John Fountain

                 
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A native son of Chicago, John W. Fountain is an award-winning journalist, professor and author of the memoir, True Vine: A Young Black Man's Journey of Faith Hope and Clarity (Public Affairs, 2003), paperback March 2005. His essay, "The God Who Embraced Me" appears in National Public Radio's book, This I Believe.

Fountain is currently a professor of journalism at Roosevelt University in Chicago.

In a journalism career that has spanned 20 years, Fountain has been a national correspondent for The New York Times. Based in Chicago. He also has been a staff writer at the Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune. He has written for the Wall Street Journal, Chicago Sun-Times, Modesto Bee, Pioneer Press Newspapers in suburban Chicago and the Champaign News-Gazette.

Until fall 2007, he was a tenured full professor at his alma mater, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he had taught the previous three years. Professor Fountain was formerly a visiting scholar at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in Evanston.

Fountain's stories and essays continue to appear in news publications across the country and overseas, including his recent poignant essay, "No Place for Me" on his disenchantment with the "Black Church," a commentary first published in the Washington Post and subsequently in newspapers across the country.

OpEdNews Member for 166 week(s) and 6 day(s)

7 Articles, 0 Quick Links, 3 Comments, 0 Diaries, 0 Polls

7 Articles

Sunday, October 18, 2009
Survival 101: Thou Shalt Not Snitch
(4 comments) John W. Fountain, a professor at Roosevelt University and a former Chicago crime reporter, writes about the ongoing violence in his hometown, specifically weighing in on why some people in crime-ridden communities are less than eager to come forward as witnesses to violent crime.

Sunday, August 30, 2009
Generations of Changed Lives: "The Providence Effect"
(6 comments) John Fountain pays tribute to his alma mater, an inner-city high school on Chicago's tough West Side that has sent for the last 30 years 100 percent of its graduates to top colleges and universities across the country-- a school with a tough, no nonsense approach and a prescription for what ails America's failing public school system.

Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Way "Black" When: Remembering Michael Jackson
(3 comments) John W. Fountain writes about a childhood musical icon and about how the color line and complexity of how race is lived in America colors how black men are viewed and also how some black men sometimes view themselves.

Tuesday, June 23, 2009
The Cost of Cutting a Son's Hair: Priceless
(1 comments) John Fountain writes about the ritual of cutting his son's hair and the importance of fathers.

Tuesday, June 23, 2009
The God Who Embraced Me
(3 comments) John Fountain writes about finding faith and a father.

Thursday, June 4, 2009
"Now, I See"
(4 comments) John W. Fountain, a professor of journalism at Roosevelt University in Chicago, writes about homelessness in Chicago and the experience this spring of leading his students in covering the issue for their project in the undergraduate Convergence Newsroom course.

Sunday, February 1, 2009
Confessions of a Newspaperman
(4 comments) Former New York Times correspondent, John W. Fountain, now a journalism professor, writes about the demise of newspapers, of the rise of convergence and missing the scent of a fresh morning newspaper. He writes, "It is a death of sorts that leaves me with mixed emotions and also a set of questions as a journalism educator, none more urgent or critical than this: How to best prepare a new generation of journalists..."