Reed Smith

When Reed Smith is not teaching broadcasting students at Georgia Southern University the intricacies of convergence journalism, he's dragging his wife into helicopters to fly into glacier country for long hikes.

He's been teaching broadcast journalism for a decade, after a career in public radio. He's attending Newsplex partly to brush up on his convergence skills, and partly to accommodate his program's quest for accreditation with the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC).

If you're interested in the history of ink-stained wretches, you've probably run across Reed's work. His research includes oral histories of journalists of the South, and an award-winning monograph on the role of journalism in the shameful legacy of lynching, including the horrific Statesboro case.

A bigger challenge, perhaps, is his hiking. He and his wife, Bev, like to get away from it all of the stuff that makes news. For them, that means heli-hiking. They board a big Huey chopper and fly north into the Canadian glacier country, where the Huey dumps them onto the ice and flies off, leaving them to their ropes, ice tools and survival skills.

At night, they return to a warm lodge, which may explain why they're still married.
Listen to this guy's baritone...


-- Mike Lewis