Trio of WWU faculty reflect on their time at Western as retirement looms

Three of Western Washington University’s journalism faculty – George Erb, Joan Connell, and Dean Wright – have announced their retirements at the end of Spring Quarter 2023.

Erb has taught at Western for 10 years, Connell for 12 years and Wright for nine years. They have each made a substantial impact on the Department of Journalism, assisting in the education and growth of hundreds of students.

George Erb

Prior to his time serving as faculty at Western, Erb spent the entirety of his journalism career in Western Washington.

Erb grew up in West Lafayette, Indiana, and his father worked as a professor at Purdue University. He earned a degree in history from Hanover College in Hanover, Indiana in 1975. His first employer was Murray Publishing Company in Seattle in 1977, which was a company with a collection of weekly newspapers and magazines. He then moved on to work for Robinson Newspapers, which also had a chain of weekly newspapers in the area. There, he worked as the production planner in the press room while also writing local sports stories.

After later working full-time as a reporter at the Highline Times and Peninsula Daily News, Erb ventured to the University of Oregon to obtain a master’s degree in journalism in 1992.

“The reason I went to Oregon is it dawned on me that there were a bunch of things I didn’t know that I needed to know,” Erb said. “I wanted to get plugged into a network of people, and I figured that Oregon would be the way to do it.”

Erb moved on to work at the Puget Sound Business Journal after earning his masters degree. He eventually became the editor-in-chief of the publication, and led the business journal through the massive story of the Washington Mutual Bank Failure in 2008. Three of the journal’s reporters at the time were finalists for a 2010 Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting for their examination of the collapse.

In 2013, Erb decided that he wanted to try something different, as he had just turned 60 and was working 60-65 hours a week. He left the business journal around Thanksgiving of 2013. He did some freelancing work – mostly for the Seattle Times – but he knew that he wanted to pursue teaching. It was Western’s Peggy Watt – the department chair at the time – who called Erb and asked if he wanted to come and teach up in Bellingham. Watt was a long-time friend of Erb’s from his days at Robinson Newspapers.

“They needed somebody on short notice to teach news writing in the spring. So I said ‘hey, I’ll do it,” and they signed me up,” Erb said. “It was kind of crazy. But I liked the department, I liked the school, students and subject matter. It energized me.”

Erb said he has enjoyed all of his classes equally: news writing being the first class he taught, the excitement from his students in reporting, and the mere fact that he learned something new each time he taught media law.

He attributes several things to his success in the journalism world. He said that his natural hard-wiredness for words, his curiosity and the ideals of his mother and father all contributed to his success in the profession.

“From my dad, I got the value for verifiable facts. From my mom, I got the value of being a part of your community. And in journalism, you have both of those,” Erb said. “That goes for

education too. You’re making a commitment to a community and investment to the next generation.”

Erb is excited to travel, relax, and spend time in nature following his retirement next month.

Joan Connell and Dean Wright

Connell and Wright, who are married, have traveled far and wide over the course of their journalism careers before teaching at Western.

From 1978 to 1986, Connell worked as a reporter and editor for the Bellingham Herald following her graduation from SUNY Buffalo in New York. Connell was a single mom at the time, and worked with her (now) fellow journalism faculty members John Harris and Jack Keith at the Herald.

“Bellingham was a place where you could actually be a working parent and a single parent and survive,” Connell said. “I found it was very hard in Seattle because it was really big.”

She traveled to San Jose, California to work as the religion and ethics editor of the San Jose Mercury News after attending graduate school at the University of Hawaii. Wright – who also worked at the Mercury News as the editor of the features desk – had moved to San Jose on the same day as Connell. The two were even staying in the same hotel.

“I found I was looking forward to editing Joan’s work, because it would give me an opportunity to call her,” Wright recalled.

Before long, they were ready to get married.

When Connell’s daughter graduated from high school, the pair began traveling across the U.S – and the globe – for their work. In the ‘90s, they spent time in Washington D.C; Wright worked at the Baltimore Sun and the Associated Press, and Connell worked at Religion News Service and Newhouse News Service, where she was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 1994 in Beat Reporting for writing and reporting on religion, ethics and morality.

The two later moved to Redmond to work at MSNBC in 1996. Connell worked as the executive producer of opinions and later as the senior editor. Wright later became the editor-in-chief after he was initially recruited as an online news producer.

“At the time, I was working for the Associated Press and the Washington Bureau. And all of my colleagues there thought I was absolutely insane,” Wright said. “To leave the AP to go to a startup in Redmond, Washington between Microsoft and NBC. And so I went, and that was the dawn of the digital age.”

Wright was later recruited by Reuters to move to New York City and serve as the global editor for consumer news, as the news organization wanted to establish a stronger connection with news consumers themselves.

“I launched Reuters.com websites in the U.S., the U.K., China, India, and Japan, which was a lot of fun but quite the challenge,” Wright said. “And then I became their global editor for ethics and standards, where it was my job to make sure that Reuters’ 2600 journalists around the world had all the tools needed to do their job in the most ethical way possible.”

Connell, at the time, wanted to begin working in higher education. While in New York City, she worked for Columbia University’s Dart Center, a resource for journalists covering difficult topics.

“We would work with people who had really hard jobs, like covering wars and crime, where they’re dealing with a lot of just awful stuff,” Connell said. “We would get these people together, give them fellowships, bring them to New York, and they would work with a writing coach to work on their storytelling, and work with a therapist to talk through their trauma-related injury.”

Finally, the pair wanted to “get out of the fast lane” and decided to move to Birch Bay in 2010. They created Connell-Wright Media, where they work with a number of news organizations and agencies to give guidance on ethics, messaging, and editorial policy and strategy. They both started teaching at Western soon after the start of their company.

Wright said that mass media ethics, an upper-division course taught in the Journalism Department, has been his favorite class to teach. He said he has learned many things from the students, and enjoys being able to touch on some of the issues he has discussed with professional journalists with the students.

Connell joked that asking her what her favorite class to teach is is like asking who her favorite child is, but she settled on the classes involving storytelling as some of her favorites.

“I think watching students grow and change and become good storytellers is really satisfying,” Connell said. 

As for their future plans, Wright and Connell plan to stick around the Pacific Northwest, but have a number of trips planned, too. They are taking their granddaughter to Paris, France this summer and returning to Kyoto, Japan this fall.

What’s next?

Wright, Connell and Erb all said that they have thoroughly enjoyed their time at Western.

Erb touched on the fact that he has learned the most from his journalism students, especially from teaching classes like mass media law.

“I learned just as much as the students did every time I taught a class,” Erb said. “‘Every time I taught, I learned something else.”

Wright said he is impressed by the great sense of service present in Western’s Journalism students.

“One of the things that I’ve seen in my students at Western in each quarter I’ve taught is that students come in with a sense of service,” Wright said. “They see it as a service profession, whether they’re going to be working for a newspaper or broadcast network, or an NGO or working as a public relations professional for a company. I’ve just been so impressed with that.”

Connell said that she holds similar sentiments.

“What really happened here is how much I’ve learned from students from teaching them,” Connell said. “I think Dean and I both went into teaching with a very open mind. We didn’t really know how to do it. But I can say that I’ve learned much more than I’ve taught.”

Connell said that she will miss her time at Western, but isn’t completely severing ties with the university, as she and Wright will be around to help teach if needed.

“We’re very fond of the university community and everything we’ve been able to experience at Western, so I don’t want to think that relationship is over.”

To learn more about Western’s Journalism program, visit chss.wwu.edu/journalism.