Cal Poly Journalism to welcome Alicia Shepard as Journalist in Residence

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, November 2019

SAN LUIS OBISPO, CA— Award-winning journalist, author and media critic Alicia Shepard will spend Winter Quarter 2020 at Cal Poly teaching Featuring Writing (JOUR 407) in the Journalism Department. 

Shepard is an expert on the lives of Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who broke the stories on the Watergate break-in that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon in the 1970s. She spent four years interviewing more than175 people linked to Watergate for her 2006 book,  “Life in the Shadow of Watergate.” She also co-wrote “Running Toward Danger: Stories Behind the Breaking News of 9/11,” about the challenges journalists faced covering that historic story.

Currently, she is working with the International Women’s Media Foundation, helping to break down barriers women journalists face in the U.S. and abroad.

She is a former ombudsman for National Public Radio, current contributor to USA Today, and a champion for women and diversity in the news industry. She lived in Afghanistan for two years and worked with non-profits training journalists and for the United States Agency for International Development.

She was the 2017 Visiting Distinguished Professor of Ethics in Journalism at the University of Arkansas. She has taught media ethics at Georgetown University, American University and University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She has also taught courses on interviewing and long-form writing.

She was a Times Mirror Visiting Professor at the University of Texas at Austin in 2005-06.

Shepard Shepard’s extensive resume includes writing for The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and People magazine. For 10 years, she wrote about ethics and the newspaper industry for American Journalism Review, where she won awards for media criticism.

Shepard graduated from George Washington University with honors in English and received a master's degree in journalism from the University of Maryland in 2002. That year, she biked from Amsterdam to Paris. Early in her career, she and her family, including a nine-month old baby, sailed the South Pacific for three years and wrote about it. They spent two years in Japan, where she learned to speak Japanese, wrote and taught English.

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For more information, contact:

Mary Glick

Journalism Department Chair

Phone: 805-756-2508

mmglick@calpoly.edu