New York Times Editor to Present Annual Roy Reed Lecture

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Peter Applebome, New York Times deputy national editor.

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Peter Applebome, New York Times deputy national editor, will be the 2014 Roy Reed Lecturer. He will speak at 7 p.m. Wednesday, April 9, at the Janelle Y. Hembree Alumni House. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Applebome started with the Times as a correspondent and then bureau chief of the Houston bureau from 1987-89. He went from there to Atlanta, where he was bureau chief from 1989 to 1994. He was the chief education correspondent from October 1994 through January 1998 and then was a correspondent on the culture desk. In September 1999, he became assistant metropolitan editor and worked as an editor for four years before taking over the "Our Towns" column in 2004.

Applebome is the author of Dixie Rising: How the South is Shaping American Values, Politics and Culture, published by Times Books in 1996 and Scout's Honor: A Father's Unlikely Foray into the Woods, published by Harcourt in 2003.

Applebome has also taught journalism at Princeton and Vanderbilt University.

The Roy Reed Lecture Series in Journalism honors Roy Reed, a University of Arkansas journalism professor emeritus and former New York Times reporter.

Reed started with the Joplin Globe in 1953. From 1954-1956, he served as a public information officer in the U.S. Air Force. He joined the Arkansas Gazette in 1954 and worked there for eight years. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University from 1963-1964. From the Gazette, Reed moved on to the New York Times, where he covered the civil rights movement in the South and worked as a foreign correspondent in Great Britain from 1977-1979.

Reed joined the faculty at the Walter J. Lemke Department of Journalism in 1979 as an associate professor. He served as chair of the department in 1981-1982, becoming a full professor in 1982. Reed retired in 1995 and lives in Hogeye with his wife, Norma. Students remember Reed for his respect for the written word and his sense of a reporter’s responsibility for accuracy.

Reed is the author of Beware of Limbo Dancers, a memoir focusing on his time reporting about the civil rights movement during the 1960s. Reed also wrote Looking for Hogeye a collection of essays about his adopted hometown, and Faubus: The Life and Times of an American Prodigal, a biography of the former Arkansas Gov. Orval E. Faubus. The University of Arkansas press published all three of his books.

Reed was awarded the 2007 Cecil Woods Jr. Award for Nonfiction from the Fellowship of Southern Writers.