Saltzman, Levander, Celis head to New York for Columbia alumni events

School of Journalism faculty Joe Saltzman and Bill Celis, along with Michelle Levander, director of the USC Annenberg/California Endowment Health Journalism Fellowships, will attend Columbia's alumni reunion weekend April 20-22.

Saltzman, journalism professor and director of The Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture, will deliver a major IJPC presentation lecture on April 20. He will be there for his  50th class reunion along with his son, Michael, a consulting producer on "Mad Men," who will be there for his 25th reunion.

Levander will be a panelist for a discussion on "New Models of Journalism" to talk about "how new and creative models of journalism are rising out of one of the most tumultuous periods in media history."

Celis will also attend as well as interview Columbia administrators about the school's program and meet with a New York Times editor about the use of technology in reporting.

More on Saltzman's presentation, titled Hollywood and the News: The Image of the Journalist in Movies and Television:

Most people never see journalists in action. Yet they have a very specific idea of what journalists are and what they do because they have seen these news-gatherers in movies and on television. The public bases its impressions and understanding of the news media on these images and this has serious ramifications on the success or failure of the American democracy.

A 35-minute video of movie and television images from the 20th and 21st centuries is featured in this presentation by Saltzman, an award-winning journalist, professor of journalism and director of The Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture (IJPC) at the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at the University of Southern California. Saltzman was a recipient of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism Alumni Award in 2005, and the winner of the Charles E. Scripps Award for the national Journalism & Mass Communication Teacher of the Year by the Scripps Howard Foundation in 2011.