Indiana University School of Journalism

Home » News » Summer in London studentsmeet Hoosier John Owen

Note: Professor David Boeyink led the Summer in London program this year.

When 13 journalism honors students signed up for a course in British Media and Culture in London, none expected a Hoosier to show up as one of the international experts. But John Owen is used to showing up in unexpected places. Owen has been active in journalism around the world for more than 20 years.

Courtesy photo

Longtime journalist John Owen teaches at City University in London and took time to talk to Summer in London students in June.

Owen, M.A. ’72, Radio and Television, was a long-time head of TV news for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Later, he became the founding director of the European Centre of the Freedom Forum. Owen is currently professor of international journalism at City University in London.

In these roles and others, Owen has helped journalists wherever their work has been under attack.

• After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Owen sponsored training programs for journalists in Central and Eastern Europe.
• He worked with the European Broadcasting Union to create live satellite links with media experts around the world.
• In addition to London, he has taught in Ethiopia, Kosovo, and the United States.
• Owen is presently working to develop safety training to journalists covering war and disaster and to understand how post traumatic stress disorder affects those journalists.
• As founding chairman of the Frontline Club Forum in London, he has facilitated over 1,000 film showings, speeches and discussions focused on journalism issues in the last five years.

“Most of my life, I’ve tried to have a real influence in journalism,” Owen said.

Owen attributes his passion for journalism to his IU broadcast professor Dick Yoakam.

“At the end of the day, you’ve got to love what you do,” Owen said. “That’s what Yoakam did for me.”

Owen grew up in Huntington, Ind., a friend of the Van Arsdale twins who played basketball for IU, and a Sunday school student in the class taught by Dan Quayle’s father. Owen went to DePauw University on a football scholarship. But when he sustained a knee injury his first year, his interests turned to sports broadcasting at WGRE, the local radio station.

Not long after graduating from DePauw, Owen came to IU to study journalism with Yoakam, who got Owen his first job at WTMJ in Milwaukee.

“Yoakam knew everybody,” Owen said. And Yoakam’s recommendation meant everything. The journalists at WTMJ told Owen, “If Yoakam says you’re good, that’s good enough for us.”

Owen has spent a lifetime proving Yoakam right. And the IU students who spent two hours with Owen saw his passion for journalism on display. Owen led the class through a series of media sites on the Internet that offered them a window into international journalism from the BBC and the Huffington Post to Al Jazeera on YouTube.

“I was so excited about everything he was telling us, I wanted to go right home and look it up on the Web,” said IU student Katie Wickham, one of 13 honors students in the summer program.

Owen remembers Dick Yoakam’s classes because “he brought everything alive.” In his own classes, Owen does the same by introducing students to journalists facing challenges, from the CBC journalist forced to deal with her own mistake to the Al Jazeera journalist reporting from Islamabad only one month after journalist Daniel Pearl was beheaded.

What holds Owen’s work together is a passion for real journalism. “What matters is the work,” Owen said. “At the end of the day, you’ve got to love what you do.”

Owen is co-editor of Frontlines and Deadlines: Reflections on International Journalism, due to be published in December. Owen’s portion of the book will be dedicated to Dick Yoakam.