News Release

Local angles: Jacksonville,
Winston-Salem; Chicago

Photo: To download a photo, see end of story.

Reporter, UNC alum Fred Shropshire 
to speak at journalism school April 11

CHAPEL HILL — Fred Shropshire of WGN-TV news in Chicago will speak on "Lessons and Blessings Under Deadline" on April 11 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The Carolina alumnus and former co-anchor of "Carolina Week," the student news broadcast from the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, will be the school’s 2006 Nelson Benton Lecturer. The free public talk will be at 5:30 p.m. in Carroll Hall Auditorium.

Shropshire, who graduated from the school in 2000, gave up his position on the university’s cheerleading squad to co-anchor the first editions of "Carolina Week." The experience started him on a path that led to the country’s third-largest television market.

Shropshire joined WGN-TV in February 2004, filing stories for the station’s flagship newscast "WGN News at Nine." He also is a substitute anchor on WGN’s morning, noon and evening newscasts.

Before joining WGN, Shropshire was a general assignment reporter for WXII-TV in Winston-Salem, from 2002 to 2004. He was the Jacksonville-Onslow County Bureau Chief at WCTI-TV, in his hometown, from 2000 to 2001.

His most memorable assignments were at Camp Lejeune during and after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, he said.

"It was the heaviest experience trying to capture what this meant, not only for our country, but also for Eastern North Carolina," he said. "We did scores of stories on military families directly affected when Marines left for Afghanistan. People still remember me for those stories."

Benton died in 1988. His family and friends established the Nelson Benton Lectures in 1989.

Benton graduated from Carolina in 1949 and began his broadcasting career at radio station WSOC in Charlotte. He went on to work for CBS News for more than 20 years.

Benton was working for CBS in Dallas when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, and he became the network’s New Orleans bureau chief in 1964. He reported on the civil rights movement in the South and covered the Vietnam War from Saigon, Hue and the Vietnamese countryside.

In the early 1970s, Benton was an anchor on the "CBS Morning News." He covered Watergate and the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974 and won an Emmy for a special broadcast about the Watergate tapes.

When the country faced an acute shortage of energy resources in the 1970s, Benton pioneered the energy beat for CBS News. He was on a team of CBS News correspondents who covered the American space program from the days of the Mercury astronauts through the moon landing on July 20, 1969.

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Photo URL: http://www.unc.edu/news/pics/visiting/shropshire.jpg

School of Journalism and Mass Communication contact: John Kuka, (919) 966-3323

News Services contact: L.J. Toler, (919) 962-8589