Director Joe Saltzman of the USC Annenberg
School for Communication & Journalism
Heads the Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture (IJPC) Project
of the Norman Lear Center
Associate Director Matthew C. Ehrlich, Professor of Journalism at the University of Illlinois at Urbana-Champaign is a co-founding editor of The IJPC Journal and editor of the IJPC Student Research Papers.
Associate Director Richard R. Ness, Professor of Film and Media Studies at Western Illinois University is the Chief Film Consultant-Researcher for the Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture (IJPC) Project.
Senior Research Associate Liz Mitchell, USC Annenberg
Joe Saltzman, the director of the Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture (IJPC) is an award-winning journalist and professor of journalism and communications at the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Frank Capra and the Image of the Journalist in American Film and the co-author of book Heroes and Scoundrels: The Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture (University of Illinois Press, 2015), the definitive book on the subject written by Matthew Ehrlich and Joe Saltzman.
He received his B.A. in journalism from the University of Southern California and his M.S. from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. After working for several years as a newspaper reporter and editor, Saltzman joined CBS television in Los Angeles in 1964 and for the next ten years produced documentaries, news magazine shows, and daily news shows, winning more than fifty awards, including the Columbia University-duPont broadcast journalism award (the broadcasting equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize), four Emmys, four Golden Mikes, two Edward R. Murrow Awards, a Silver Gavel, and one of the first NAACP Image Awards.
He was among the first broadcast documentarians to produce, write, and report on important social issues, including Black on Black, a ninety-minute program with no written narration on what it is like to be Black in urban American 1967, acknowledged to be the first program of its kind on television; The Junior High School (Part One, "Heaven Hell or Purgatory" and Part Two, From 'A' to Zoo"), a two-hour program on education in America in 1971 considered by critics to be one of the best documentaries on education; Rape, a 30-minute 1972 program on the crime, the first documentary on the subject on television, which resulted in changes in California law and is considered to be the highest rated documentary in Los Angeles TV history; Why Me? acknowledged to be the first documentary on television on the subject, a one-hour program on breast cancer in 1974 that resulted in thousands of lives being saved and advocated changes in the treatment of breast cancer in America; The Unhappy Hunting Ground, a 90-minute documentary 1971 on the urbanization of Native Americans, one of the few documentaries ever made on the subject and acknowledged to be the first on television, and The Very Personal Death of Elizabeth Holt-Hartford, a 30-minute 1972 program on what is like to get old in America,
Click the individual program to watch it on Youtube.
In 1974, Saltzman created the broadcasting sequence in the USC School of Journalism. During his tenure at USC, Saltzman, who has won three teaching awards, was associate dean of USC Annenberg for five years, and has remained an active journalist who has produced medical documentaries, functioned as a senior producer for Feeling Fine Productions and as a senior investigative producer for Entertainment Tonight, and wrote articles, reviews, columns, and opinion pieces for numerous magazines and newspapers.
Saltzman is the author of Frank Capra and the Image of the Journalist in American Film and co-author of Heroes and Scoundrels: The Imate of the Journalist in Popular Culture. He has been researching the image of the journalist in popular culture for twenty years and is considered an expert in the field. His IJPC database and this web site are considered the world-wide resources on the subject. Saltzman is co-founding editor of the peer-review The IJPC Journal and creator of the IJPC Web Site and the IJPC Database. In 2020 Saltzman won a Jinx Coleman Broussard Award for Excellence in the Teaching of Media History ("Transformative Teaching of Media and Journalism History") issued nationally by the AEJMC History Division. His ground-breaking studies on The Image of the Journalist in Silent Film, 1890-1929, The Image of the Gay Journalist in Popular Culture, The Image of the Female Journalist in Popular Culture, The Image of the Broadcast Journalist and other IJPC articles are used by scholars, researchers, students and teachers around the world.
Saltzman, who was awarded the 2005 Journalism Alumni Award from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, the Alumni Association’s highest alumni honor, was named the 2010 national Journalism & Mass Communication Teacher of the Year by the Scripps Howard Foundation. The Scripps Howard Foundation’s National Journalism Awards are considered among the most prestigious awards in American journalism. He received a $10,000 cash prize and The Charles E. Scripps Award at the keynote session during the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication convention in St. Louis in August 2010. He also was recognized at the Scripps Howard Foundation's National Journalism Awards dinner in Cincinnati in May. 2010. For the presentation introduction, click here. Saltzman also received the Outstanding Service Award from the USC Association of Trojan Leagues in 2017 and the Jinx Coleman Broussard Award for Excellence in the Teaching of Media History for the Transformative Teaching of Media and Journalism History in 2020.
The Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture is now public.
https://digitallibrary.usc.edu/Archive/Image-of-the-Journalist-in-Popular-Culture-video-collection-2A3BF1M1WUHT1
It’s on the Home page under:
Recent Addisions
USC Scholarship
Cinematic and Performing Arts
It’s on the Collections page alphabetically under “Image”.
https://digitallibrary.usc.edu/CS.aspx?VP3=CMS3&VF=CollectionPage
The Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture with Joe Saltzman -- a visual summary of IJPC research at USC Annenberg
Fake News & The Image of the Journalist in Pop Culture Video
The Conversation: Do Journalists Get a Bad Rap in Pop Culture? Video
The Scoop: Journalism in Movies -- a 13-minute documentary on the image of the journalist in films.
'Richard Jewell’ is only the latest film to depict a female journalist trading sex for scoops, The Conversation 2019 and published in more than two dozen newspapers including the Associated Press, Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Houston Chronicle, the San Francisco Chronicle-SF Gate, San Antonio Express, Albany Times-Union, Idaho Press-Tribune and several syndicated news networks.
For a conversation with Saltzman conducted by Norman Corwin, click here.
For Henry Jenkins' three-part interview with Saltzman, click below:
June 28, 2010 (Part One)
June 29, 2010 (Part Two)
July 2, 2010 (Part Three)
