She has worked for the Style section of the Washington Post, assisted reporter Bob Woodward, composed poetry and fiction and ghostwritten more books than she can remember. There have been few writing genres that Barbara Feinman Todd hasn't dipped into.

Now the associate dean in the School of Continuing Studies (SCS) is taking on a new challenge -- helming the launch of Georgetown’s first master’s degree in journalism.

SCS will offer two new degree tracks this semester in the Master of Professional Studies. Feinman Todd will head the journalism track while her colleague, Denise Keyes, SCS associate dean, will lead the public relations and corporate communications specialty. It is a big step for Georgetown, which previously offered only undergraduate journalism courses through the English department.

That department is where Feinman Todd has spent her 15 years at Georgetown. So what draws her to the academic world instead of full-time writing or reporting?

"I think serious, careful reporting is now more important than ever. The world is getting complex," she says. "We need really good journalists and we need to keep training smart people and encouraging them to become journalists."

Getting ready to train those future journalists has meant months of work for Feinman Todd. A dry erase board hangs in her office ticking off the days until the semester begins, and a dozen "to do" notes surround the countdown. Interviewed earlier this summer, Feinman Todd jumped up to add notes to the growing list.

"She feels so passionate about the program. We both do," Keyes says. "Barbara and I really share in each other's struggles and joys as we’ve been developing the programs, which is very hard to do from scratch."

With Feinman Todd, there is no sense of detachment, Keyes declares.

"Barbara is working around the clock and putting her whole heart and soul into what she's doing," Keyes says. "She's really drawing on all the people she’s known in the field to help the programs here."

Many of those people are Feinman Todd's previous students, from whom she still receives regular updates on their jobs and progress in the Fourth Estate. The professor values these relationships because she knows what it is like to finally hit upon one’s passion in life.

Feinman Todd almost missed having a writing career herself after her parents pushed her toward law school. They were worried, she recalls, that a creative writing path "may not pay the bills."

But Feinman Todd pushed back and pursued writing, which helped lead to opportunities at the Washington Post and elsewhere.

"I can't tell you how many people I've saved from law school. I think that's my greatest contribution to mankind and womankind," she jokes. "I really do feel like I’m contributing to the direction of people’s lives. There are several points in my life where I met people who changed the course of my life. For me to be one of those people in someone's life is amazing."

Feinman Todd’s network of former students is continually expanding as more of them advance in the field. Some are even returning to lecture to her new crop of students. The professor is at the hub of that network, introducing contacts to each other and creating a social network.

"I'm helping to build a community of people interested in journalism, and that's really cool," she says. "Because journalism is professional, there is a lot of informal career counseling that goes on here."

Feinman Todd will put her dedication to her craft to good use through an ambitious project she co-founded with journalist and new Georgetown professor Asra Nomani. The two are leading the university's Pearl Project, a seminar investigating who killed Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, a close friend of Nomani, and why.

The professors will combine lessons on investigative and computer-assisted reporting with interviewing sources and contacts. Guest lecturers include both local and national journalists, as well as those with a tie to the Pearl case.

"What we're able to do, and it's something a lot of other institutions aren't able to, is align ourselves with work existing in other academic units at Georgetown and complement what they offer," SCS Dean Robert Manuel said.

Feinman Todd and Nomani recently heard the welcome news that the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation is giving the Pearl Project $100,000 to continue the course a second semester in the spring.

Uncovering Pearl's killer is the ultimate goal, but Feinman Todd says it is just as important that the students learn thorough reporting skills, including how to finesse information from sources, how to respond to obstacles they may encounter and how to build a narrative out of a complicated story.

A required ethics course will challenge students to act responsibly as they learn those skills.

"It will be taught by a mixture of Georgetown faculty, Jesuits and professionals who have experience with ethical issues," Feinman Todd explains. "We've got great guest lecturers lined up, like Ben Bradlee coming in to talk about the Pentagon Papers and Watergate."

A personal ethics manifesto will mark each student’s final project. It's a way, Feinman Todd says, for students to decide what sort of journalist they want to be.

"It's in keeping with Georgetown's emphasis on ethics," she says. "As journalism becomes more complicated, sometimes ethics stays in the background, especially because everything is sped up.

"The 24-hour news cycle doesn’t always leave journalists with enough time to make careful decisions. We want to help prepare our students to make the best possible decisions even when they're in very time sensitive, very stressful situations -- which is pretty much every day in the newsroom."

As she trains the next generation of journalists, Feinman Todd says she will continue with her own writing as a hobby. After so many years as a writer and reporter the professor says she'll never tire of the journalism scene.

"I just love it. I love following the news," she says. "I have such admiration for so many journalists in Washington. It's great for me to take those friendships and have my students benefit from them."

Source: Blue & Gray