MEDILL NEWS SERVICE

Ellen Shearer
Co-Director, Medill News Service/Medill Washington Program
Associate Professor, Medill School of Journalism
Northwestern University

Ellen Shearer, professor in the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, is assistant dean and co-director of the Medill School of Journalism's Washington Program, Medill News Service, which has as clients more than 40 newspapers, Web sites and TV and radio stations.

Prior to becoming co-director of Medill News Service, Shearer was an editor at Newhouse News Service in Washington, where she edited stories from Newhouse national staff and the company's newspapers for distribution on the Newhouse wire.

She worked for United Press International for 10 years after graduating from the University of Wisconsin in 1975 with a bachelor's degree in journalism. After two years as a reporter in UPI's Cheyenne bureau, she became legislative correspondent in Annapolis and, a year later, Maryland bureau chief in Baltimore. In 1981, she was promoted to Pennsylvania editor, based in Philadelphia. She moved to Boston to become UPI's New England deputy division manager, responsible for sales and marketing of news and photos to more than 200 newspapers and TV and radio stations, in 1983.

In 1985, she joined Reuters in New York, where she helped developed the Reuter Business Report as a member of the Media Sales Department.

In 1987, she was appointed New York administrative editor at Newsday, overseeing editorial budgets and personnel for a 250-person newsroom as well as serving as a contributing editor to the daily paper. She also supervised Newsday's internship program for both its New York and Long Island newspapers. She was co-chair of the paper's task force on repetitive strain injuries.

Shearer left Newsday in late 1991 to move to Washington, where she was public affairs director of the American Federation of Teachers for one year before accepting the editing position at Newhouse.

She is a member of the American Society of Newspaper Editors and serves on its Readership and American Editor committees. She also is a member of the American Association of Educators of Journalism and Mass Communication, Investigative Reporters and Editors, Journalism and Women Symposium, the International Women's Media Foundation, the Society of Professional Journalists and the National Press Club; she serves on the Press Club's Scholarships Committee.

She has coordinated judging of the White House Correspondents' Association's awards competition since 1999. She also has been a judge for the 1998 Suburban Newspapers of America newspaper of the year contest, 1994 and 1996 "Best of Gannett" awards competitions for large-circulation Gannett newspapers, the 1996 Heywood Broun Award for the Newspaper Guild, the 1995 New England Newspapers Association's Newspaper of the Year Awards, and the 1995 Hearst Newspapers awards competition. She also judged the Best of Philadelphia awards for KYW-TV in 1982 and was a member of the 1980 awards committee of the Maryland-Delaware-D.C. Press Association.

In 2000, Shearer led a team of Medill reporters in a year-long project to cover the 2000 presidential campaign in a way that would engage young people in political news.The project, called Y Vote 2000: Politics of a New Generation, included two national polls of Generation Y and resulted in more than 400 stories geared toward young adults that were picked up by newspapers and TV stations across the country.

Shearer wrote an article for the American Journalism review based on the project's research.

In 2000 and 1996, Shearer directed the Washington program's project, "No-Shows," national polls of likely nonvoters that provided new information about the characteristics of nonvoters and revealed five distinct types of people who don't vote. The polls were the foundation of two series, one in each election year, that ran in more than 30 newspapers through the Medill News Service as well as stories on more than a dozen TV stations. They were released to other media at National Press Club news conferences carried live on C-SPAN. Shearer and the survey were quoted by more than 200 media outlets, both print and broadcast.

She and Associate Professor Jack Doppelt wrote a book based on the original 1996 research, "Nonvoters: America's No-Shows."

With Doppelt, she co-authored an op-ed piece that appeared in the Chicago Tribune in November 1997 on why voter turnout was so low in that month's elections. She and Doppelt also wrote a chapter for another book, "Engaging the Public."

In 1997, she led a team of 31 print and broadcast graduate students as they conducted a national poll of older Americans to determine how they differ from those under age 55. The poll was funded by the Newspaper Management Center and was the basis for a series of newspaper and TV stories, a nine-minute video documentary and a chapter authored by Shearer in an NMC workbook on how to create and use demographic information.

Shearer was the conference coordinator for the first Reuters Foundation/Medill Washington Conference, which addressed the topic of the quality of information Americans receive from the U.S. news media concerning Russia. The conference involved prestigious panels in Washington and Moscow hooked up via live videoconference. Held at the National Press Club, it attracted about 120 people.

With Frank Starr, she co-authored an article, "Through the Prism Darkly," based on the conference findings and further research that appeared in the September 1995 issue of the American Journalism Review.

She is a regular contributor to The American Editor, the magazine of the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

She also has written chapters for two ASNE books, "The Local News Handbook" and "The Learning Newsroom."

In 1994, Shearer formed a partnership between Medill and the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting to create a continuing education program at the Medill Washington bureau offering quarterly four-day training seminars on computer-assisted reporting for journalism professionals. Her areas of expertise include Washington reporting; media management, particularly newsroom management; editing; computer-assisted reporting; team reporting to create publishable projects across media; and nonvoters in U.S. elections.

She is a member of the board of the Washington Press Club Foundation and the Center for Religion and the News Media, a joint program between the Medill School of Journalism and the Garrett School of Theology.

Shearer has addressed the 1998 annual conventions of the Oklahoma State Boards of Election and Virginia State Boards of Election and the 1997 national conference of the Election Center, an organization of local and state election officers on "Who Are the Americans Who Don't Vote"; the National Press Foundation; the Society of Environmental Journalists' 1996 annual convention on "Job Opportunities for Journalists in the Next Century"; the Washington Journalism Conference on writing and reporting for three consecutive years; and the 1990 AEJMC convention on "Newspaper Internships: What We Want Students to Know."

At the Freedom Forum 1996 conference, "Celebrating the Right to Know: 30 Years of the Freedom of Information Act," she was a discussion leader; she also was an invited participant in the 1996 Washington seminar of ASNE's journalism.