Vernon A. Stone: Newsman and Educator

Abstract

Our paths crossed a number of times at various professional or educational gatherings. We shared some similar experiences in newsrooms and classrooms, and often we found ourselves of common mind: a couple of news guys who started their careers in the '40s and '50s when television news was just getting cranked up and who commiserated, in the '90s, about how it was deteriorating. Our careers converged once more when Vernon Stone joined the University of Missouri School of Journalism faculty not long after I became chair of the Broadcast News Department (his hiring already was in the works). And we both retired at the same time, in 1992. Vernon continued another 2 years as research director for the Radio-Television News Directors Association (RTNDA), then retired from that 22-year assignment as well. His visits to the Journalism School became less frequent after that; we ran into each other on the jogging trail more frequently than at other venues. I was out of the city when Vernon A. Professor Emeritus of Journalism, died on June 15, 2005. One newspaper obituary listed cause of death as complications from surgery. He was 75 (Vernon A. Stone, 2005). A few weeks later, his son, Adam, returned to Columbia to prepare his father's house for sale and to decide what to do with all the material accumulations of a lifetime. Adam invited me to the house to go through Vern's books, to decide which ones would be appropriate for the Journalism Library. I quickly concluded it was a daunting task, far beyond my abilities, and deferred to our Journalism librarian. The extensive collection was testimony to the academic and professional mix that Vernon Stone typified: writings about research dealing with the increases of women and minorities in broadcast media; about salary trends; about the variety of career possibilities, educational levels of news personnel, levels of job satisfaction. There were biographies and autobiographies of prominent news personalities, books about broadcast news writing style and media ethics, and copies of theses and dissertations by some of the many M.A. and Ph.D. candidates on whose committees he served or chaired. In addition, a few copies surfaced of some of the more than 150 research articles and papers Vernon produced that were published in a number of scholarly journals and trade periodicals (primarily the RTNDA Communicator) and presented at academic conventions (mainly the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication [AEJMC]). In 1973, Journalism Quarterly designated him one of the nation's 10 most productive authors of articles in peer-reviewed communication research journals (Vernon A. Stone, n.d.). Edward Lambeth, professor emeritus of Journalism, former associate dean of Graduate Studies, University of Missouri School of Journalism, recounts: Vernon Stone was a pioneer in applying quantitative methods to the study of media audiences. In a deeper sense, his scholarly example in mentoring young researchers helped bring a whole new generation of social scientists to the fore in the analysis of the effects of radio and television news and programming, especially for the Radio-Television News Directors Association. (E. Lambeth, personal communication, March 2, 2006). The obituary included this comment from another faculty colleague at Missouri, George Kennedy: [He had] a kind of a gruff, no-nonsense demeanor that failed to hide the reality that he cared deeply about his students and the craft (Vernon A. Stone, 2005). Vernon's career resembled that of many of us who began in a newsroom and moved (some more readily and comfortably than others, perhaps) into the academic life. He earned his undergraduate degree in English from Western Kentucky University (his home state); the M.A. in Journalism from the University of Iowa, and the Ph.D. in Mass Communications from the University of Wisconsin. …