This year’s Seline Lecture guest speaker was executive editor of The Omaha World-Herald Randy Essex. The virtual event had over 50 attendees.
His talk "Journalism Love Stories" covered why a news career is both important and fun. Through the lens of his seminar on America, Essex discussed his time working in seven states across five decades. He explained why journalism will remain an important and fun career into the foreseeable future.
See Essex’s lecture and read his bio below.
In 1992 CoJMC alum Rex Seline's siblings and his mother, Kathleen Seline, launched the Seline Memorial Lecture fund to honor their father S. Allen Seline who passed away in 1984. Two months after the first lecture, Kathleen Seline passed away, and her named was added to the lecture series.
"My father, in whose name we started this, would have turned 100 this year," Seline said. "The 2021 lecture is a special occasion for our family."
The Seline family established the Seline Memorial Lecture fund in memory of their parents to support an annual lecture at the College of Journalism and Mass Communications. The fund recognizes S. Allen and Kathleen D. Seline for the years they devoted to helping the young people of Nebraska.
Randy Essex bio
Randy Essex has been executive editor of The Omaha World-Herald since January 2020. He’s a Nebraska native and College of Journalism and Mass Communications graduate. He worked at newspapers in Abilene, Texas, and Boise, Idaho, before spending 18 years in editing roles at The Des Moines Register, eight years at the Detroit Free Press and two years at the Cincinnati Enquirer. He’s overseen coverage of the Iowa caucuses, the bankruptcies of General Motors and Chrysler, and won the 2016 Burl Osborne Editorial Leadership award from the American Society of News Editors for editorials on immigrant rights when he was publisher-editor of the Glenwood Springs Post Independent in western Colorado. He’s married to Angelyn Frankenberg, whom he met at that first career stop in Texas.
