October 11, 2019

Eight former Daily Egyptian staff members to be inducted into newspaper’s Hall of Fame

by Pete Rosenbery

CARBONDALE, Ill. — Eight former staff members of the Daily Egyptian, Southern Illinois University Carbondale’s student-produced newspaper, will be inducted into the newspaper’s Hall of Fame next weekend. 

The inductees include a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist, an author and chief investigative reporter for a television station in Nashville, Tennessee, and an enterprise reporter at the Washington Post.

The newspaper’s Hall of Fame began a few years ago, Eric Fidler, the Daily Egyptian’s faculty managing editor said. The newspaper’s policy and review board approves the nominees. The criteria for nomination requires that the former Daily Egyptian staff members have distinguished themselves since leaving the paper’s newsroom.

“It’s good to see the success so many of our alumni have had, and how work at the DE has prepared them for that,” Fidler said.

The inductees will receive plaques at an Oct. 19 tailgate celebration hosted by the Daily Egyptian and the College of Mass Communication and Media Arts.

Inductees followed varied professional career paths

The 2019 inductees, in alphabetical order, are:

  • Jayette Bolinski is the deputy communications director at the Illinois comptroller’s office. Bolinski previously served as a reporter and State Journal-Register editorial page editor. She is a former DE reporter and editor-in-chief.
  • Marc Chase has worked for Lee Enterprises newspaper chain for 21 years, including five years as a criminal justice and then investigative reporter for the Quad-City Times in Davenport, Iowa. He has served in several capacities the last 16 years for The Times of Northwest Indiana, where he is now the executive editor.
  • Jeremy Finley, former DE reporter, is the chief investigative reporter at WSMV-TV in Nashville, Tennessee. A multiple regional Emmy and Edward R. Murrow Award recipient, he also is a national Murrow Award winner. In addition, Finley is the author of two books, “The Darkest Time of Night” and “The Dark Above.”
  • Kendra Helmer, a former DE editor-in-chief, leads the strategic communications team for the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Office of Transition Initiatives. Helmer previously was an overseas journalist with Stars & Stripes. Her photographs have been published in the New York Times and in books about the war in Iraq.
  • David Mahsman, a former DE reporter, retired in 2016 after serving more than 30 years in various executive positions for The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod. He spent 20 years as director of news and information and executive editor of its two national periodicals, a magazine and a newspaper. Before attending seminary and being ordained into the Lutheran ministry, Mahsman was an award-winning reporter for the Daily Herald in Arlington Heights.
  • Mike Rosenwald, a former DE reporter, is an enterprise reporter at The Washington Post. Before joining The Post in 2004, he was a reporter at The Boston Globe. He has also written for The New Yorker, Esquire, The Economist and the Columbia Journalism Review. Rosenwald was a finalist for the National Magazine Award in feature writing.
  • John Patterson, a former DE reporter, was an award-winning Illinois statehouse reporter for nearly 15 years working for the (suburban Chicago) Daily Herald and before that Lee Enterprises. He is now spokesman and strategic media adviser for Illinois Senate President John Cullerton.
  • Scott Shaw, a former DE photojournalist who is a freelance photographer, won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for his internationally recognized photograph of Jessica McClure after her October 1987 rescue from an abandoned water well. At the time, Shaw was a photographer for the Odessa American newspaper in Texas. He later worked as a photojournalist at the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

DE celebrating anniversary

First published on Oct. 28, 1916, the Daily Egyptian is celebrating its 103rd anniversary this month. The newspaper is now printed once a week but operates daily online at dailyegyptian.com. The paper recently earned a third consecutive nomination for an Online Pacemaker by the Associated Collegiate Press. The Daily Egyptian is going for a third straight title after earning the award in both 2017 and 2018.