By DAMIEN CROGHAN
J Alumni News staff
Joe Weber
Joe Weber started his newspaper career as a 12-year-old paperboy.
But his love affair with journalism really took off when he was working on his high school newspaper. More than 30 years later, it’s still going strong. Only now he’s teaching that same passion to future journalists.
Weber joined the J school faculty in August after 22 years at Business Week as a reporter and editor and a dozen years at other publications.
He started as a proofreader at The Home News in New Brunswick, N.J., but eventually he worked his way up to writing stories — everything from obituaries to features. At the same time, he was attending Rutgers University, working on an English degree, which he earned in 1977.
While working for The Home News, Weber saw that economics stories were making the front page. It was 1980 and the United States was in the middle of a recession. “Economics would get me on the front page,” Weber said.
He went back to school, earning a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University in New York in a program that concentrated on economic and business coverage. Weber believes graduate school, with a solid focus on a specialty, can be beneficial to journalism majors today, too.
“I think it can be very helpful because the more specialized skills you have, the more valuable you are to an employer,” Weber said.
After grad school, Weber worked for Dun’s Business Month and then for the Rocky Mountain News, both of which are no longer published.
“My career has involved organizations that changed a lot,” Weber said. “I’ve seen a lot of tumult in journalism. The changes are coming at a more stepped up pace. You learn to be flexible.
“Change is the normal state of affairs in journalism.”
Weber eventually landed at Business Week. “What I loved at Business Week were the smart people and the complex stuff we wrote about,” Weber said. The job was tough and demanding, but Weber said it also was fun.
“It made for better stories and made me a better reporter.”
The real world experience of Business Week taught him a lot. “What Business Week did do for me that school didn’t was teach me how to be more critical and analytical,” he said. “You question everything you hear.”
While at Business Week, Weber worked in Dallas, Philadelphia, Toronto and Chicago. Eventually, he became chief of correspondents, overseeing all of the magazine’s bureaus. He was based in Chicago and continued to write for the magazine.
At CoJMC, Weber, an associate professor, taught three courses last fall: the magazine article, advanced beat reporting and NewsNetNebraska.
His colleagues say he’s been a solid addition to the college. “Joe has brought another qualitative dimension to our college. He’s a professional journalist. He’s a thoughtful colleague and great mentor to students,” said Barney McCoy, an associate professor who teaches the NewsNetNebraska class with Weber.
“When Joe works with students in our class, he always provides them with rich examples and ideas in his instruction that almost always allow their work to improve.”
Weber said he had always planned to teach when he left Business Week. But it happened a little sooner than he anticipated.
“I didn’t think it would happen now,” he said. “But my wife got a job here and thought the school was wonderful.” Weber’s wife, Donna Shear, is the director of University of Nebraska Press.
Not only does he credit her with bringing him to Nebraska, he also gives her the credit for hooking him on his favorite pastime: marathon running. He is a 12-time marathoner, running races in places as varied as Honolulu, Las Vegas and Chicago.
“We had always run together from college on,” he said. “I never got into it seriously until I helped my wife prepare for a marathon in Toronto in 1998.
“I saw her doing this and thought, ‘I could never do that.’ But we moved to Chicago, and when she was training for it, I started training with her. Now I run with her. I’m not a fast marathon runner, but I’m training.”
Weber is adjusting to life in Lincoln. He said he enjoys his job at UNL and wants to help students prepare for life in an industry undergoing rapid change. “There will always be a great need for good journalism,” Weber said. “Multimedia is just the future.”
And students say Weber is helping them prepare for their futures.
“Joe knows his stuff. He has the ability to take a story and tear it apart, which is good because it shows that all writers have room for improvement,” said Adam Templeton, a senior news-editorial major, who was in Weber’s magazine class.
“He’s always interested in what you have to say, which creates a great learning environment.”
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