Mike Smith, head of the Media Management Center at Northwestern University.
EVANSTON:
MICHAEL P. SMITH has been named executive director of the Media Management Center at Northwestern University, Northwestern Provost Lawrence B. Dumas announced on Monday.
Smith will replace John Lavine, who was appointed dean of the Medill School of Journalism last week. Both will assume their new positions on January 9, 2006.
Smith and Lavine have worked together since 1991, when Smith joined the Center after a career in journalism. The Media Management Center is an executive education and research centre affiliated with the Medill School of Journalism and the Kellogg School of Management. It offers on-campus and company-specific executive education programmes and conducts research on many of the media's toughest management issues. Smith has led the center's executive programmes and overseen much of its research and general operations.
"Michael Smith's appointment to direct the Media Management Center will enable the centre to continue to do the valuable research and executive education that have been its hallmarks under John Lavine," Dumas said.
MAJOR CONTRIBUTING FORCE
"No one is better qualified to take the helm of the Media Management Center than Mike Smith," Lavine added. "Since we began working together 15 years ago, he has been a major contributing force to the center's research and executive education programmes. He has profound knowledge about how to achieve media quality, and is recognised here and abroad as an expert on how to understand and engage younger media audiences. I am excited to work with him in our new roles."
Smith holds joint appointments in Medill and at the Kellogg School of Management, where he teaches MBA students in the Media Management major.
Smith said: "This year especially, we have been telling the media that it is time to innovate. The media are caught in the middle of a generational tidal wave and the impact of digital technology. If that were not enough, the economy and fragmentation of the consumer market are shaking the business models of newspaper, broadcast and magazine companies. The media are on the precipice of dynamic change," Smith concluded. "We will work with them and with our colleagues at Medill and Kellogg to help the media thrive in this challenging transition."
NATIONAL RESEARCH PROJECT
Smith has led research and projects on Generation X and Generation Y for the centre that are used internationally by numerous media companies. He also helped create the Readership Institute, the national newspaper research centre, which is a division of the Media Management Center. In the mid-1990s, he founded the Editorial Leadership Initiative, a national research project aimed at helping editors become more strategic managers while preserving the values of journalism.
Smith joined Northwestern after spending more than 20 years as a journalist and editor. He was a beat reporter, copy editor and magazine editor at the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel; managing editor of the Boca Raton News; and sports editor, executive news editor and features editor for the Detroit Free Press. For two years, while assigned to the corporate staff of Knight Ridder Inc., he served as an internal editorial consultant and change agent. In 1982, he shared in the Pulitzer Prize for local reporting.
