Christine “Chris” Martin, the former WVU journalism dean who turned Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters and war correspondents into professors at her school, has died.
The Reed College of Media said Martin died Wednesday in Florida, where she had launched a media and marketing company, after serving years in the senior administration of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, a leading journalism think-tank in St. Petersburg.
No other details were available Thursday of her passing, but Maryanne Reed said Martin’s legacy of journalism in the Mountain State and elsewhere couldn’t be better documented.
Reed, who serves as WVU provost and vice president of academic affairs, is also a former reporter and dean of the school. She became a professor at the school in Morgantown under the watchful eye of Martin, her mentor.
“She was a visionary leader,” Reed said, praising Martin for her work in creating degree offerings such as the school’s online Integrated Marketing Communications master’s program and her work in launching ambitious chronicles of cancer patients and military veterans across West Virginia.
Martin also recruited two marquee reporters to the faculty: George Esper, the Associated Press correspondent acclaimed for his dispatches from the Vietnam War, and Terry Wimmer, a reporter and editor who helped lead
the coverage of wrongdoings at a Southern California fertility clinic that won a Pulitzer Prize for the Orange County Register.
“Her major curriculum revisions paved the way for the college to become a leader in modern media education,” Reed continued. “She was loved and will be missed.”
Love was what got Martin into to all this in the first place, she said in a profile in The Dominion Post in 2003.
“I loved telling stories of people’s lives,” she said.
Martin, who grew up in Jeanette, Pa., found out in earnest that she wanted to be a writer and reporter after doing public relations at her alma mater, California University of Pennsylvania, right after she earned an English degree in 1973.
A freelance gig at a small weekly newspaper in southwestern Pennsylvania led to her first assignment: A telephone interview with Bob Prince, the rascally play-by-play announcer for the Pittsburgh Pirates, conducted, (Prince said), while he was in the bathtub.
She later worked at newspapers in Greensburg, Pa., and Uniontown, Pa., before going back to school to study education.
Martin joined the WVU journalism faculty in 1990 as an associate professor. After 10 years of national and international accolades for her teaching, she was named dean of the school in 2000.
She didn’t have time to savor the promotion, as she was boarding a plane with Esper to help cover the 25th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, a watershed moment in the Vietnam War.
The song of reporting, Martin said, was one that could always make her dance.
As she put it: “In no other job can you meet so many extraordinary people. You share people’s most exciting and frightening and exhilarating moments.
“One of my favorite writers, Claude Shearer, says ‘Every person has
a story that can stop your heart and mark your memory.’ ”
