Smith Named New Head of Northwestern's Media Management Center

By: E&P Staff Michael P. Smith has been named executive director of Northwestern University's Media Management Center, replacing John Lavine, who was appointed dean of the
Medill School of Journalism last week.

Both will assume their new positions on Jan. 9, 2006.

The Media Management Center is an executive education and research center affiliated with Medill and Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management.

Smith, who has been with the center since 1991, led the center's executive programs and oversaw much of its research and general operations.

"Michael Smith's appointment to direct the Media Management Center will enable the center to continue to do the valuable
research and executive education that have been its hallmarks under John Lavine," Northwestern Provost Lawrence B. Dumas said.

Smith holds joint appointments at Medill and at Kellogg, where he teaches MBA students in the Media Management major.

Smith helped create the Readership Institute, the national newspaper research center, which is a division of the Media Management Center. In the mid-1990s, he founded the Editorial Leadership Initiative, which described itself as a national research project aimed at helping editors become more strategic managers while preserving the values of journalism.

Smith is the author of the books "Values, Culture, Content"; "The Changing Reader"; and "The Newsroom Brain." He is a contributing editor to the Spanish-language journal "Hora de Cierre."

Smith joined Northwestern after spending more than 20 years in newspapers. He was a beat reporter, copy editor and magazine editor at the Fort Wayne (Ind.) News-Sentinel; managing editor of the Boca Raton (Fla.) News; and sports editor, executive news editor and features editor for the Detroit Free Press.

In 1982, he shared in the Pulitzer Prize for local reporting.