School of Media News

(This announcement was originally included in NPPA’s news release publicizing more than 20 awards of distinction for 2016. For more information on other NPPA awards, https://nppa.org/news/nppa%E2%80%99s-sprague-award-jonathan-malat-boyd-huppert.)

WKU Photojournalism Professor Tim Broekema was selected as a 2016 recipient of the Robin F. Garland Educator Award by the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA). The honor is given for outstanding service as a photojournalism educator.

Professor Broekema teaches new media, picture editing, and news design in WKU’s photojournalism major in the School of Journalism & Broadcasting (SJ&B). Prior to teaching at WKU, Broekema served as the director of photography for the Kalamazoo (MI) Gazette, as well as having been a sports picture editor for the Chicago Tribune and a picture editor for the Louisville Courier-Journal and the Providence (RI) Journal. For more than 30 years he’s been a faculty member for The Mountain Workshops of WKU, and he’s proud of the fact that his students and former students have won top honors in CPOY, POYi, the Hearst competition, and in NPPA’s Best Of Photojournalism.

Garland, the namesake of this NPPA distinction, was a picture editor and war correspondent for the Saturday Evening Post until he joined Graflex Inc. as press technical representative after World War II. Later he became a press photography product specialist for Eastman Kodak Co. 

Also selected for the Garland award in 2016 was Loret Steinberg, an associate professor of photographic arts and sciences at Rochester Institute of Technology.

The Garland Educator Award will be presented along with other top honors during a ceremony at NPPA’s Northern Short Course in Iselin, NJ, in late February.