Author Archives: Doug Cumming

Why is it, I asked Daddy, that we two writers, with such rich material to work with, have never made fiction out of our family? Pat Conroy did it with his family. Yeah, he said, and it wasn’t very nice … Continue reading →

My daddy, now 90, entertains us with an endless scroll of family stories, and I had never heard this one until recently. One year, when he was a boy, he rode his father’s horse in the Confederate Memorial Day parade … Continue reading →

Tom Wolfe, you old rascal! You’ve done it again. You’ve taken on the entire academic field of linguistics – as an outsider, a mere journalist – and played your snappy Emperor-has-no-clothes game on them. Bingo! And once again, you’ve stolen … Continue reading →

JOUR395 F17 Specialty Reporting (Education) Douglas O. Cumming, associate professor Notes toward a SYLLABUS – 8/27/16 This course fulfills the requirement for a 3-credit specialty reporting class required for majors in the Journalism sequence. Journalism and Strategic Communications majors must … Continue reading →

It’s a convenient catastrophe for us, another post-Katrina experience just an hour and fifteen minutes to the west. There is a house in Caldwell, W. Va., one among hundreds, soaked by the Flood of ’16 and abandoned by a widow … Continue reading →

In the 1920s, according to the sign outside the heavy door, DeWitt Wallace spent countless hours in the high-ceilinged sanctum within, reading and condensing magazine articles. This was how he filled Reader’s Digest, the unorthodox little magazine he and his … Continue reading →

I just received the sad news that Lou Hodges, the elder statesman of this Journalism & Mass Communications department,  has died at the age of 83. Farmer, preacher, professor, profane and funny Christian ethicist, the grumpy and joyous man who … Continue reading →

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE. Nov. 16, 2015 The lay governing body of Lexington, Va.’s historic Episcopal church voted 9-6 to remove the name R.E. Lee from the church’s name, falling one vote short of the super-majority of 10 it needed to … Continue reading →

The late Marshall Frady, a New Journalism magazine writer from Georgia, wrote in a way that gave some of us a sugar high. Others felt his prose was too rich. Anyway, when I dip back into his books, I find … Continue reading →

from the book Bylines: Writings from the American South, 1963 to 1997, by Joseph B. Cumming, Jr., 2010. Joe Cumming was a most unusual sort of journalist. For twenty-two years he covered the American South for Newsweek magazine, the very … Continue reading →