VCU Turpin Lecture Features Award-Winning News and Media Managers

By Mike Porter

The Virginia Commonwealth University School of Mass Communications will host a panel discussion with news, media and entertainment leaders.

The 2010 Turpin Lecture, “ANECDOTES AND LEARNED LESSONS: Award-winning, industry veterans provide perspectives on the business of news, media and entertainment,” takes place on Wednesday, April 14, from 6:30 p.m. until 8 p.m. at the Grace Street Theater, 930-934 Grace St., Richmond. The panel discussion is free and open to the public.

Panelists will be:

• Jesse Vaughn, nine-time, Emmy award winning writer, director and producer; Sony Innovator in Film award winner and a 1980 VCU alumnus.

• Jeffrey Blount, Emmy award winning senior director of NBC’s “Meet the Press” and MSNBC’s “Hardball with Chris Mathews” and a 1981 VCU alumnus.

• Joseph Cortina, five-time national Emmy award winner, creative director and principal of Cortina Productions and a 1976 VCU alumnus.

• Tim Reid, Emmy-nominated actor, director and producer; two-time NAACP Image Award winner and co-founder and president of New Millennium Studios.

The discussion will be moderated by Daphne Maxwell Reid, who played the character Aunt Viv in the NBC comedy “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air,” and is co-founder and principal partner in New Millennium Studios.  

The lecture is named in honor of former VCU journalism professor Bill Turpin. After a distinguished career in newspaper management, Turpin spent 16 years coaching, advising and teaching hundreds of aspiring journalists in VCU’s School of Mass Communications.

Turpin left VCU in 1985 as a full professor and moved to Florida, where he became publisher of two business journals. He continued his academic career as the John and Eleanor Miller Chair in Mass Communications and department chair at Florida Southern College from 1991 until 1994. He passed away in 2001 at the age of 72.

The Turpin Lectureship in News Management was established to honor Turpin’s dedication to journalism and to his students in mass communications. The lecture typically focuses on the news industry and the business of providing, reporting on and delivering the news.