Email: bergen@txstate.edu
Office: Old Main 102i
Phone: 512-245-2656

Courses
MC4382E - Media Ethics


Lori Bergen, Ph.D., is professor and director of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Texas State University-San Marcos. Bergen became director of the school on September 1, 2006, returning to the university where she was an assistant professor nearly 20 years before.
 
Prior to her position at Texas State, Bergen was associate director of the A.Q. Miller School of Journalism & Mass Communications at Kansas State University, where she taught multimedia reporting, PR writing, and media ethics. Before her career as a university professor, Bergen was an assistant to the press secretary for a national presidential campaign and a newspaper reporter in Kansas and Indiana. As a fellow of the American Society of Newspaper Editors Project in Journalism Excellence, she was a business and features writer for the Sacramento Bee.
 
Bergen received a Kaiser Family Health Foundation grant to produce a series of reports for Kansas Public Television on access to health care in rural Kansas. She was a frequent guest on the public affairs program, Kansas Week, and did live coverage of the Kansas governor's State of the State address for KPTS-TV for 6 years. Active as a journalist and a scholar, her research has appeared in Newspaper Research Journal, Journal of Health Communication, Human Communication Research, Journal of Advertising and Mass Communication & Society.She received a 2006 grant from the National Association of Broadcasters to examine the interaction of auditory and visual working memory as a way to understand how visual clutter affects memory for news story facts. Her research on media and children and attention to media messages was recently featured on the Discovery Channel and in the New York Times. Bergen is co-author of a book on children and media violence to be published by Sage in 2007.
 
A member of the Board of Directors for the Association for Education for Journalism and Mass Communication, she is chair of the organization’s Professional Freedom and Responsibility Committee. She is a frequent presenter on journalism and crisis communication. Bergen received a bachelor's degree in History and Political Science from Kansas State University in 1981 and a master's degree from K-State in Journalism and Mass Communications in 1983. She earned her Ph.D. from Indiana University in 1991.