Introduction: Special Edition on Public Relations and Popular Culture - Welcome from the Editors

Matthew C. Ehrlich
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Matthew C. Ehrlich, journalism professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is an associate director of the Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture (IJPC), a project of the Norman Lear Center at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California. His book "Journalism in the Movies" was published in hardback in 2004 and in paperback in 2006 by the University of Illinois Press.

Sammye Johnson
Trinity University
United States

Sammye Johnson is a professor in the Department of Communication at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, where she holds the Carlos Augustus de Lozano Chair in Journalism. Prior to joining the faculty at Trinity, Johnson was an award-winning magazine editor and writer for more than a decade. She continues to freelance; since 1985 she has published more than 350 articles in a variety of magazines and newspapers and received 19 writing awards. Johnson’s research focuses on magazine content and history, particularly the depiction of women on the covers and editorial pages of such magazines as Time, Cosmopolitan, Maxim, Sassy, Glamour, and Vogue. Her work has been published in the top refereed journals in the journalism and mass communication field, including Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Journalism & Mass Communication Educator, Journal of Magazine and New Media Research, and Journalism Studies. She has contributed 14 chapters to books about magazine publishing and presented more than 50 refereed research presentations at national and international conferences.

Joe Saltzman
http://www.ijpc.org
University of Southern California
United States

Joe Saltzman, the director and founder of the Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture (IJPC) and the author of "Frank Capra and the Image of the Journalist in American Film," is an award-winning journalist and professor of journalism at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. 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 America in 1967; "Rape," a 30-minute 1970 program on the crime, which resulted in changes in California law; "The Junior High School," a two-hour program on education in America in 1970; and "Why Me?" 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. 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, been a TV consultant and wrote articles, reviews, columns, and opinion pieces for numerous magazines and newspapers. He has been researching the image of the journalist in popular culture for fifteen years and is considered an expert in the field. Saltzman was awarded the 2005 Journalism Alumni Award from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, the Alumni Association’s highest alumni honor.