Award-Winning Broadcast Journalist and Educator Al Tompkins to Join Newhouse as Visiting Professor 

Al Tompkins, an award-winning reporter, photojournalist, coach and educator, will join the Newhouse School this spring as a visiting professor in the broadcast and digital journalism (BDJ) department. He will teach the Master Storytelling for TV class with Les Rose, a BDJ professor of practice.  

Tompkins arrives from the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida where he was senior faculty for 25 years. As one of the most requested broadcast journalism and multimedia teachers and coaches in the country, Tompkins has educated thousands of professional journalists in classes, workshops and conventions in 49 states and around the world, including Canada, Egypt and the Cayman Islands. 

He is the author of “Aim for the Heart,” a textbook about multimedia storytelling that has been adopted by more than 100 university journalism programs worldwide. Tompkins helped to create codes of ethics for the National Press Photographers Association and the Radio and Television Digital News Association. 

Tompkins has been awarded many of journalism’s highest honors including the National Emmy, three Gabriel Awards, The Robert F. Kennedy Award, The Japan Prize, seven National Headliner Awards and the National Press Photographer’s Sprague Award. He was also inducted into the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame. 

He holds a B.S. in journalism from Western Kentucky University and an M.A. in journalism and digital design from the University of Florida, St. Petersburg.