Josh Dawsey / Courtesy photo
A White House correspondent with the Washington Post will speak on the University of Arkansas campus next month as part of the School of Journalism and Strategic Media’s annual Journalism Days events.
Josh Dawsey, an award-winning journalist who scooped multiple White House stories that received worldwide coverage, is the 2019 Roy Reed Lecture speaker. His talk begins at 7 p.m. Wednesday, April 3 at the Janelle Y. Hembree Alumni House. The event is free and open to the public.
Dawsey was named among the Forbes 30 under 30 in media who are defining and driving the world of news. He won the 2018 White House Correspondents’ Association Award for deadline news reporting.
He will speak about the dynamics and dysfunction of covering the current White House, how he deals with the hostility and attacks on the press, and how the White House press corps competes and then cooperates in the face of this external threat.
The lecture series is named after Roy Reed, a New York Times writer and a professor of journalism at the UA. He died in 2017.
Rob Wells, assistant professor of journalism at the UA, first met Dawsey in 2012 when he was a student in Wells’ business reporting class at the University of South Carolina.
“Josh is a phenomenal reporter who has quickly established himself as a force on the national political scene,” said Wells. “I think students will enjoy learning about his journey from student media to covering New York politics to writing about the extraordinary events in the Trump White House.”
Gerald Jordan, associate professor of journalism at the UA, said in years past, the speaker in the lecture series had always been a journalist who knew Roy Reed personally.
“I’m happy to see the torch passed to a new generation, and I’m supremely confident that Roy would have been equally elated,” said Jordan. “Roy insisted that the speakers be ‘good reporters’ and ‘good writers,’ a measure that he set during his New York Times days as a national and foreign correspondent. Our speaker on this occasion fills those requirements with excellence.”
