Source: Gloria Freeland, 785-532-0721, gfeela@k-state.edu
Photo available. Contact media@k-state.edu or 785-532-6415.
Thursday, May 7, 2009
K-STATE ALUM SCOTT KRAFT OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES TO PRESENT 10TH ANNUAL HUCK BOYD LECTURE IN COMMUNITY MEDIA SEPT. 3
MANHATTAN -- Scott Kraft, senior editor and roving correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, will be the speaker for Kansas State University's 10th annual Huck Boyd Lecture in Community Media at 10:30 a.m. Thursday, Sept. 3, in Forum Hall at the K-State Student Union.
The lecture is free and open to the public.
The purpose of the Huck Boyd Lecture in Community Media is to recognize the role of community journalists in helping to keep their communities strong.
Kraft, a 1977 K-State journalism graduate, has covered or directed coverage of many of the world' s top stories during more than two decades as an editor and reporter.
As national editor of the Los Angeles Times from 1997 until 2008, Kraft managed a 75-person news department with bureaus in 10 cities. He directed the paper's coverage of many major stories, including Sept. 11, Columbine, the Clinton impeachment, the 2000 Florida recount and Hurricane Katrina. He ran the paper's presidential campaign coverage in 2000, 2004 and 2008. Under Kraft, the national staff won four Pulitzer Prizes: two in feature writing, one for national reporting and another for investigative reporting.
Kraft became an editor after a career as a national and foreign correspondent for the Times, with postings in Chicago and as bureau chief in Nairobi, Johannesburg and Paris. During a six-year assignment in South Africa, he covered the release of Nelson Mandela, the country's first democratic elections and the war in Angola. He also reported on the ill-fated American military mission in Somalia and the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
Kraft has written more than 100 "Column One" stories, the signature front-page enterprise pieces of the Los Angeles Times, from more than two dozen countries. His report in the Los Angeles Times Magazine on how the subservient status of women in Africa, particularly in Zimbabwe, had made them more vulnerable than women on any other continent to the AIDS epidemic, won the Distinguished Service Award for Foreign Correspondence from the Society of Professional Journalists, Sigma Delta Chi, in 1992.
Before coming to the Times, Kraft worked as a correspondent for the Associated Press in Missouri, Kansas and New York.
Kraft has been a member of the visiting faculty at The Poynter Institute for Media Studies, and has been a featured speaker at three National Writers Workshops.
The Huck Boyd National Center for Community Media, in K-State's A.Q. Miller School of Journalism and Mass Communications at K-State, has sponsored nine previous lectures. The speakers include former U.S. Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas, who delivered the inaugural lecture; veteran broadcaster Bill Kurtis; National Geographic photojournalist Jim Richardson; New York Times metropolitan editor Susan Edgerley; and former White House press secretary Marlin Fitzwater.
