Kelley French to join new media school

This August, Kelley Benham French will join IU’s Media school as a professor of practice, and it’s been a winding road to get here.

She went to summer camp at the Poynter Institute twice before she graduated high school, joined the student newspaper at University of Florida and graduated with a degree in journalism.  

Soon after an internship at the Dallas Morning News, French began teaching at Deerfield Beach High School, a communications magnet high school in Deerfield Beach, Fla.

“I had a full schedule of just journalism,” French said. “It was phenomenal.”

French also advised the high school newspaper and the yearbook at Deerfield.

“We won a bunch of awards, and we had a great time,” she said.

After three years of teaching, French decided to attend the University of Maryland journalism graduate program.

“I heard about the graduate program at Maryland, and there were some people teaching there that were legends to me,” French said.

She said she relished the opportunity to study under journalism icons such as Gene Roberts, former national editor at the New York Times and executive editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, and Jon Franklin, two-time Pulitzer Prize award winner.

Despite flunking Franklin’s narrative writing class, French said her graduate school experience was “magical.”

In 2002, French started writing for the Clearwater Bureau for the Tampa Bay Times. She said she sometimes felt she was writing trivial stories she felt were getting her nowhere.

“I wrote stories about street signs and rusty water pipes, and I was like, ‘What am I going to do?’” French said.

After writing a story about a rooster that attacked a two-year-old girl, she got national attention.

“That was one of the stories that demonstrated her great gift,” Mike Wilson, former managing editor of the Tampa Bay Times, said. “Everybody noticed that piece.”

It was the story that prompted Wilson to hire French as a feature writer for the Tampa Bay Times.

“It’s a section that, for years, had showcased the best writing in the country, and it has always been my dream to work for that section,” French said.

French said she attributes most of her professional journalistic acumen to Wilson.

“Mike Wilson must have been in the top handful of editors in the country, and he pretty much taught me everything,” she said.  

French’s career flourished while writing and editing for the Floridian feature section of the Tampa Bay Times. There, she edited two stories that were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize.

French was a Pulitzer finalist herself in 2013 after she reported and wrote a series of articles titled “Never Let Go.”

The series chronicled the triumphant survival of her premature daughter, born 1 pound and 4 ounces after only 23 weeks and six days. The three-part story was a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing.

French said the story’s effect transcended her daughter’s struggle.

“It’s an incredibly important story, not just about my daughter and what she went through, but about these early babies are this frontier in medicine, science and ethics, and these profound questions about these babies,” she said.

French’s effect also transcends her classrooms, according to some of her students at the University of Florida.

“She was the best professor I’ve ever had by far in my whole college career,” Jon Silman, French’s former student, currently a staff writer for the Tampa Bay Times, said.

“Kelley has a way of taking mundane, ordinary, everyday stories and turning them into extraordinary, life-affirming, deep, thoughtful, insightful pieces of journalism.”

French said she believes her classroom should be a laboratory for her students to tell the best stories they can.

She said she will employ an interactive heuristic approach to teaching journalism.

“I’m not going to have a classroom where we just work out of textbooks and do assignments that don’t go anywhere,” French said.

French said she understands the significance of a potent teacher-student relationship and hopes to cultivate some at IU.

“It only takes one really important relationship with a professor to change the trajectory of someone’s life or career,” she said.