After graduating from Hammond High in 1964, I attended Indiana University-Bloomington, where I earned bachelors and masters degrees in journalism from 1964 to 1969. I then entered the U.S. Army as a Second Lieutenant in the Signal Corps, and served at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and Long Binh, South Vietnam, where I was awarded a Bronze Star with First Oak Leaf Cluster for meritorious service in a combat zone. In 1971, I left the Army for a Ph.D. program in mass communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I graduated in 1974 and took a position as an Assistant Professor of Journalism at Indiana University-Bloomington, where I have been on the faculty since then. I was appointed the Roy W. Howard Research Professor in 1988, a position I have held since then. I have won a number of national and international awards for research, including the 2009 Paul J. Deutschmann Award for Excellence in Research from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.