Pulitzer-Winning Reporter To Speak At WKU

November 08, 2007

Bowling Green, Ky. -A reporter honored for his investigative reporting will speak at Western Kentucky University on Nov. 19.
           
Brett Blackledge will speak at 7:30 p.m. in the Mass Media and Technology Hall Auditorium. His lecture, which will follow a 5 p.m. reception and special announcement, is part of the Gaines Lecture Series. The series is named for the John Gaines family, owners of News Publishing LLC, publishers of the Daily News in Bowling Green and began in 2004 in honor of the newspaper’s 150th anniversary.
           
Blackledge received the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Journalism and the Associated Press Managing Editors public service award for his ongoing series on corruption and cronyism in Alabama’s two-year colleges.
           
Blackledge is a general assignment and special projects reporter with The Birmingham News. He moved to Alabama in 1993, joining The Mobile Register as a local government reporter. He also covered education and state government. He has worked at The Birmingham News since 1998.
           
Blackledge is a native of Baton Rouge, La. He earned a journalism degree from Louisiana State University in 1986. He began his career with the Associated Press in New Orleans, and later worked for AP in Jackson, Miss., and Tulsa, Okla.
           
He worked for The Journal Newspapers in suburban Washington, D.C., covering crime, local government and the Maryland and Virginia legislatures. There he wrote about national education issues for Education Daily, covering the White House, U.S. Congress and U.S. Department of Education. He left Washington for Alabama in 1993.
           
Blackledge is married to Stephanie Dowdy of Mobile who is a veterinarian in Birmingham. His daughter, Anna, is 12 and a seventh-grader at Oak Mountain Middle School in Shelby County, Ala.

More WKU news is available at www.wku.edu. If you’d like to receive WKU news via e-mail, send a message to WKUNews@wku.edu.