College of Communication to name Bill Geddie Outstanding Alumnus, present Howard Schneider with the DeWitt Carter Reddick Award
AUSTIN, Texas – April 12, 2012 – The College of Communication at The University of Texas at Austin will name Bill Geddie, executive producer of “The View” and “The Barbara Walters Specials,” the Outstanding Alumnus for 2011-2012 and Howard Schneider, founding dean of the School of Journalism at Stony Brook University, the DeWitt Carter Reddick Award recipient for 2012-2013.
Geddie and Schneider will officially accept their awards at the College of Communications’ Honors Day convocation, which takes place at 10:30 a.m. on Sunday, April 15 in the Lone Star Room of the Frank Erwin Center, 1701 Red River.
The College of Communication established the Outstanding Alumnus Award to recognize alumni of the college who have distinguished themselves in their professional and personal lives. Past recipients of the Outstanding Alumnus Award include Wayne Sellers, Lady Bird Johnson, Liz Carpenter and Bruce Hendricks of Walt Disney Productions.
“I’m thrilled to receive this award and very proud to be a Longhorn,” Geddie said. “I’ve worked in New York City for 30 years, but I still think Austin is the center of the universe. I just hope that returning to UT doesn’t bring on that old recurring dream where my TV project is due and I haven’t started it yet.”
Established in 1974, the DeWitt Carter Reddick Award recognizes excellence in the field of communication. Past Reddick Award recipients include Walter Cronkite, Molly Ivins, Nicholas Lemann, Bill Moyers, William S. Paley, William J. Raspberry, Helen Thomas, Ted Turner and Bill Wittliff, among others.
“For a number of reasons, I am deeply grateful and honored,” Schneider said. “The award is named after a legendary dean who built one of the great journalism programs in the country. We have a long way to go, but I hope to do the same at Stony Brook University in New York.”
About Bill Geddie
Geddie, along with Barbara Walters, serves as executive producer of “The View,” ABC network’s critically acclaimed live talk and entertainment program produced by ABC Daytime and Walters’ Barwall Productions.
Geddie has helped “The View” earn 30 Daytime Emmy Awards, including the 2003 Daytime Emmy for “Outstanding Talk Show.” He also appears on Walters’ weekly Sirius Radio program, “Barbara Live!,” providing his own brand of humor and insight on a variety of topics.
He’s been with Barbara Walters for the past 25 years as the executive producer of “The Barbara Walters Specials” and “The 10 Most Fascinating People,” which he also co-writes and directs.
Before joining Barwall Productions, Geddie produced for “Good Morning America.” He is the recipient of three Emmy Awards, two for news and one as executive producer of “The View.” He is a screenwriter in his spare time and his script, “Unforgettable,” was made into a movie starring Ray Liotta and Linda Fiorentino. His production company, Bill Geddie Productions, produced 60 original hours for the Discovery Channel.
“If you want to make it in television it’s important to have taste, but you can’t afford to be a snob,” Geddie said.
About Howard Schneider
For more than 35 years, Schneider was a reporter and editor at Newsday. Under his tenure, the paper won eight Pulitzer Prizes in categories including investigative reporting, deadline reporting, arts criticism, specialized beat reporting and foreign affairs reporting. The native of Brooklyn, N.Y., led efforts to introduce TV and radio into what had been an all-print newsroom and ensured that Newsday was among the first newspapers in the country to create news websites.
Schneider spearheaded the team that developed the proposal for SUNY’s first School of Journalism. At Stony Brook, he is the founder and active dean of the School of Journalism and helped develop the nation’s first course in news literacy, which seeks to have undergraduates across all disciplines study how to become discerning news consumers. The course has subsequently spread to universities across the nation.
He is the executive director of the school’s Center for News Literacy and collaborated with actor Alan Alda in launching the country’s first Center for Communicating Science, which is housed in the journalism school, and trains future and current scientists on how to communicate more effectively with the public.
“The next challenge in journalism education is not to teach students how to better use new technology – we’re doing that now – but how to not get distracted by the new technology,” said Schneider. “In addition, it is imperative that journalism schools take on a second mission of equal importance: to train the next generation of news consumers.”
About The University of Texas at Austin College of Communication
One of the nation’s foremost institutions for the study of advertising and public relations, communication sciences and disorders, communication studies, journalism and radio-TV-film, The University of Texas at Austin College of Communication is preparing students to thrive in an era of media convergence. Serving more than 4,500 undergraduate and graduate students, the College is nationally recognized for its faculty members, research and student media. For more information about the College of Communication, visit http://communication.utexas.edu.
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CONTACT: Laura Byerley, 512-471-2182
