Wally Dean, Director of Training

E-mail Wally
Phone:  (202) 662-7157

Wally Dean is director of training for the Committee of Concerned Journalists. He has been a journalist for over 40-years, during which he has anchored one of the country’s highest rated local newscasts, spent a decade as news assignment manager of the CBS News Washington Bureau, authored a landmark study of local television news content, and trained several thousand journalists in the U-S and abroad.

Dean is co-author of “We Interrupt this Newscast,” published in April 2007 by Cambridge University Press. The book examines 34,000 stories on 2,400 newscasts in 50 markets and is the most extensive analysis of local TV news content ever. Dean was senior associate at the Project for Excellence for Journalism and a member of the PEJ team awarded the 2004 Sigma Delta Chi Award for Excellence in Journalism Research and the Bart Richards Award for Media Criticism.

At the Committee of Concerned Journalists, he developed the broadcast version of CCJ’s Traveling Curriculum and has presented it at forty TV stations.  He has also trained at newspapers including the Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer, Baltimore Sun, and the Raleigh, NC, News & Observer.

Dean has consulted the Associated Press Broadcast Center in Washington and was a regular presenter at AP Managing Editor NewsTrain conferences.  He has trained at several Univision Spanish-language stations, been a consultant to NewsLab, and has been published in the RTNDA Communicator and the Columbia Journalism Review.

He has presented sessions to the news staffs at Dutch public television and the annual correspondents meeting of the RTL network in the Netherlands; the annual conferences of European public television stations (CIRCOM); the Dutch-Flemish Investigative Journalists (VVOJ); and Dutch regional public television stations (ROOS Dagen); conducted training sessions in seven cities for the Norwegian Journalism Institute, and consulted and trained at the TVN Network in Poland.  He was a keynote presenter at the European Broadcast Union’s 2009 annual conference (NewsXchange) in Malta.

Dean has lectured at VU University in Amsterdam and the Hogesschool in Rotterdam, the Netherlands; the University of Athens in Greece; and at Eurasian National University in Astana and the Kazakhstan Institute of Management, Economics and Strategic Research in Almaty, Kazakhstan.  He has made presentations at The Symposium on Computation and Journalism at George Tech University; The Media and Law Symposium at Washington & Lee University; the Benjamin Franklin Transatlantic Fellows Institute (Wake Forest University); the Poynter Institute; the University of Missouri Journalism School, the Media Literacy program at SUNY at Stony Brook, NY; and at annual conferences of the Radio and Television News Directors Association, the Asian American Journalists Association, the National Association of Black Journalists, the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association, and the Society of Professional Journalists.

He is among a group of academics tapped by the Global Strategy and Innovation Center of the U.S. Strategic Command to advise the Department of Defense on how to integrate social science theory into post-Cold War military planning.  He was a presenter at the Strategic Command’s Capabilities-Based Assessment Strategic Communications conference and has lectured at National Defense University.  He has also done independent consultanting for Booz Allen Hamilton.

Dean came to CCJ from the Pew Center for Civic Journalism, where he was Associate Director.  Prior to that he spent 14 years as an editor, producer, and news assignment manager at the Washington Bureau of CBS News.  He began his career at WOW-TV in Omaha, where he was a reporter, anchor, executive producer and associate news director.

He is a graduate of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a member of the Innocents Society, the Chancellor’s Senior Honorary.