mike cowling story

Mike Cowling, spends most of his days at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh lecturing to students in stuffy classrooms on media ethics and news writing but at night this professor truly applies those lessons to practice when he joins one of the worlds largest news organizations, The New York Times, as copy editor for The Times website.

Cowling’s other job, his experience and the organization for which he is employed, The New York Times, were all topics Wednesday when Cowling spoke on the UW-Oshkosh campus.

Cowling, who has spent the past eight summers working for The Times in its main offices as a copy editor as well as spending five nights a week reviewing sections for The Times website, enlightened faculty and students alike on the success of the paper as well as the changes that The Times has faced since 9-11 and in the wake of their own plagiarism scandal with former employee Jayson Blair.

Once regarded as one of the leaders in the industry, The Times has won almost twice as many Pulitzer Prizes for journalism as any other newspaper or news organization. Since 1917 The Times as won 90 of the prestigious awards.

However, The Times has spent more time in the past year reviewing the work of their own employees since news broke in the spring of 2003 that former employee Jayson Blair fabricated parts of many of his stories written for The Times. Since then, The Times has created the position of public editor, a position currently held by Daniel Okrent, to oversee the content of the paper’s reporters

Another element that has forced changes in the way that reporters at The Times and throughout the world cover stories is 9-11. This change can be seen, according to Cowling, in The Times lack of investigative reporting on issues regarding the war on terror.

“How do you cover things when everyone is so patriotic,” said Cowling.

Even for a more liberal paper such as The Times this balance can be tricky.

Cowling is an associate professor in the Department of Journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. During his ten-year tenure at UW-Oshkosh, Cowling has taught a variety of courses including news writing, reporting, feature writing as well as media ethics and editing, two courses that he currently teaches. Prior to taking a full-time teaching job at UW-Oshkosh, Cowling taught part-time at California State University-Fullerton and Cal Poly-Pomona. Cowling’s assistance to aspiring journalists does not stop at the college level; currently he is executive secretary of the Northeastern Wisconsin Scholastic Press Association, an organization for high school journalism students.

Cowling’s love for journalism has propelled him into the forefront of his profession. "It is the little things in life you do that are important and I am lucky to have found something I enjoy and love to do," Cowling said during his hall of fame induction speech at Eastern. Along with fulfilling his teaching duties at UW-Oshkosh, Cowling has spent the last 5 years as an editor for The New York Times Web site. Throughout his career Cowling has held the position of news editor at The Los Angeles Time as well as copy editor at The Chicago Sun-Times. He also held workshops on editing, written a chapter for an editing textbook and had many free lance articles published throughout the United States.

Cowling, a 1975 graduate of the Eastern Illinois University was inducted into Eastern’s Journalism Alumni Hall of Fame in 2004. Prior to graduating from Eastern with a degree in journalism and history, Cowling was editor of the schools’ newspaper The Eastern News as well as sports editor of The Warbler. Both of these positions proved to be a positive stepping-stone for Cowling, something that he feels is crucial to the department and its students. As a result Cowling has stayed in contact with the department. "I have stayed in touch with The Eastern News because I feel it is the heart of the program, the glue that holds the journalism department together," he said.