HSPA looks forward to continuing its partnership with the National Sports Journalism Center at IUPUI as the center’s leadership changes.
Tim Franklin, the director who helped found the center as part of the Indiana University Department of Journalism in 2009, will join Bloomberg News as an editor-at-large in the Washington bureau.
HSPA and HSPA Foundation have worked with the center’s leadership to distribute stories written by students in the sports journalism program to newspapers across the country during events in Indianapolis such as the NCAA Women’s Final Four and the Indy 500, and the benefit to both newspapers and students is palpable, said Karen T. Braeckel, Foundation director.
“HSPA and the Foundation are advocates for content-sharing to help newspapers better serve readers, and we appreciate Tim’s involving the National Sports Journalism Center toward that effort,” Braeckel said. “The experiences journalism students gain will benefit the industry as well.”
Franklin, who was the Louis A. Weil Jr. Endowed Chair at IU, will join the center’s National Advisory Board to stay involved with the program he helped launch.
He will start at Bloomberg Aug. 8.
The school will begin a national search in August for the new director. Dan Drew, a veteran IU professor and former broadcast journalist, will oversee the program in the interim.
“Helping to launch the National Sports Journalism Center at IU, an institution that I care deeply about, was one of the most challenging but rewarding things that I’ve ever done,” Franklin said. “It’s not at all easy for me to leave the school or the students, but I do so knowing that the center is now firmly established as one of the best – if not the best — sports journalism programs in America.”
Franklin said the move allows him to fulfill a lifelong goal of practicing journalism in Washington, D.C. Prior to joining IU in January 2009, Franklin was the editor in chief of The Baltimore Sun, and editor of the Orlando Sentinel and The Indianapolis Star.
