The Prof.  Larry Gillick
  Assistant Professor – Digital & Broadcast Media
  Shenandoah University
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Back in 1991, the nation was warming up for what is now referred to as the first Gulf War. I'm not the sort of person who wants to be drafted - I always thought that if I just waited for my country to demand my service, I wouldn't be serving as well as I could. Still, I didn't (at that time) see full-time military service as my life-path. So, I compromised, joining the National Guard as a military journalist - available and trained, if needed - free to lead my life, if not needed. That was a great gig. I liked the Defense Information School so much that when the opportunity arose to go back for broadcasting school, I took it - then went on active duty. Military life took me to Texas, Korea (3+ years!), Kuwait (just a short deployment), Japan (part of an evacuation exercise from Korea) and Georgia - a few airports in other places, too. Then, I left the military for grad school.

I learned a lot from my military time - most of it about responsibility.

Responsibility & service

In Texas, my first Army supervisor handed me the open end of a cable and told me that whatever I put into that feed would wind up in folks' homes as television. We filled that cable with music videos, news and military information.

In Korea, after I learned the ropes of morning radio and afternoon TV reporting, my then-supervisor handed me the keys to our Taegu-based radio station and departed for the U.S. His tour was over. Mine was just getting interesting. It's an odd thing to be a specialist (E-4 - not one of the higher pay grades) and the ranking military official in a broadcasting affiliate. Eventually, I moved to our headquarters unit in Seoul, covered the Sampoong Department Store collapse and learned to produce and anchor a then-nationwide evening news program, AFKN News Tonight.

Larry and Edie Wah

I met my wife in Korea. She took that picture on the left - me with our cat. The red is from the rich sunset, not poor Photoshop technique. You should have seen it before I hit it with Photoshop.

Korea was an excellent training ground. I eventually became the news department's training NCO and developed a certification process for new reporters.

When we (wife, cats, and myself) moved on to Georgia, I remained a newsroom trainer. One of my trainees was named Broadcast Journalist of the Year in our military command.

On to Newhouse

We left Georgia a bit early, for a stint in grad school and a permanent shift to civilian life (For those military folks who might be curious, I left as a staff sergeant with a pair of meritorious service medals). I attended Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communication and met a fellow who changed how I look at news.

Paul D'Ambrosio (now investigations editor for the Asbury Park Press) taught me computer assisted reporting - a data-based approach to finding and analyzing news. I joined the National Institute for Computer Assisted Reporting and Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc., and read every issue of every publication they put out.

Technology, journalism & teaching

I was hooked. When I returned to commercial television at a station in North Carolina, I partnered with my reporters in the field to add CAR components to their daily newsgathering. That's about when I started speaking on panels at NICAR's annual conferences. First, it was on CAR in television. Nowadays, I help train visiting professionals in advanced uses of Excel.

I moved into teaching in 2001, and helped the folks at East Carolina University revise the curriculum (adding a CAR class, among other things) and develop a distance education program that was second-to-none in the nation. I recall one year, early in our experiments with CAR, in which one student reporting group exposed the $1.5 million cost of ECU's recent short-lived chancellor's administration and another sold its final advanced reporting project to a regional magazine.

Then there was a short stint at American University - a story in itself. I spent some time experimenting with educational technology - mostly with podcasting, an interest that brought me to Las Vegas for NAB. I spoke on a panel at the RTNDA@NAB educators' breakfast on the subject of podcasting in journalism and journalism education.

I also worked with folks at Gannett (and one at AU) to produce online training for digital journalism. We produced three training modules: Breaking News Online, Local Conversation, and one that hasn't been released for public consumption. If you're a Gannetter, please feel free to let me know what you think of them. I'm always curious what end-users think of these collaborations - and there are thousands of you.

I've taught a CAR class via podcast (mostly). I also spent a month at WTOP radio, on an RTNDF Educator in the Newsroom fellowship, shadowing experts, writing, reporting and producing radio news.

Now, I'm at Shenandoah University, back to teaching with technology - and at National University, back to learning with technology, studying for my MFA in Digital Cinema.

That's about it for the chronology. In these 20 years, I've learned a few things, visited a few places, met a few people - and somehow transformed from an Army private into a researcher and trainer on technology in journalism.

What a ride - definitely an E-ticket.

Addendum: Bits of Humor - Me in the media

As I find more vestiges of past lives on the Web, I'll post them here.

[Prof. G's antique self-promotion site from back in the '90s.]