Roland De Wolk

Last updated

Roland De Wolk (born 1953) is an American author [1] and print and television journalist from the San Francisco Bay Area. His career has spanned four decades. He has won multiple awards for his journalism, including a lifetime achievement award. He has been described as "a star journalist" and "an ace reporter." [2]

Contents

Career

De Wolk spent the first half of his four-decade career [3] at publications such as the Oakland Tribune and San Francisco Chronicle. [4] He also wrote for publications such as the New York Times [5] and Chicago Tribune as well as the Paris Metro (now defunct). In 1995 he co-wrote a travel guidebook for the San Francisco area called Our Town. [6] After the near shutdown of the Oakland Tribune in 1991 [7] and observing changes in the media landscape in the early years of the Internet, De Wolk moved into television and online journalism. [8]

TV and online journalism

De Wolk moved to television journalism and worked at KTVU from 1991 when he took legal action against the station after it fired three other producers, when a list of fake and racially offensive names, supposedly of pilots on board a crashed Asiana flight, was read on the air. [9] While at KTVU, he won multiple awards for his investigative journalism.

He was a contributing reporter/producer for the Chauncey Bailey Project, which covered the murder case of the well known Bay Area journalist and editor-in-chief of the Oakland Post. [10] [11] [12]

Academia

Since 1993 he has been a lecturer and adjunct professor of journalism at San Francisco State University’s Journalism Department, where he taught online journalism as well as news writing, reporting, feature reporting and investigative reporting. [13] [14] Working with Professor Emeritus Leonard Sellers, De Wolk assisted in founding SFSU's Online Journalism Program, which started NewsPort.org.

Publications

In 1997 he co-wrote (with photographer John Swain) a guidebook to family campgrounds in Northern California. [15]

In 2000 he wrote one of the earliest college textbooks on online journalism, Introduction to Online Journalism: Publishing News and Information (2000). [16]

In 2021 he wrote a biography of Leland Stanford, the American industrialist and politician who founded Stanford University, titled American Disruptor: The Scandalous Life of Leland Stanford. [17]

Awards and recognition

De Wolk won a Society of Professional Journalists Career Achievement Award, four James Madison Freedom of Information Awards from SPJ, and the Edward R. Murrow Award for Investigative Journalism. [4] [18]

De Wolk and Leslie Griffith won a Casey Award from the Journalism Center on Children & Families at the University of Maryland for their 1998 KTVU investigative news story called "Candy Kids", about the exploitation of children in violation of labor laws in selling candy. The citation called it a "provocative report on a subject rarely examined. It showed true enterprise and initiative and followed up with additional reporting. It provided the children’s perspective looking at a story that affects minority children not only in this community but elsewhere." [19]

He was an investigative journalist in a collaborative, multimedia storytelling project, called "The Price of Prosperity", which was produced in partnership between KTVU, the San Francisco Chronicle, SFGate.com and Bayinsider.com. The project received a grant award from the Pew Center for Public Journalism in 2001. [20] [21]

De Wolk won a James Madison Award in 2008 for digging into public records about the Metropolitan Transportation Commission's loss of income from drivers who obstruct the collection of fees for using its FasTrak system on bridges. [12] [22]

KTVU-TV

In July 2013, De Wolk was employed as a producer with KTVU-TV, when the station's news team broadcast false and racially insensitive names of pilots involved in the July 2013 Asiana airplane crash at San Francisco International Airport. Anchor Tori Campbell read all four fake names on air. The names had reportedly been emailed to De Wolk by a trusted source and he forwarded them to the newsroom with the warning "you'd better check these out." [2] The names were confirmed by the National Transportation Safety Board before they were aired but the NTSB later apologized and said the mistaken confirmation had been given by a summer intern "acting outside the scope of his authority". [23] Three other producers were fired by KTVU after the incident. [24] De Wolk retained legal counsel and took action against KTVU. The station quickly settled, issuing a statement that De Wolk and KTVU had "reached an amicable agreement" but details were not released. [25]

Earlier in 2013, Electronic Frontier Foundation technologist Micah Lee claimed that De Wolk interviewed him for KTVU on the subject of doxing and its free speech implications but inserted quotes from that interview in a story that aired on the subject of swatting, which Lee says was not discussed during the interview. The story was routinely removed from KTVU's website as were all such stories on KTVU servers as company policy for server space. The Executive Producer issued a statement to the EFF stating that after reviewing the raw tapes of the interview the station "unequivocally stands by its story." [26]

Publications

Personal

De Wolk is a graduate of UC Berkeley, [28] and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, Politico senior reporter Carla Marinucci, and two sons. [18]

Related Research Articles

<i>San Francisco Chronicle</i> American daily newspaper

The San Francisco Chronicle is a newspaper serving primarily the San Francisco Bay Area of Northern California. It was founded in 1865 as The Daily Dramatic Chronicle by teenage brothers Charles de Young and Michael H. de Young. The paper is owned by the Hearst Corporation, which bought it from the de Young family in 2000. It is the only major daily paper covering the city and county of San Francisco.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jane Stanford</span> American philanthropist, co-founder of Stanford University, first lady of California

Jane Elizabeth Lathrop Stanford was an American philanthropist and co-founder of Stanford University in 1885, along with her husband, Leland Stanford, in memory of their only child, Leland Stanford Jr., who died of typhoid fever at age 15 in 1884. After her husband's death in 1893, she funded and operated the university almost single-handedly until her unsolved murder by strychnine poisoning in 1905.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Big Four (Central Pacific Railroad)</span> Tycoons of the Central Pacific Railroad

"The Big Four" was the name popularly given to the famous and influential businessmen, philanthropists and railroad tycoons who funded the Central Pacific Railroad (C.P.R.R.), which formed the western portion through the Sierra Nevada and the Rocky Mountains of the First Transcontinental Railroad in the United States, built from the mid-continent at the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean during the middle and late 1860s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Leland Yee</span> American criminal and former Democratic California State Senator

Leland Yin Yee is an American former politician who served as a member of the California State Senate for District 8, which covered parts of San Francisco and the Peninsula.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Farai Chideya</span> American journalist (born 1969)

Farai Chideya is an American novelist, multimedia journalist, and radio host. She produced and hosted Pop and Politics with Farai Chideya, a series of radio specials on politics for 15 years. She is the creator and host of the podcast Our Body Politic, which launched in September 2020.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">KTVU</span> Fox TV station in Oakland/San Francisco, California

KTVU is a television station licensed to Oakland, California, United States, serving as the San Francisco Bay Area's Fox network outlet. It is owned and operated by the network's Fox Television Stations division alongside San Jose-licensed independent outlet KICU-TV. The two stations share studios at Jack London Square in Oakland; KTVU's transmitter is located at Sutro Tower in San Francisco.

KRON-TV is a television station licensed to San Francisco, California, United States, serving as the San Francisco Bay Area's outlet for The CW. The station also maintains a secondary affiliation with MyNetworkTV. Owned and operated by The CW's majority owner, Nexstar Media Group, KRON-TV has studios on Front Street in the city's historic Northeast Waterfront, in the same building as ABC owned-and-operated station KGO-TV, channel 7. The transmitting antenna is located atop Sutro Tower in San Francisco.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">KICU-TV</span> Independent TV station in San Jose, California

KICU-TV, branded on-air as KTVU Plus, is an independent television station licensed to San Jose, California, United States, serving the San Francisco Bay Area. It is owned by Fox Television Stations alongside Oakland-licensed Fox outlet KTVU. The two stations share studios at Jack London Square in Oakland; KICU-TV's transmitter is located on Monument Peak in Milpitas.

Carla Marinucci capped her distinguished journalism career as Politico Senior Reporter covering California politics. Formerly of the San Francisco Chronicle, she specialized in California state gubernatorial politics and national politics.

Dennis Richmond is an American retired news anchor who spent 40 years with Oakland, California-based KTVU.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">T. Christian Miller</span> American journalist

T. Christian Miller is an investigative reporter, editor, author, and war correspondent for ProPublica. He has focused on how multinational corporations operate in foreign countries, documenting human rights and environmental abuses. Miller has covered four wars—Kosovo, Colombia, Israel and the West Bank, and Iraq. He also covered the 2000 presidential campaign. He is also known for his work in the field of computer-assisted reporting and was awarded a Knight Fellowship at Stanford University in 2012 to study innovation in journalism. In 2016, Miller was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism with Ken Armstrong of The Marshall Project. In 2019, he served as a producer of the Netflix limited series Unbelievable, which was based on the prize-winning article. In 2020, Miller shared the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting with other reporters from ProPublica and The Seattle Times. With Megan Rose and Robert Faturechi, Miller co-won the 2020 award for his reporting on United States Seventh Fleet accidents.

Harold Gilliam was a San Francisco–based writer, newspaperman and environmentalist, a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner newspapers. The Harold Gilliam Award for Excellence in Environmental Reporting, given by The Bay Institute, is named in his honor.

Leslie Ray Griffith was an American writer and journalist. She worked for 22 years at KTVU in the San Francisco Bay Area as a reporter and as a news anchor.

Thuy Vu is an American-Vietnamese journalist, anchor, reporter and international corporate business mentor. Vu is the Co-founder and President of Global Mentor Network. Vu is a seven-time Emmy Award winner and recipient of an Edward R. Murrow award. She was named by the San Jose Mercury News and East Bay Times as one of the San Francisco Bay Area's most Inspiring Women. Vu has been interviewed by numerous media outlets, including the New York Times, CNN, CBS-5, San Francisco Chronicle, and Bay Area News Group.

California Watch, part of the nonprofit Center for Investigative Reporting, began producing stories in 2009. The official launch of the California Watch website took place in January 2010. The team was best known for producing well researched and widely distributed investigative stories on topics of interest to Californians. In small ways, the newsroom pioneered in the digital space, including listing the names of editors and copy editors at the bottom of each story, custom-editing stories for multiple partners, developing unique methods to engage with audiences and distributing the same essential investigative stories to newsrooms across the state. It worked with many news outlets, including newspapers throughout the state, all of the ABC television affiliates in California, KQED radio and television and dozens of websites. The Center for Investigative Reporting created California Watch with $3.5 million in seed funding. The team won several industry awards for its public interest reporting, including the George Polk Award in 2012. In addition to numerous awards won for its investigative reports, the California Watch website also won an Online Journalism Award in the general excellence category from the Online News Association in its first year of existence.

Lloyd LaCuesta is an American journalist. He was most recently the South Bay bureau chief for the San Francisco Bay Area TV station KTVU's news division, having worked at KTVU for 35 years. He retired from the position as of June 2012. LaCuesta is of Filipino ancestry.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Asiana Airlines Flight 214</span> Transpacific flight that crashed on July 6, 2013

Asiana Airlines Flight 214 was a scheduled transpacific passenger flight originating from Incheon International Airport near Seoul, South Korea. On the morning of July 6, 2013, the Boeing 777-200ER operating the flight crashed on final approach into San Francisco International Airport in the United States. Of the 307 people on board, three died; another 187 were injured, 49 of them seriously. Among the seriously injured were four flight attendants who were thrown onto the runway while still strapped in their seats when the tail section broke off after striking the seawall short of the runway. It was the first fatal crash of a Boeing 777 since the aircraft type entered service in 1995.

Frank Somerville is an American television journalist. During his three decades at KTVU in Oakland, California, Somerville received three Emmy Awards, including one for best on-camera news anchor.

Raj Mathai is an American television journalist. He is the primary news anchor at NBC-owned KNTV in the San Francisco Bay Area.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chauncey Bailey</span> American journalist (1949–2007)

Chauncey Wendell Bailey Jr. was an American journalist noted for his work primarily on issues of the African-American community. He served as editor-in-chief of the Oakland Post in Oakland, California, from June 2007 until his murder. His 37-year career in journalism included lengthy periods as a reporter at The Detroit News and the Oakland Tribune.

References

  1. ↑ De Wolk, Roland (November 2019). American Disruptor. UC Press.
  2. 1 2 Walsh, Michael (August 7, 2013). "At least 4 KTVU staffers saw prank pilot names before cringe worthy broadcast: report". New York Daily News. Retrieved 6 November 2013.
  3. ↑ "Newsman keeps opinions off air". Contra Costa Times. April 24, 2008. Retrieved 1 August 2013.
  4. 1 2 Snapp, Martin (July 31, 2013). "Snapp Shots: Time at KCBS was best training ever". InsideBayArea.com. Retrieved 1 August 2013.
  5. ↑ Dewolk (sic), Roland (February 20, 1977). "An Idyll of Mr. Penn's Sylvania". New York Times. p. 167.
  6. ↑ "Check the summer crop of travel books". Orange County Register, cited by Orlando Sentinel. June 18, 1995. Archived from the original on August 4, 2013. Retrieved 3 August 2013.
  7. ↑ Farhi, Paul (August 15, 1991). "Neuharth Foundation Aids Oakland Tribune". The Washington Post.
  8. ↑ Cruz Lat, Emelyn (January 10, 1998). "Part-time jobs add up to a career". San Francisco Examiner. Retrieved 1 August 2013.
  9. ↑ Ross, Matier & (July 24, 2013). "KTVU producers fired over Asiana pilots' fake names". SF Gate.
  10. ↑ "Justice is Waiting". The Post News Group. August 2, 2008. Retrieved 1 August 2013.
  11. ↑ "Staff". chaunceybaileyproject.org. Retrieved 1 August 2013.
  12. 1 2 Richman, Josh (February 21, 2008). "Journalism society awards Chauncey Bailey group, reporters". chaunceybaileyproject.org. Retrieved 1 August 2013.
  13. ↑ Lasica, J.D. (December 16, 2000). "Is Broadband News Ready for Prime Time?". Online Journalism Review. USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Retrieved 3 August 2013.
  14. ↑ "Roland De Wolk". San Francisco State University. Retrieved 3 August 2013.
  15. ↑ De Wolk, Roland; Swain, John (February 1, 1997). Northern California's Best Family Campgrounds: 50 Fun, Affordable, Kid-Friendly Sites. ISBN   0811812707.
  16. ↑ De Wolk, Roland (2001). Introduction to Online Journalism. Allyn & Bacon, Incorporated. ISBN   0-205-28689-5.
  17. ↑ De Wolk, Roland (2021). American Disruptor: The Scandalous Life of Leland Stanford (First ed.). University of California Press. ISBN   9780520383234.
  18. 1 2 Saunders, Debra J. (July 26, 2013). "What's wrong with this news? The KTVU purge". SFGate.com. Retrieved 1 August 2013.
  19. ↑ "1998 Casey Awards for Meritorious Journalism". Casey Journalism Center on Children and Families, University of Maryland. 1998. Archived from the original on 21 May 2013. Retrieved 1 August 2013.
  20. ↑ De Wolk, Roland (Spring 2001). "'The Price of Prosperity': Journalists unearth stories beneath the veneer of wealth" (newsletter). Nieman Reports. Retrieved 1 August 2013.
  21. ↑ "Pew Center's New Projects: 16 Experiments Pioneer Education, Sprawl Coverage and "Sim City"-like Mapping Tools for Community Issues". Civic Catalyst Newsletter. Pew Center for Public Journalism. Winter 2001. Retrieved 1 August 2013.[ permanent dead link ]
  22. ↑ "Freedom of Information: 2007 James Madison Award winners - Page 2". San Francisco Bay Guardian Online. March 11, 2008. Retrieved 1 August 2013.
  23. ↑ "Asiana pilot names: NTSB intern 'no longer with agency,' report says". Los Angeles Times. July 15, 2013. Retrieved 3 August 2013.
  24. ↑ "KTVU Fires Staffers Over Fake Asiana Pilot Names Fiasco". San Francisco Chronicle. July 25, 2013. Retrieved 6 November 2013.
  25. ↑ "S.F. naked felon in and out of psych ward". San Francisco Chronicle. September 25, 2013. Retrieved 6 November 2013.
  26. ↑ Swan, Rachel (July 25, 2013). "Ousted KTVU Producer Allegedly Had History of Questionable Reporting Before Asiana Gaffe". SF Weekly. Retrieved 1 August 2013.
  27. ↑ Stross, Randall (October 27, 2019). "'American Disruptor' Review: The Life and Myth of Leland Stanford: The railroad tycoon and university co-founder is often credited for paving the way to a postindustrial revolution. Nonsense". Wall Street Journal. Retrieved August 14, 2021.
  28. ↑ "Directory of Instructional Faculty, Administrators, Librarians, and Student Services Professionals (A - L)". San Francisco State University. June 3, 2013. Archived from the original on 3 June 2013. Retrieved 1 August 2013.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.