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Thought Leader: Joyce Dehli

 

Joyce Dehli is vice president for news for Lee Enterprises, which publishes 53 newspapers, their affiliated online sites and mobile products. They include the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson, the Wisconsin State Journal in Madison and other mid-size and smaller news operations across the United States.

Dehli leads strategic efforts to support and strengthen Lee's print and digital journalism in a rapidly evolving environment. In collaboration with leaders in news, technology and other disciplines, she coordinates initiatives to do journalism in ways that play to the distinct strengths of emerging digital platforms, with a current focus on mobile and tablet forms. She oversees journalism training, and she developed the news curriculum for Lee Online University, a companywide program. She leads a variety of projects to support enterprise and watchdog journalism, good storytelling, newsroom leadership and ethical decision-making.

Before becoming vice president for news in 2006, she served as Lee's director of editorial development. She previously worked at the Wisconsin State Journal as a reporter, front-line editor and managing editor. She helped drive the newspaper's emphasis on investigative journalism, which included reports on statehouse corruption, a prosecutor's justice-for-sale scheme, the unraveling of a poor neighborhood within an affluent city, and racial disparities in local schools. Many of her projects included extensive work with databases. While at the Wisconsin State Journal, she worked with a German newspaper to produce a project for The Center for Foreign Journalists examining global interdependency in local communities in the United States and Germany.

She began her journalism career in Louisville, Kentucky, where she reported for The Courier-Journal and The Louisville Times. Between her years in Louisville and Madison, Dehli took time to work on a one-year project in Milwaukee aimed at reducing violence through education and advocacy. She went on to get a master's degree in English Literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has a bachelor's degree in journalism from Marquette University.

Dehli serves on the Pulitzer Prize Board. She also is a member of the Professional Advisory Board for the University of Iowa's School of Journalism and Mass Communication. She was a 2002 Poynter Ethics Fellow and has been a roundtable panelist and guest teacher at The Poynter Institute and for other journalism organizations and in classrooms. Her work, alone or as part of a team, has been recognized with more than 30 national and state journalism awards and honors.

 

Joyce's recent work and related links: