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First of two biographical sketches -- for secular setting Fall, 2000, for California State University at Fullerton Joseph Webb has lived, worked, and taught in a variety of communication media and environments. Early on in life, he was a newspaper reporter and an editorial writer for Lindsay-Schaub Newspapers, a group of six dailies in Illinois. During those years he covered two sessions of the Illinois General Assembly in Springfield, specializing in state tax matters, public utilities, and higher education. He was the first of the six-person editorial writing/state reporting staff to be hired prior to receiving his master's degree. Dr. Webb began his working life as a 16-year-old in radio in his hometown of Lincoln, Illinois, located on historic Route 66 midway between Chicago and St. Louis. His radio program lasted from five to eight in the morning, after which he rode his bicycle to high school. That radio work lasted for six years, since he went to college in that same town. Ironically, in three different places where he has lived and taught since then, he has had a weekly radio program-still, in a sense, his first love. He graduated from Lincoln Christian College in 1964, with the idea of becoming a clergyperson, but he was clearly hooked on media by that time; and so switched from radio to newspapers, becoming a general assignment reporter for the Lincoln Daily Courier. After a year, he was hired by Lindsay-Schaub Newspapers in nearby Decatur. While at the newspapers, Dr. Webb began graduate work at the University of Illinois in Urbana, completing a Master's degree in Journalism in 1968, followed by a Ph.D. in communication in 1973. Full-time newspaper work put him through graduate school. That was when the hard choice came. He and another editorial writer were both invited to join the AP in New York. So when his friend Coleman Mobley headed for the Big Apple, Webb-who by this time had decided he wanted an academic life--headed west. He left Illinois for California and his first teaching job in journalism and communication at what was then San Fernando Valley State College. Two years later, the college became California State University at Northridge. Over the years since then, Dr. Webb has taught at several colleges and universities, taking on a number of institutional challenges as well as opportunities for personal growth and intellectual development. He taught mass media history at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, where he also served as acting head of the School of Journalism. He was then head of the Department of Journalism at the University of Evansville, and head of Journalism Studies at Pepperdine University for six years in the 1980s. In the late '80s, he taught at Clark College in Atlanta, an all-black institution in the Atlanta University Center. After that, he accepted an invitation to design and launch a new Communication Department at Milligan College, a private religious college in Tennessee. He has also taught at Cal State San Bernardino and is now an adjunct professor of communication at Cal State Fullerton. During most of his teaching years, Dr. Webb has been an active communications consultant as well. In the 1970s, he consulted consulted largely in broadcasting, both radio and television. While teaching at the University of Tennessee, he directed a staff that conducted all of the broadcast license renewal studies for stations in the city of Knoxville. He also consulted for the news departments of WBIR-AM-FM-TV during that time. He has consulted on publication development for the Camarillo State Neuropsychiatric Institute, on marketing, management, and video education of several national insurance marketing firms, and on public education for the El Segundo Transportation Authority-among other consulting assignments. Dr. Webb has taught virtually everything in the communications curriculum, including broadcast writing and production, media management, advertising, public relations, as well as interpersonal and organizational communication. He has taught communications law, media theory and research, mass media effects, and persuasion, among other related courses. His favorite course remains mass media history and philosophy with a postmodern bent. He has also taught virtually every professional journalism course as well, from basic writing and reporting, through editing and layout, to editorial, feature writing, investigative reporting; and on to the newest forms of electronic news processing, which he has kept in close touch with. He has also been a campus newspaper and radio station advisor. Needless to say, he set out early in his career to become a media generalist. His early book on reporting, Writing the New Journalism (New York: Richards Rosen Press, 1977) is no longer in print; but it still forms a major part of his reporting classes. Dr. Webb has also published more than 50 articles, essays, and papers, all of them journalism and media oriented in some way. Over the past few years, staying true to his lifelong interest in things religious, he has published seven books on communication subjects for working clergy of all denominations. These books can be found under his name on Amazon.com. |