Award-winning journalist to speak at FOCAL dinner

Friends of the Caltech Libraries (FOCAL) will present its annual holiday dinner on Tuesday, December 10, featuring award-winning journalist Joe Saltzman. The event will take place at the Athenaeum beginning at 6 p.m. with a no-host reception; dinner will be served at 7.

Saltzman, the associate dean and a professor of journalism at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication, will speak on his latest book, Frank Capra and the Image of the Journalist in American Film. His book on the film director (a Caltech alum, class of 1918) is the first publication of the Annenberg School’s Norman Lear Center Press and of the center’s new Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture project; the popular image of journalists is an area that Saltzman has researched for 15 years. In the book, he discusses Capra’s representations of journalists, including the iconic news hawks played by Clark Gable and Jean Arthur in It Happened One Night and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, as well as numerous lesser-known characters such as editors, publishers, and media tycoons.

A graduate of USC, Saltzman received a BA in journalism, and also earned an MS from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. In his four decades in the field, he has worked in the print and broadcast media and garnered more than 50 awards, including Columbia’s Dupont Broadcast Journalism Award (the Pulitzer Prize of broadcasting), four Emmys, four Golden Mikes, two Edward R. Murrow Awards, and one of the first Image Awards from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Cost for the event is $50 per person for members and two guests and $60 for nonmembers. Please make reservations by December 2 with K. C. McBride at (626) 395-6411.
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