Who is Gary Kebbel?
Before becoming dean of the College of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, I was the Journalism Program Director at the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation in Miami, Fla. In that role, I administered the Knight News Challenge, a $25 million contest to find digital news innovations that are used to inform and engage communities in a given geographic area. At Knight Foundation, I also helped create the Knight Citizen News Networkand the Knight Digital Media Center.
I was the director of AOL News, helping to make it one of the largest news sites on the Internet, with an audience of up to 24 million people each month. I am a founding editor of USA TODAY.com and Newsweek.com.
I am a Fulbright Senior Specialist in online journalism. In that role, I worked in Pretoria, South Africa, helping the Journalism Department at Tshwane University of Technology advance its digital media curriculum. (Here’s my blog about the trip.) I have been a trainer at the U.S. Foreign Service Institute, and have consulted on social networking at NORAD and for the U.S. Department of Defense. In May 2010, I lectured about digital news media at Moscow State University in Russia, and at various universities and news organizations in Taiwan, at the request of the U.S. Department of State. I also have lectured about news site creation and maintenance in Tunisia and Latvia.
At AOL I also was the director of the largest election and politics site on the Internet and the largest government consumer portal, Government Guide.
I was the front-page editor of Washingtonpost.com during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, including President Clinton’s impeachment in the House of Representatives and trial in the Senate.
I was deputy editor of USA TODAY.com and directed its political coverage during the 1996 presidential election – the first covered by Internet news sites.
Before moving to the online world, I was the graphics editor at USA TODAY during the Gulf War, the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
