The School of Journalism and Communication is pleased to welcome new members to its faculty. In spite of Oregon’s soggy fall and winter (and, ahem, spring) reputation, SOJC drew talent from both in state and out:

Valerie Terry
Valerie Terry, a new assistant professor in Public Relations, is an award-winning researcher and teacher. She holds a BS in advertising from the University of Texas at Austin, an MA from the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin and a PhD from Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind.

Terry began her professional career as an advertising account executive with Ogilvy & Mather Advertising in Houston, Texas. She then moved on to work in the political and legislative arenas in Texas. Before going to Purdue, she was the director of political education at the Texas Medical Association, where she did political fundraising, grassroots organization and some lobbying.

A native Texan, Terry’s route to Eugene includes teaching spots in Boston and Oklahoma, as well as a Fulbright Scholarship in journalism in Almaty, Kazakhstan, for the year 2001-02—an experience she describes as “extraordinary, to say the least.”

Terry specializes in lobbying and issues management and international public relations. This fall, she’s teaching Public Relations Campaigns, where the students work on an actual campaign for a local client—in this case, the Stewart Aquatic Center. The center’s warm water pool, used primarily for therapeutic purposes, recently lost its primary funding through Easter Seals. Terry says, “We’re working to try to ‘keep it afloat,’ so to speak.”

Mark Blaine
Some of you will recognize Instructor Mark Blaine, a ‘93 graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism, from his graduate work (MS ’00) in the SOJC literary nonfiction program. After completing his master’s, Blaine settled in Eugene, taking on the editorship of Forest, a national environmental magazine about national forest and public land issues, and working as an adjunct instructor in the SOJC magazine sequence.

This year he’s teaching information gathering and upper division magazine courses.

Before coming to Eugene, Blaine spent five years with the Asheville, N.C., Citizen Times. As a beat reporter, night city editor and an investigative reporter, Blaine focused mostly on environmental issues. However, he also won awards for health care reporting and stories about Eric Robert Rudolph, the accused Olympic bomber who hid in the North Carolina mountains for five years. Blaine has also published one book, Whitewater: The Thrill and Skill of Running the World’s Great Rivers.

John Faville
Visiting Assistant Professor John Faville comes to the J-school from sunny San Francisco. He holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of California at Berkeley, as well as an MBA from Stanford University. Faville will be teaching Advertising Strategy, Advertising Campaign Development and Agency Account Management here in Allen Hall. His 20-year ad agency career, based in New York before San Francisco, includes work with companies such as P&G, Bank of America, ConAgra and—his personal favorite—Jelly Belly.