Don Corrigan has served for more than 25 years as a professor of journalism at Webster University in St. Louis, At Webster, he received a Messing Research Award in 1990, the Kemper Outstanding Teacher Award in 1994 and the Presidential Faculty Scholar Award in 1998. He has twice been selected as the state college newspaper adviser of the year in Missouri and in 2001 was presented the National College Newspaper Adviser of the Year Award in New Orleans by College Media Advisers. In 2005, the college paper he advises, The Webster University Journal, won “Best In State” among all college and university newspapers in Missouri.
In addition to his work in the academia, Corrigan is editor and co-publisher of the two suburban weeklies, Webster-Kirkwood Times and South County Times. He received a Gannett Foundation Writing Award for Environmental Reporting in 1988. He has reported for his newspaper group from Russia, Bosnia, Northern Ireland and Vietnam. He is a contributing writer to St. Louis magazine. He is a frequent writer for St. Louis Journalism Review, where he has served on that publication’s editorial board for more than 25 years.
Corrigan also has published several books, including “The Public Journalism Movement In America: Evangelists In The Newsroom,” which took aim at the faddish newspaper practices of civic journalism in the 1990s. He also has appeared in “COLUMNS: Favorite Columns From A Hometown Newspaper,” a book by Times Publications, a collection of humorous, serious — and occasionally insightful — newspaper columns.
In Rheta Blaney’s book, forwarded by Walter Cronkite, entitled, “Journalism: Stories From The Real World,” Corrigan contributed a chapter on what it was like to be the first male reporting for a women’s lifestyle section on a daily newspaper. His account is both hilarious and disturbing, because it reveals the second-place status women have endured at newspapers even in recent times. In 2006, Corrigan received the Quest Award for Communication from the Missouri Federation of Press Women.
Corrigan’s latest page-turner is called, “Show Me…Natural Wonders,” a meditation on selected nature sites in the Missouri area; illustrated by artist Ed Thias; published by Reedy Press; June, 2007.
