Supervises the Traveling Curriculum and other initiatives for broadcast newsrooms

Wally Dean, Broadcast/Online Director

E-mail Wally
Phone:  (202) 662-7157

Wally Dean is a 40-year broadcast news veteran who is director of broadcast initiatives for the Committee of Concerned Journalists. Over the last three years he has presented CCJ’s Traveling Curriculum to more than 3,000 journalists at 40 broadcast newsrooms and at newspapers that include the Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer and Baltimore Sun.

Dean is a co-author of “We Interrupt this Newscast,” published in April 2007 by Cambridge University Press. The book is the most extensive analysis ever of local TV news content. Dean was also 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.

Dean is a frequent presenter at Associated Press Managing Editor NewsTrain conferences and has trained at several Univision Spanish-language stations. He has been a consultant to NewsLab and his work has been published in the RTNDA Communicator and the Columbia Journalism Review. He frequently meets with foreign journalists participating in U.S. State Department exchange programs and has made presentations to Dutch public television and the RTL network in The Netherlands.

Dean was a staff producer and news assignment manager at the Washington Bureau of CBS News for 14 years. Prior to that, he was a reporter, anchor, executive producer and associate news director at WOWT-TV in Omaha. After leaving CBS News, he served two years as associate director of the Pew Center for Civic Journalism and produced “A Journalist’s Toolbox,” a series of training videos for newsrooms and classrooms. He shaped the broadcast version of CCJ’s Traveling Curriculum and, as part of a grant from the Knight Foundation, is coordinating its teaching in broadcast newsrooms.

Dean, who lives in Washington DC, is a 1971 graduate of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and was a member of the chancellor’s senior honor society, the Innocents. He is a past president of the Omaha Press Club and has taught broadcast news writing at the University of Nebraska – Omaha and Creighton University.