Ted Pease

Biography

Ted Pease is a journalist, editor and photographer who was a professor in the JCOM department at Utah State from 1994-2016, and department head for 16 years, from 1994-2005 and 2008-2013. He previously worked at several news organizations and taught at six other universities (see CV).

Since his retirement from USU in 2016, he has been editor of Senior News, a monthly community newspaper circulating 10,000 in Humboldt County, California. “It’s the kind of local community journalism I’ve wanted to do since I was a cub reporter at the Gloucester Daily Times,” he said. “It just took me 40 years to land the job.”

It’s fun, keeps me busy and connected to the community, and it pays for the boat,” he said.

Pease and his wife, emerita JCOM professor Brenda Cooper, live in Trinidad, a fishing village on the Redwood Coast, 280 miles north of San Francisco. Pease was hired in 1994 as head of the then-Department of Communication, relocating from New York City. When asked what an Eastern liberal was doing in Utah, Pease liked to answer, “Missionary work.”

During Pease’s leadership of JCOM, the department grew in faculty, students, course offerings and statewide reputation; one newspaper publisher described JCOM in the early 2000s as “the best professionally oriented journalism program in Utah.” Pease oversaw revival of the Communication master’s program and the department’s move from the Animal Science Building, then the oldest unrenovated campus building, to the shiny new Ag Science Building in 2014.

“I am enormously grateful for my years at USU,” he said. “The JCOM faculty was extremely dedicated and did great work, and our students have gone on to do great things in the world. I’m so proud of them.”

Pease was a recovering English major when started his newspaper career as a University of New Hampshire student, covering Jimmy Carter’s New Hampshire presidential primary campaign in 1976 and serving as news editor of the weekly student paper. He later worked as a reporter and editor for newspapers, magazines and the Associated Press in several states.

In the early 1980s, he covered Arkansas’s then-Gov. Bill Clinton (and his wife) for the Associated Press in Little Rock. He served as a Pulitzer Prize juror, was an Olympic torch runner in 2002 and taught journalism for 35 years.

Pease is author of dozens of turgid research articles, many on his research specialty concerning people of color in the newspaper business, and hundreds of newspaper columns and stories. He was managing editor of Newspaper Research Journal (1988-1991), editor of Media Studies Journal (1992-1994), book review editor of Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly (2008-2013), and co-edited four books on the mass media — on race and the media, children and the media, gender and radio. He was a member and national officer of various professional journalism and journalism education associations.

He holds a BA in English/journalism from the University of New Hampshire (1978); an MA in journalism from Minnesota (1981), and a PhD in mass communication from Ohio University (1991).

Pease is a dog lover, bogey golfer, photographer, indifferent tennis player, hiker and avid salmon fisherman aboard his boat, the mighty Toad, moored each summer in the harbor at Trinidad, California.

He likes to quote playwright Tom Stoppard, who said, “Writers are not sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you can get the right words in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.”—TP, 2023