Media Management Center's Lavine Named Medill Dean

By: E&P Staff John Lavine, the founding director of Northwestern University's Media Management Center, was named the new dean of the university's Medill School of Journalism Wednesday.

The appointment is effective Jan. 9, 2006. Medill's current dean, Loren Ghiglione, had previously announced his intention to resign. Northwestern Provost Lawrence B. Dumas said Ghiglione offered to resign early when Lavine said he could start the new job in January.

Ghiglione, who is known for his work on diversity with the American Society of Newspaper Editors, will continue to teach during the remainder of the academic year, and then take a leave of absence during the 2006-07 academic year, the school said. He then will return to Medill as the first holder of the Richard Schwarzlose Professorship of Media Ethics.

Dumas said Lavine "extraordinary strengths to this position and an exciting vision for what Medill should be in the 21st century."

"We will support that vision with a major new investment in the school," he added.

Under Lavine, the Media Management Center -- which uses the resources of both Medill and Northwestern's well-known Kellogg School of Business -- has become one of the top newspaper industry research and teaching institutions. The center is home to the Readership Institute, which is conducting the massive impact study of factors that affect newspaper readership.

A professor of media management and strategy in both the journalism and business schools, Lavine was previously the Cowles professor of media management and economics at the University of Minnesota. For more than 25 years he was
Publisher and editor of four daily and four weekly newspapers in Wisconsin.

In a statement, Lavine said he intended to "remake the school's entire undergraduate and graduate curricula" to prepare students for "a more profound understanding of audiences and consumers, of what they value and of how to present journalism and the new digital media to them."

He said the faculties of the j-school and Northwestern's Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) program, which researches consumer brand experiences, "are already among the best in the country, but in the past they have operated separately." He said the faculties will be combined to build a curricula.

"Our students already have experience outside of the school, but in this process we will ensure that our graduates have even more exposure to every media platform in a variety of challenging, professional settings," he said. "When this sweeping change is done, we will create a guarantee for employers: Medill graduates will know more about how to engage and reach media audiences with 21st-century, quality journalism, media and integrated marketing communications than anyone else they can find."