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Any context? Or should I provide my own?
Edward Hershey Appointed Director of Public Affairs at Reed College
PORTLAND, Ore., June 13 (AScribe Newswire) -- Reed College has announced the appointment of Edward Hershey as director of public affairs. Hershey comes to Reed from Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., where he is currently director of publications and marketing.
Hershey will oversee print and web communications, community and media relations, and conference and events planning at Reed, which is one of the nation's pre-eminent institutions of the liberal arts and sciences.
"Ed Hershey has a long and distinguished career in communications," noted Hugh Porter, Reed's vice president of college relations. "We're looking forward to his leadership and ideas as the college approaches our upcoming centennial and capital campaign."
"Reed is one of America's most intellectual and iconoclastic undergraduate liberal arts colleges," Hershey said. "My work at Cornell and elsewhere has been about building. And the opportunity to go about it again at this point at a college of Reed's quality in a place as dynamic as Portland is absolutely alluring."
A journalist and municipal official before turning to higher education, Hershey has served as director of public relations at Long Island University in New York, director of communications at Colby College in Maine, and vice president for public affairs at Albright College in Pennsylvania. Before that he was an award-winning reporter for Newsday and assistant commissioner for public affairs in the New York City Department of Correction. He has written books about baseball and hostage negotiation and since 1977 has judged the prominent George Polk Awards in Journalism.
"I'm not a very passive person," Hershey said. "I tend to ask questions and get involved in things."
After Newsday was sold to a national chain, his concern for the paper's independence led him to organize a successful drive for an editorial union. At Colby, he joined the board to help publicize the Theater at Monmouth, a Shakespearean repertory company, and was elected president of the theater. In Ithaca, too, Hershey has been active in campus and community affairs. Elected an alderman, he was part of a city council coalition that paved the way for economic expansion and downtown revitalization. And for a decade he has been public address announcer for Cornell men's and women's varsity basketball games.
When he was a young Newsday sportswriter, Hershey's series on legendary coach Paul Brown was reprinted in Pro Football Digest and his profile of tennis star Arthur Ashe was included in Best Sports Stories of 1969.
That year he wrote a biography of the world champion New York Mets' leading hitter, Cleon Jones, and left sports for the city desk.
"I figured that nothing could top the Mets winning the World Series," he said, "so I was ready to cover the real world." He reported on many major stories, including the Attica prison insurrection and a bus hijacking that closed Kennedy Airport and led to Hershey's second book, "Hostage Cop." His account of a charter bus accident that killed six children won a coveted Society of Silurians Award for deadline reporting and made him a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
A native of Brooklyn who still remembers watching the Dodgers play at Ebbets Field, Hershey is an alumnus of Long Island University and taught journalism as a member of the adjunct faculty there and at Baruch College of the City University of New York. His wife, Leah, is associate director of the teacher education program at Cornell. She expects to join him in Portland at the end of the year. They share three children. His daughter, Rebecca, a Cornell graduate, is attending the University of Maine Law School. Her sons, David and Andrew, are undergraduates at Cornell University and Colorado College.
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CONTACT: Beth Sorensen, Office of Communications, 503-777-7574; beth.sorensen@reed.edu
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