Biography

Linda Lotridge Levin has been a faculty member in the Department of Journalism at URI since 1983. She has served as the chairwoman since 2001. A graduate of Michigan State University and Boston University, Professor Levin began her career as a reporter for The Providence Journal. She also was a photo editor.

After she left the Journal, she was an award-winning freelance writer specializing in health and medicine and travel. She wrote a nationally syndicated health and medicine column, travel stories for magazines and newspapers, and edited two books on Rhode Island history.

She has spent the last decade writing about First Amendment issues, in particular the area of access to public information, and is the author of several books and monographs and a number of newspaper and magazine articles. She has been a fellow of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, the American Press Institute and the Annenberg Washington Program.

She has received three grants to work with journalists, first in the Soviet Union and then in Russia. She is a former president of the Rhode Island Press Association and is a board member and founder of ACCESS/Rhode Island, a coalition of organizations devoted to open government. In 1999 she was given the Yankee Quill Award by the New England Society of Newspaper Editors and the New England Society of Professional Journalists and was inducted into the Academy of New England Journalists. Her latest book is The Making of FDR: The Story of Stephen T. Early, America’s First Modern Press Secretary.

Her teaching specialties are media law, history of American journalism, advanced reporting and media criticism.