Leonard Witt
Robert D. Fowler Distinguished Chair & Associate Professor

SO 5120, #2207
Kennesaw State University
Kennesaw, GA 30144

Phone: 770.423.6925
Fax: 770.423.6740
Email: lwitt@kennesaw.edu

Leonard Witt

Leonard Witt is the Robert D. Fowler Distinguished Chair in Communication at Kennesaw State University. His academic interests include public and citizen journalism and how to get citizens’ voices heard. He is founding president of the Public Journalism Network, an online network of citizens, journalists and academics interested in public and citizen journalism. He is now developing what he calls Representative Journalism, an idea to build small journalism-centered communities. He is past chair of the Civic and Citizen Journalism Interest Group with the Association of Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC). His weblog PJNet.org has about 15,000 unique visitors each month, and if you do a Google search for “public journalism,” his site tops the list. He has organized major academic conferences for the AEJMC, including one at Kennesaw State University and others in Toronto and San Antonio. He was a co-sponsor of the SoCon07 conference at Kennesaw State in February 2007 and the Journalism that Matters D.C. Session in August 2007. In 2005 he received a $36,000 grant for the year-long project Journalism and the Public: Restoring the Trust. In 2006 he and two other Kennesaw professors received a $46,000 No Child Left Behind grant to teach Cobb County and City of Marietta teachers to use weblogs in Language Arts classes. They received a similar grant of $48,000 for 2007-08. His latest paper published at First Monday, the peer-reviewed online journal, is entitled: Constructing a Framework to Enable an Open Source Reinvention of Journalism. He has spent most of his professional career as an award-winning journalist. He was executive director of the Minnesota Public Radio Civic Journalism Initiative. At MPR he put on more than 20 major events where major policy issues were discussed and their results amplified on the radio, in print and on the Internet. His last major project there won the Silver Gavel Award, the American Bar Association’s top national award. He was editor of Minnesota Monthly magazine, the Minneapolis Star Tribune Sunday Magazine and the Allentown (Pa.) Morning Call’s a.m. Magazine. He conceived and edited The Complete Book of Feature Writing (Writer’s Digest Books, 1991) and has an M.A. in nonfiction writing from the University of New Hampshire.