The University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications today announced that Mindy McAdams will be retiring at the end of the 2024-2025 academic year, marking nearly 26 years at the College.

McAdams has been the Knight Chair in Journalism Technologies and the Democratic Process since July 1999, the only UFCJC faculty member to hold that position. Since the program began in 1990, the Knight Foundation has endowed 26 chairs and professors at 23 universities.

During her career at UFCJC, she developed more than 12 new courses at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, including AI in Media and Society, Introduction to Web Apps, Advanced Online Media Production, Advanced Social Media, Multimedia Reporting and Web Apps and Coding.

McAdams has trained hundreds of journalists in digital skills and strategy in 19 countries, including Argentina, the Czech Republic, Italy, Laos, Russia, Singapore and South Africa. She received five U.S. Speaker and Specialist Grants to deliver training to journalists in Bulgaria, Thailand and Vietnam. She has conducted on-site training for newspapers throughout Florida as well as at the Freedom Forum Diversity Institute, Montreal Gazette, Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, Pennsylvania Newspaper Association, Poynter Institute, and Virginia Press Association.

McAdams also served as a visiting consultant on journalism curriculum at Brigham Young University, Emerson College, the University of Georgia and the University of Oregon.

As the recipient of two Fulbright Senior Scholar grants, she taught online journalism in Indonesia (10 months, 2011–2012) and in Malaysia (eight months, 2004–2005), where she also researched press freedom. In 2014, she was the Mellon Scholar-in-Residence at Rhodes University in South Africa.

McAdams has served on or chaired 68 graduate committees at UF, including nine Ph.D. committees.

In 2019, she received the Distinguished Teaching in Journalism Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.

Her book “Flash Journalism: How to Create Multimedia News Packages,” was published by Elsevier/Focal Press in 2005. In “The Principles of Multimedia Journalism,” the authors called McAdams’ book “among the first [books] to formalize news packages and the notions of unifying multimedia into cohesive story packages.”

McAdams began her career in book publishing in New York but then returned to journalism in 1984 in an editing/reporting role at a weekly business newspaper published by Fairchild Publications. She worked at The Washington Post and Time magazine 1988–1995, then spent two years as an internet publishing consultant. She was a web strategist at the American Press Institute from 1997–1999 and helped API develop an online learning center for journalists.

McAdams earned a B.A. in Journalism from Penn State University in 1981 and a Master of Arts in Media Studies from The New School for Social Research in 1993.

Posted: February 28, 2024
Category: College News
Tagged as: Journalism, Knight Chair in Journalism Technologies and the Democratic Process, Mindy McAdams