Michelle Carr Hassler, who has taught at UNL since 1998, teaches a vareity of reporting courses, including the fundamentals of reporting, multimedia storytelling, diversity reporting, solutions journalism and the Media Lab, the senior capstone course.

She’s received nine national teaching awards, most in Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication-refereed competitions. Her students also win national and regional awards, including the prestigious 2023 Edward R. Murrow Award for Excellence in Digital Reporting, a national award given by the Radio Television Digital News Association.

Hassler actively pursues innovative journalism initiatives, including the Carnegie Corporation and Knight Foundation’s News21 program. In 2011, she taught a seminar on food safety with Arizona State University and Maryland University professors to prepare students for a reporting project that produced an award-winning website on food safety.

In 2014, her capstone class produced a multimedia project about a diverse city neighborhood for the Ford Foundation’s Heartland Project. In 2018, she led “One College, One Project: The Heart of Lincoln,” in which students in eight CoJMC courses collaborated on a civic engagement initiative in the city’s six poorest neighborhoods. And in 2022 and 2023, she co-coordinated the college’s participation in the nationwide Democracy Day initiative.

She was among the first U.S. educators to be trained by the Solutions Journalism Network to teach solutions journalism in 2018 and has actively worked to promote the practice ever since. In addition to presenting workshops to regional and national groups, she and two other educators helped 13 Kenyan female journalists learn about solutions journalism as part of a U.S. Department of State program in 2021.

As executive director of the Nebraska High School Press Association, Hassler works with teachers to strengthen scholastic journalism. She organizes an educational convention that brings 700+ journalism teachers and students to campus and has helped with the group’s lobbying efforts for New Voices legislation to ensure students have the First Amendment freedoms of speech and the press. For her work with the NHSPA, she was honored with the R. Neale Copple Friend of Journalism Award in 2019.

Hassler also has served the broader university community. She was a group leader with UNL’s Peer Review of Teaching Project, was a member of the Chancellor’s Commission on the Status of Women and a participant in the Executive Vice Chancellor’s inaugural leadership program.

Hassler received a bachelor's degree in journalism and a master's degree in English, both from UNL. She was a newspaper reporter and editor for 16 years in Colorado, Arizona and Nebraska.