UNC’s NC Media and Journalism Hall of Fame will honor five industry stalwarts
Four journalists and an advertising executive with North Carolina ties will be inducted Friday into the NC Media and Journalism Hall of Fame housed at UNC.
The Hall of Fame’s Class of 2019 will be honored with a reception, dinner and ceremony benefiting the UNC School of Media and Journalism. The event is underwritten by the Josephus Daniels Charitable Fund of the Triangle Community Foundation.
The Hall of Fame honors journalists who have made significant impacts on their professions and their communities. According to the school, 2019 honorees are:
▪ Taylor Branch, a writer and public speaker whose trilogy, “America in the King Years,” chronicled the life of Martin Luther King Jr. The first book of the set won a Pulitzer Prize in 1989. Branch received his bachelor’s degree in history from UNC-Chapel Hill in 1968 and his master’s in public administration from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton. According to his website, he started his career as a staff writer for The Washington Monthly, Harper’s and Esquire magazines. In 2009, he published “The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President,” based on eight years of interviews with Bill Clinton. In 2011, he wrote “The Shame of College Sports” for The Atlantic.
▪ Margaret Johnson, creative officer and partner for Goodby Silverstein & Partners, the San Francisco advertising agency. Johnson was named Executive of the Year in 2018 by Advertising Age. Her biography says Johnson got her bachelor’s in journalism and mass communication from UNC and a degree in art direction from the Portfolio Center in Atlanta. Under her direction, the agency has produced a string of ad campaigns with a social-justice bent, including Tostitos’ “Party Safe” bag to help prevent drunk driving after the Super Bowl, Doritos’ “No Choice” Chips to encourage millennials to vote in the 2016 election and the #IAmAWitness campaign against cyber-bullying for the Ad Council.
▪ Mary E. Junck, chair of Lee Enterprises, which produces news, information and advertising in 49 markets in 21 states. Junck holds an honorary doctor of laws from UNC-Chapel Hill and endowed the Mary Junck Research Colloquium for scholarly presentations at the school. Junck served as chair of The Associated Press from 2012 to 2017. Since 2018, she also has managed the BH Media Group for Berkshire Hathaway, which has print and digital news operations in 30 markets. According to her biography, she started her career in 1972 at The Charlotte Observer as a marketing research manager. She has a master’s in journalism from UNC.
▪ Rochelle Riley, a columnist for the Detroit Free Press since 2000 and author of “The Burden: African Americans and the Enduring Impact of Slavery,” published in 2018. She has a bachelor’s degree from the UNC School of Media and Journalism and, according to her biography, recently co-founded the Letters to Black Girls Project, a national effort to pass words of encouragement from black women to girls. She started her career at the Greensboro Daily News & Record, first as a general assignment reporter and then covering education. As a columnist at the Free Press, she has advocated for education, race and children’s issues and government responsibility.
▪ David Woronoff, president and publisher of The Pilot of Southern Pines. Under his leadership, The Pilot has grown from a twice-a-week newspaper into a statewide media company that also publishes five magazines and two phone directories. Woronoff got a bachelor’s in English from UNC in 1988, and started his journalism career at The News & Observer. He took over at The Pilot in 1996. In 2009, he was named president of the N.C. Press Association, becoming the fourth generation of his family to serve in the role.
This story was originally published April 11, 2019 at 3:34 PM.
