UAA appoints O’Malley as new Atwood Chair of Journalism

Julia O'Malley, a well-known independent journalist with deep roots in Anchorage, will serve as the University of Alaska Anchorage's 21st Atwood Chair of Journalism.

"Julia will be a great addition to the program given her professional experience and sense of community," said John Stalvey, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. "We are excited to have her join us at UAA."

Within UAA's Department of Journalism and Communication, O'Malley will engage students in digital journalism and entrepreneurial mass communications, which she practices as a freelance reporter and writer. She will teach the introductory reporting course, Reporting and Writing News, and a course about Alaska food journalism that uses cuisine as a gateway into larger stories about the state's changing culture and climate.

Before becoming a freelancer, O'Malley wrote a popular column about Alaska life and politics for the Anchorage Daily News from 2009 to 2014. Before that, she covered courts and wrote about military culture and Anchorage's immigrant and ethnic communities. Her work has appeared in Al Jazeera America, the Oregonian and PBS.org, among others.

O'Malley has embraced social media and video storytelling and has been recognized for her long-form journalism. O'Malley was nominated for a James Beard Award in 2015 for a story about agriculture and restaurants in Homer. In 2014, she won a Berger Award from Columbia Journalism School for a series of stories about two teenage boys, best friends, one of them Lao and one of them Hmong, who were diagnosed with cancer at the same time. In 2011, her series on heroin addiction in Anchorage won the Darrell Sifford Memorial Prize from the Missouri School of Journalism. That same year, her columns won first place for general commentary from the Society for Features Journalists.

ATWOOD CHAIR OF JOURNALISM The Atwood Chair of Journalism is among the nation's most prestigious endowed journalism chairs. Anchorage Times publisher Robert B. Atwood established the Atwood Chair at the University of Alaska Anchorage in 1979. Among the many positive contributions Bob and Evangeline Atwood made to Alaska's civic life, the Atwood Chair of Journalism has helped educate the state's next generation of journalists.

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