Newseum Consultant to Deliver Roy Reed Lecture

Photo Submitted

Susan Bennett

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Susan Bennett, senior consultant at the Newseum, will deliver the annual Roy Reed Lecture at 7 p.m. Wednesday, April 4, at the Janelle Y. Hembree Alumni House. The event is free and open to the public.

The Roy Reed Lecture Series brings noteworthy journalists to campus each year to discuss their careers in issues in their profession. The lecture was created by the Walter J. Lemke department of journalism in the J. William College of Arts and Sciences to honor Roy Reed, a professor emeritus of journalism who reported for The New York Times from 1965 to 1978.

Bennett is a veteran newspaper reporter and editor. She spent 13 years with the Newseum, located in Washington, D.C., where she last served as senior vice president in charge of exhibits, programs and media relations. Bennett had held a variety of positions including vice president of marketing and deputy director of the Newseum and director of Asian and European programs and communications director for the Freedom Forum in Rosslyn, Va. 

A native of Tennessee, Bennett began her journalism career with United Press International in Memphis and was named bureau chief six months after she was hired as a reporter. There she covered state politics, college and professional sports, and the death of Elvis. She also was dispatched throughout the South to cover elections, riots, natural disasters and other national news stories for UPI. In 1980, she was named state editor and Richmond bureau chief for UPI in Virginia.

Bennett left UPI and became the first Washington correspondent of the Philadelphia Daily News, where she covered Congress, the Pentagon, presidential campaigns and government agencies. She was named a national correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers, where she covered Congress, presidential politics and the State Department. As a diplomatic correspondent for Knight Ridder, Bennett accompanied secretaries of state James Baker and Warren Christopher to more than 50 countries, writing about arms control, the collapse of communism, U.S.-Soviet summits, the Persian Gulf War and the Middle East for this chain of 30 U.S. newspapers and 200 plus wire-service clients. In 1989, Bennett received the Olive Branch award from New York University as a member of the Knight Ridder foreign-affairs team writing on international security.

Bennett next moved to USA Today, where she was an editor and writer, specializing in aviation safety and foreign affairs, on the national newspaper’s editorial page. She won numerous in-house awards and her editorials on the investigation of the crash of ValuJet Flight 592 were nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

She is co-author of the Newseum’s book, President Kennedy Has Been Shot, and was editor of Running Toward Danger, the Newseum’s book on journalists who covered the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Bennett attended the University of Memphis and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from Huntingdon College in Montgomery, Ala., where she received the 2003 Alumni Achievement Award.

She and her husband, John Bennett, a retired journalist, live in Annandale, Va. They have four children, including a daughter, Meredith Mendez, who was an on-air television journalist for 15 years.