Chip  Scanlan

Chip  Scanlan

Chip Scanlan ‘74 spent two decades as a reporter, feature writer and national correspondent, working for Knight Ridder Newspapers Washington Bureau, St. Petersburg Times, and the Providence Journal. He won 16 awards for writing, Congressional reporting and public service, including a Robert F. Kennedy award for his exposé of hazardous exports to developing countries.

In 1994, he joined the Poynter Institute as director of writing programs. During his 15 years there, he edited the “Best Newspaper Writing” series, ran a summer program in reporting and writing for college graduates, and oversaw the National Writers Workshops, which provided low-cost training to thousands of journalists and other writers from Seattle to Cambridge, Mass.   He’s taken his writing workshops around the globe, including Scandinavia and Asia. His interests lie in reporting the news, telling the stories of our time across media platforms, narrative, and time management and productivity.

In recent years, as senior faculty for reporting, writing and editing, he’s focused on online journalism, leading workshops on Web writing, co-leading seminars in multimedia reporting and multiplatform journalism, and twice coaching Web writers at Yahoo! He advises News University, Poynter’s online learning site, where his courses on leads, interviewing and revision rank among the 10 most popular.

He blogs writing advice at Chip on Your Shoulder, has written a journalism textbook with another due in 2010 from Oxford University Press. His articles, essays and fiction have appeared in The New York Times, National Public Radio, The American Scholar, The Washington Post Magazine and Salon.com.

He and his wife, Katharine Fair, have written two newspaper serial novels published in more than 60 newspapers and Web sites; Chip’s audio version plays on iTunes. He’s at work on a memoir about his grandfather, a Tammany Hall grafter during the Roaring Twenties reign of New York City mayor Jimmy Walker. He hopes to produce a multimedia story about the fate of the African schoolchildren he taught as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1971 and 1972.