Dawn Bonker
The Orange County Register
and Chapman University today announced a new editor-in-residence collaboration beginning in February 2012 that will provide opportunities for students to gain real-world experience covering breaking news, doing general assignment reporting and learning all aspects of digital journalism.
As part of the collaboration, the
Register
’s reader innovation editor Dennis Foley will serve as editor-in-residence and will expand his current role supervising newsroom recruitment and internship programs at the
Register
. Foley, a 40-year newspaper veteran, will teach students as an adjunct faculty member at Chapman and directly supervise students working within the
Register
’s Content Centers in Santa Ana, Anaheim, Lake Forest and San Clemente.
Foley will work with Chapman journalism program director Susan F. Paterno to make the editor-in-residence class and internship program available to all interested humanities and social science students. Journalism is an English Department program within Chapman’s Wilkinson College of Humanities & Social Sciences.
“I am grateful to Chapman University and the
Register
for creating a new opportunity for students to learn how to produce accurate and compelling journalism,” Foley said. “Our mutual goal is to prepare students for success after college by teaching them how to work on deadline and publish across multiple platforms.”
The editor-in-residence is a logical next step in the journalism program’s ongoing effort to extend its Humanities in the Workplace initiative – giving humanities students the practical skills they need to succeed in the workplace, Paterno said. “We know of no other liberal-arts college that has teamed up with a major metropolitan news organization to reinforce and apply critical thinking skills learned in humanities classrooms in real-world environments,” she added. “If not for the Register’s generosity and openness to new ideas, we would have never been able to provide this unparalleled opportunity for our students. We are thankful for their ongoing support of the journalism program at Chapman. “
Foley and Paterno will choose as many as 15 students to participate in the Editor-In-Residence program. Participants will earn academic credit during fall and spring semesters, and the best of those will be considered for additional internship opportunities.
As part of the Chapman collaboration, Foley will continue to teach English 308, public affairs reporting. In that class, students gain practical experience covering news for ocregister.com, the Register and its community newspapers. Foley edits the students’ articles for publication; students leave the class with a portfolio of published work.
Foley has been a reporter and editor since 1970 at newspapers in Michigan and California. He has been at the Register since 1987, serving as a politics/government editor, ombudsman and reporter. His responsibilities since 2005 include newsroom internships, news website manager and reader engagement editor. He taught journalism at San Diego State University and presently teaches at Cal State Fullerton, in addition to Chapman.
Paterno is an award-winning journalist with more than 30 years experience as a reporter, writer and columnist. For nearly a decade, Professor Paterno served on the staff of The
Orange County Register
,
where she won numerous awards for writing and reporting, and several fellowships for post-graduate study. As senior writer for
American Journalism Review
,
Professor Paterno won the National Press Club’s Arthur Rowse Award for Press Criticism. Chapman University awarded her the Hua-Cheng Wang Fellowship in Scholarly Achievement, the highest faculty honor Chapman confers.
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