Professor

Jan Johnson Yopp, Walter Spearman Professor, teaches news writing and reporting. She serves as faculty adviser to the Carolina Association of Black Journalists. She is also dean of Summer School at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Prior to joining the faculty, she was a reporter, covering local governments, medical news and prisons, and assistant city editor for The Raleigh (N.C.) Times. She also was media relations specialist for Wachovia Bank in Winston-Salem, N.C., and public relations director for a Durham advertising agency. She wrote a weekly column, "Life with Kids," for the Herald-Sun in Durham, N.C., for three years. She co-authored a text, Reaching Audiences: A Guide to Media Writing, published in a fifth edition in 2009 by Allyn & Bacon. A second text, An Introduction to News Reporting: A Beginning Journalist's Guide, was published in 2005. She wrote A Legacy of Caring: The First Fifty Years of the Kate B. Reynolds Charitable Trust, published in 1997. She also edited Bicentennial Chronicles, published in June 1998.

For four years she was the co-director, then the director, of the Freedom Forum Rainbow Institute, a national program that selected 30 high school students to study journalism in a three-week intensive program.

In 1995 she received the David Brinkley Teaching-Excellence Award given in the School and a Favorite Faculty Award from the Class of 1995 and the University's General Alumni Association.

Office phone: 919.962.4083
Office location: Carroll 218
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