Pam Luecke, former editor and senior vice president of the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader and a business journalist for many years, has joined the department faculty to inaugurate a program in business and economic journalism. 

The program is made possible by a $1.5 million endowment given by the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation.

One of Luecke's first jobs is creating a fourth sequence for journalism majors. The new business journalism sequence includes courses in reporting on business and the economy and a substantial number of courses in the Williams School of Commerce, Economics and Politics.

An advisory council of distinguished working journalists is helping to shape the program. 

“We are most pleased that Pam Luecke is inaugurating the Reynolds Chair program,” said Hampden H. Smith, head of the department of journalism and mass communications. “Her outstanding newspaper background, her intelligence and her desire for innovation are creating excitement among her students. She has been a widely known rising star within the newspaper profession, and we are certain she will create an excellent program for our students, while also benefiting the profession in numerous ways.”

Larry Peppers, dean of the University’s Ernest W. Williams School of Commerce, Economics and Politics, added, “Many of the most exciting topics for journalists have to do with the overlap of business, politics and economics. With the addition of Professor Pam Luecke, we are able to blend her impressive background in journalism and business together with the expertise of the faculty of the Williams School in order to offer truly interdisciplinary courses.”

As an editor, Luecke supervised a number of prize-winning efforts, including three that won Pulitzer Prizes, the nation’s most prestigious newspaper awards. She was supervising editor for the Hartford Courant series on the Hubble space telescope that won the Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism in 1991. She was one of the supervising editors on the Louisville Courier-Journal’s coverage of the Carrollton, Ky., bus crash, which won the Pulitzer Prize for local reporting in 1988. Joel Pett, editorial cartoonist for the Herald-Leader, received the Pulitzer Prize in 2000. The Courant’s coverage of wiretapping by Connecticut state police, which she supervised, won a George Polk Award in 1989.

Luecke has served on the advisory boards for the department of mass communication at Eastern Kentucky University and for Midway College for Women and Leadership. She is also a trustee for Carleton College and vice chair of American Editor, the publication of the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

She earned her bachelor’s from Carleton College, her master’s in journalism from Northwestern University and her master’s in business administration from the University of Hartford. Luecke also was a Bagehot Fellow in economics and business journalism at Columbia University.

“The days when business news was aimed only at a specialized audience are gone forever,” said Smith. “The Reynolds Foundation has recognized that all journalists are regularly confronted with issues in business and economics. As governments pull back from their activist positions in society and multinational corporations increase their operations, journalists have a moral obligation to understand and cover this dramatically changing environment—and to report for everyone, not just a specialized, business-related audience.”

The Donald W. Reynolds Foundation is a national philanthropic organization founded in 1954 by the late media entrepreneur for whom it is named. Reynolds was the founder and principal owner of the Donrey Media Group, which he started in 1940 with the purchase of the Okmulgee Daily (Okla.) Times and the Southwest (Ark.) Times Record.

Luecke said of the Reynolds chair: "I have an opportunity to build a new program at Washington and Lee that I think is too good to pass up," she said.

Information about the business journalism program is available from  Prof. Luecke at 540-458-8435 or by email.