Richard Roth

Richard J. Roth is now located in Doha, Qatar, where he is the journalism dean at Northwestern University's first international campus. Before accepting this assignment, which began in July 2008, Roth was for 10 years the senior associate dean of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.

He speaks frequently these days about the future of journalism and the values of journalism. He has given such talks at seven universities in South Korea, two universities and the Nordic Media Festival in Norway, and at various gatherings of journalists in the U.S. and around the world.

Besides his administative duties at Medill, Richard Roth also teaches reporting, which is where his career began in 1971 at the Buffalo (N.Y.) Courier-Express.

It was there, in his rookie year as a reporter, that Roth became involved in the bloodiest prison riot in American history and there to which he has returned many times in preparing to write a book about the village of Attica, N.Y., and all the other prison towns like it.

Richard Roth was one of two newspaper reporters inside the prison yard at Attica during the Sept. 9-13 riots in 1971, serving on the Select Observers Committee. His subsequent writing about Attica earned him a 1972 nomination for the Pulitzer Prize.

Roth remained at the Buffalo newspaper until it ceased publication in 1982. He then was named editor in chief of the newspaper at Terre Haute, Ind., home of the nation's only federal death chamber. After six years in Terre Haute, Roth was named an associate professor at DePauw University in Greencastle, Ind.

He left DePauw after seven years and worked at the then-new Wall Street Journal interactive edition, before accepting the associate dean's position at Northwestern in 1998. Along the way, Richard Roth has also been international vice-president at-large of The Newspaper Guild, a governor's appointee to the Indiana Oversight Commission on Public Records, president of the Indiana Associated Press Managing Editors association, president of the Terre Haute Symphony Orchestra Association board and today he is a member of the national board of directors of the Society of Professional Journalists and a member of both its Finance and Executive committees.

Richard Roth grew up in Indiana and earned degrees from Indiana University and Indiana State University.