Farewell to a true civic patriot

I was saddened yesterday to learn of the passing of a man I barely knew.

Cole Campbell, Dean of the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada-Reno, and former editor of the Virginian-Pilot and St. Louis Post Dispatch, died last Friday in a tragic auto accident on an icy road.

I spoke with Cole only a handful of times on the phone, but I feel a deep connection to his work. If you read the New York Times piece about his death here, you'll learn that Cole was a "supporter" of what is called public journalism. Cole really was more than a supporter, he was a pioneer, and the movement that he help to create was not only ahead of its time, it's ahead of our time.

A better perspective into his life and work can be found through the eyes of Rich Harwood and Noel Mcafee. Mcafee writes:

He was a philosopher who happened to be a journalist. One of the first
times I met him, when I was not too long out of graduate school, was at a
meeting somewhere unremarkable, where the place that caught his fancy was the
nearby bookstore. On the bus back to the hotel he pulled books out of the
plastic bag to show me his finds. All manner of intellectual fodder about
postmodernism, public philosophy, John Dewey, literary criticism. Frankly I
don’t remember. I just recall that it was the sort of reading that my fellow
graduate students and I would read, not what the former editor of the St. Louis
Dispatch would read.

But Cole was more than a thinker. He worked to put his ideas into action, and learned first hand how difficult that could be. He strived to create a civic space in newspapers that had never been there before. He did this for the benefit of this own community, but also worked to bring those same spaces to communities across the nation. He possessed the true spirit of a civic patriot, and that spirit lives on.

If you want to learn more about Public Journalism (also known as Civic Journalism) this article is a good place to start.