FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – The Walter J. Lemke department of journalism in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences has hired two new instructors to teach news reporting and other basic journalism courses.

Ray E. Minor, a veteran newspaper reporter and editor, has been hired as a full-time instructor. He will teach beginning news reporting as well as fundamentals of journalism. He is also working on a course in journalists’ use of social media, which he will teach in the spring.

Gina Holland Shelton, who covered the U.S. Supreme Court for the Associated Press, will teach news reporting as an adjunct instructor.

An Arkansas native and alumnus of the Lemke department, Minor started his journalism career in Little Rock and has been a part of award-winning reporting and editing teams in Illinois and Texas.

He earned a master of science in journalism administration from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in 1992.

While working in Chicago, Minor worked on a team that exposed gaps in safety regulations regarding railroad crossings, prompting a revision of statewide safety policies. Minor then spent several years in San Antonio, Texas, overseeing a team of three editors and a dozen journalists covering a wide range of state and national news.

Minor returned to Arkansas in 2008 as city editor for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s Northwest Arkansas edition. He left the paper in 2010 and began editing and writing for corporate clients, before joining the Lemke faculty this summer. 

Shelton covered politics and legal affairs for the Associated Press from 1989 to 2006.

At the high court, she oversaw coverage of historic cases on affirmative action, abortion, capital punishment, environmental protections, land rights, medical marijuana, free speech and presidential powers in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2012, terrorist attacks. She has discussed legal issues on NPR and NBC's “The Today Show.”

She is a graduate of Mississippi State University and a native of the Mississippi Gulf Coast.