If Only Hunter Could Be There

Event-design as Rorschach test… Am I the only one who mistook the jagged white Rocky Mountain profile ranging through next year’s AEJMC Convention logo for an optimistic graph of media industries’ ups and downs, showing a slight upturn on the right? On second thought, the line looks exciting, dangerous and cracked, which reminds me of someone…

Getting a crowd of journalism educators together in Hunter Thompson territory in August could be a lot of fun.  I hope I can attend… (I hope anyone can attend, given the state of academic travel budgets, if my own institution is any indicator.)

Thinking of Hunter inspired a rewrite of this post and gave me a panel discussion idea for the event: “Going Gonzo: From Uncle Duke to Johnny Depp, how do journalism faculty and today’s students deal with Hunter S. Thompson‘s legacy?” He’s in my students’ textbook, on a page headed,  Journalism heroes, legends and folklore. He’s relevant to bloggers and skeptics, rebels and iconoclasts, lefties — and libertarian lovers of recreational firearms.

So let’s make that a discussion question for any journalism educators who see this post: How DO you treat Hunter Thompson in your classes? Is he in the textbook you use? (In my case, it’s a “yes” for Tim Harrower’s Inside Reporting.) Is he discussed in writing classes? In magazine classes? Reporting classes? History classes? Ethics classes? Do students read him? What do they think?