URI Journalism program. While at URI, he worked as an intern for the Newport Daily News and the Kent County Daily Times.He teaches JOR 320-Public Affairs Reporting. Cyr was editor of the weekly newspaper the North-East Independent from its birth in 1999 to spring 2007, when she left to become Director of Communication for the Community College of Rhode Island. A 1995 graduate of the University of Rhode Island's journalism department, she was a managing editor of The Good 5 Cent Cigar. After graduation, she held reporting and editing positions at a daily and two weekly newspaper companies in Rhode Island. She has been active in the Rhode Island Press Association and served as the organization's president. She is teaching JOR 341-Editing for Publication I. Jones is a freelance writer. He worked for the Providence Journal for 35 years, mostly as a general assignment reporter, but also covering beats that included business, television and the environment. He created a feature-column titled ³Side Streets,² which focused on people below the radar of headline news. He was twice manager of the Journal¹s Newport suburban news bureau and also served as an assistant city editor. After leaving the Journal in 2001, he was a frequent contributor to the weekly Providence Phoenix, and wrote a history of the Emma Pendleton Bradley Hospital, in East Providence, the nation¹s first psychiatric hospital for children. He currently is writing a history of The Miriam Hospital in Providence. He has worked for United Press International in Hartford, Conn. bureau, and for the Springfield Union in Massachusetts. He is a graduate of Muhlenberg College, Allentown, Pa. In addition to teaching JOR 220 at URI, he has taught journalism at Salve Regina University in Newport. LaRoche works as an assistant city editor at the Providence Journal, where he manages the work of six reporters, planning, assigning and editing locally written stories. He has worked at the Journal for 14 years and earned a 2003 Excellence Award for desk work. He previously worked at the Norwich (Conn.) Bulletin as a desk editor and sports writer covering boxing, and at Wilson Newspapers in southern Rhode Island as a sports editor. LaRoche is a graduate of the URI Journalism program. He teaches JOR 220-Media Writing. Lord is an award-winning environmental writer for the Providence Journal. He recently completed a master's degree in Marine Affairs at URI and is writing a book on Block Island.Lord is a graduate of the University of Connecticut. He was a Freedom Forum visiting professor here in 1998-1999. He is teaching JOR 321-Magazine Article and Feature Writing.