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Carol
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Carol Jouzaitis has made a successful transition from the spotlight of covering the White House to the behind-the-scenes world of public realtions. Through it all, she has remembered her role as a public servant.
Carol began her journalism career at the Star in 1972 as a reporter covering the Student Association. She later became a news editor, and also covered the state legislature.
Carol credits the Star with helping her develop relationships with sources, get scoops and further her people skills.
“It was real experience calling state legislators and representatives,” she said. “I felt by the time I got out of college, I had real experience.”
She attended NIU during particularly hostile times, both in and out of DeKalb. Vietnam and Watergate dominated the headlines.
“There was a lot happening,” she said. “Investigative reporting was all the rage. We were very inspired by that.”
After graduating, Carol held numerous reporting assignments, including at the Geneva Chronicle, where she spent about a year learning the aspects of writing, shooting photos and newspaper production.
In 1977, Carol hit it big when she started at the now-defunct Suburban Tribune. She soon started writing finance for the parent Chicago Tribune, and shortly thereafter, worked for seven years in the paper’s Washington bureau. She later would serve as a national correspondent and the White House correspondent, covering Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign and much of his presidency, traveling frequently on Air Force One.
After leaving the Tribune, Carol worked as a national correspondent for USA Today, before deciding to serve the public in other ways.
“I’ve always seen my role as evening the playing field,” she said. “Twenty-five years in journalism was a great adventure. At some point, though, you look up and say, ‘What am I going to do with the next 20?’”
Carol entered public relations, and currently works at the firm of Slack Barshinger in Chicago, where she is senior vice president and director of public relations.
She keeps in mind the fact that in PR, she ultimately is serving the public. She said this understanding of communication has helped her to appreciate the aspects of the public relations industry and perform her job better.
“I see public relations and journalism as connected,” she said. “Both are about communication. Public relations is about encouraging people to participate in the discourse.”
- Justin Smith, '08
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Bruce
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Bruce Ladd has had a stellar career in journalism and public service that many NIU J-graduates would envy. His credits include authoring three books, key roles in the passage of the Illinois Open Meetings Law and the drafting of the federal Freedom of Information Act, adviser to President Nixon’s White House press staff, and once being forcibly removed from a “secret” meeting by the police, then later given an apology by the mayor of that DuPage county municipality.
Bruce’s first reporting experience was at the Daily Illini. After transferring to NIU he worked on the Northern Star and became associate editor in 1957-58 during his senior year. His newspaper career includes being editor of the weekly Mt. Morris Index, editor of The Herald in Wheeling, then managing editor of Paddock publications’ weeklies. Next he was selected as one of 15 journalists nationwide to receive a congressional fellowship from the American Political Science Association and a $10,000 stipend from the Ford Foundation.
While working on Illinois newspapers, he also took leave to be press secretary for Chuck Percy’s unsuccessful gubernatorial campaign in 1964. After Bruce met the late Paul Simon, former Illinois weekly publisher and U.S. Senator, they joined forces with the SPJ and Chicago Headline Club to help convince the Illinois Legislature to pass the state’s Open Meetings Law.
After getting a taste of life in Washington, he joined the staff of then-U.S. Rep. Donald Rumsfeld. Serving as the congressman’s representative to the House Government Information Subcommittee, Bruce helped draft the federal Freedom of Information Act, which was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson.
One of the books Bruce wrote, “Crisis in Credibility: An Investigation into Secrecy and Deceit in the U.S. Government,” exposed the federal government’s onerous information policies, unwarranted secrecy, and attempted “news management” throughout history.
Also during his diverse career, Bruce served as an unpaid adviser to President Nixon’s Communications Director Herb Klein. Returning to Illinois in 1981, he became vice president for Legislative Affairs for Motorola, and later legislative analyst for Winston & Strawn in Chicago.
After retirement in 1998, Bruce and his wife moved to Chapel Hill, N.C., but manages to return to DeKalb frequently enough to serve on the NIU Alumni Board of Directors and keep track of his mother who still lives here.
- Barry Schrader '63
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Markos
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Markos Moulitsas was a bit surprised to hear he had been inducted into the Northern Star Hall of Fame. Not that there’s any question whether he deserves the honor. It’s just that he had stepped on so many toes — at NIU and everywhere since.
Markos, who graduated from NIU in 1996 with two bachelor degrees, is the founder and editor of the Daily Kos, one of the nation’s most influential political blogs. The Daily Kos, a potent blend of news and commentary from a largely liberal perspective, is visited each day by an average of 500,000 readers. In addition to his own daily postings, Markos provides posting privileges to dozens of other bloggers and political figures, including the likes of Sen. Ted Kennedy and Sen. John Kerry.
Markos was born in 1971 in Chicago, the son of a Salvadoran mother and Greek father. His family lived in El Salvador for four years, but fled back to Chicago in 1980 when threats on their lives were made by Communist guerillas.
Before attending NIU, Markos served four years in the U.S. Army as a rocket specialist. After NIU, he earned a law degree from Boston University School of Law. As editor in chief of the Northern Star in 1995, Markos questioned — in both news stories and editorials — the practice of spending student fee money on athletic programs, a campaign that offended many NIU administrators.
“Their argument was that sports made money for the school,” Markos wrote in a recent e-mail, “so I shot back, ‘Then why do you need our student fees?’”
“Then there’s the fact that I lost every battle I ever waged at the Star,” Markos continued in his e-mail, “most markedly efforts to save the journalism program and efforts to prevent the convention center from being built. Oh well. The lessons I learned in waging those fights have served me well in life. I graduated from fighting a corrupt university administration to fighting a corrupt White House and Democratic Party establishment.”
Markos moved to San Francisco, where he started the Daily Kos in 2002. He briefly flirted with political consulting, but now blogs full-time. He is co-author of the critically acclaimed book “Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics.” He is married and has a son, Aristotle.
-- Tom McNamee, '76
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Denise
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The Northern Star reaches 88 percent of NIU students, almost twice that of its nearest competitor, the Chicago Tribune. More readers pick it up on Monday than any other day (but by a narrow margin). One-fourth of NIU students owned an iPod in 2005, and another one-fourth planned to purchase one within six months.
A huge part of the Northern Star’s advertising sales success over the past decade can be traced to knowing its customers through this type of market research. And the research itself – hundreds of pages in all - can be traced to Dr. Denise Schoenbachler.
Formerly the chair of the NIU Marketing Department and now, since last July, dean of the entire College of Business, Denise embodies the term “Friend of the Star.” Three times – in 1996, 2000 and 2005 – she has contracted with the Star to conduct and deliver market research. She obtained scientific results using NIU’s Public Opinion Laboratory to conduct telephone surveys of hundreds of students and faculty members. Then, she met with the Star’s advertising sales staff to discuss the results and subsequent sales strategies.
“I talked to them about, ‘How do you translate this data into your sales program, and how do you use it to find new clients and customers and opportunities?’” she said. “Because we did the study for real, we could show the students, here’s this market research. Now how do you use that? It’s a living classroom as opposed to just having case studies.”
Partnering with the Star makes perfect sense for Denise and other business faculty, she said, because the students tend to be talented, outgoing and motivated.
“It never would surprise me, as a faculty member, when one of our really strong students told me they worked for the Star,” she said. “We have a professional selling program over here, and the Star experience in ad sales and that program, together, are just perfect for identifying really strong students who have an interest in sales.”
She calls the Star “The lifeblood of the university” and values its independence.
“Even though I don’t always agree with everything in the Star, it is a learning laboratory,” she said. “If everything was so constricted and restricted in the process of putting the Star together, then it wouldn’t have the value that is has.”
- Jim Killam
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Lois
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When Dr. Lois Self became chair of NIU’s Department of Communication in 1996, she was clear about one thing: “Journalism at Northern was not going to die on my watch.”
Faculty had just endured a contentious merger. The former journalism department had been absorbed into communication. The move was intended as a cost-cutter, and it did accomplish that. But upper administrators may not have considered a heavy price: Students and alumni (and the Northern Star) were furious at what they feared would spell the eventual loss of NIU journalism.
Roger Ruthhart, managing editor of the Rock Island Argus, remembers the atmosphere of suspicion and fear. Leaders of the Northern Illinois Newspaper Association wondered if their longtime connection with NIU would end. Ruthhart and other NINA board members met with Lois in 1996.
“She listened, asked questions, promised that things would be better and then tirelessly worked to make sure they were,” he said.
The NINA contingent also asked if she would serve as NINA’s executive secretary. She agreed – and served for the next decade until her retirement from NIU in 2006.
That agreement was 11 years ago, when NIU’s number of journalism majors had dipped to 150 – down from a high close to 700 in the department’s 1970s and ’80s heydays. Today, that number has rebounded to about 300, consistently. There’s no more talk of journalism disappearing from NIU.
“We watched as she quickly learned about the newspaper business and became a friend to journalism,” said Star Hall of Famer Lonny Cain, managing editor of The Times in Ottawa, Ill. “Most important, she shared the enthusiasm for ‘the story’ that sparks the engines of every newsroom. She has done a great deal to preserve and protect the passion for newsgathering that must be part of any journalism program. I count her as one of my peers and would not hesitate to seek her advice on any aspect of the newspaper business. And I am proud to be her friend.”
Lois also grew to appreciate the Northern Star, even after she had been the subject of critical editorials at times during her academic career.
“The whole First Amendment thing is pretty sacred to me,” she said. “I think I became more and more of an advocate for the Star over the years. As chair, it just seemed that it was foolish not to have the department and the faculty be more involved with and supportive of the paper.”
- Jim Killam