University of Missouri Journalism Professor
Wins Lifetime Achievement Award

Journalism professor Don Ranly helped pioneer service journalism.

Don Ranly has helped B2B magazines develop their mission.

Don Ranly, Ph.D., who helped pioneer the concept of “service journalism” as a professor at the University of Missouri, has been selected by the American Society of Business Publication Editors to receive the organization’s 2005 Lifetime Achievement Award.

Dr. Ranly headed Missouri’s magazine sequence for 28 years, helping many publications — especially those in the business-to-business market — develop service journalism as a mission. The Lifetime Achievement Award from ASBPE, the nation’s only professional association for individual editors and writers who work for business, trade, and association magazines, reflects his enormous influence in this area of journalism.

The professor defines service journalism with three words: useful, usable, and used — distinctions based on his conviction that efforts to benefit readers are illusive, and won’t work unless information is easy to access and, ultimately, helps lead readers to significant action. In addition to his teaching, Dr. Ranly has promulgated his vision of service journalism through more than 900 professional seminars and workshops, where he is recognized for his stimulating presentations, which themselves are designed to be useful, usable, and used.

“Dr. Ranly’s own service to B2B publishing is a testament to every corporate executive, mid-level manager, engineer, or other professional who reads business and trade publications to learn what useful ideas they can incorporate into their business,” said Robert Freedman, ASBPE president and senior editor of Realtor magazine.

Respected publication designer and consultant Jan White said of Dr. Ranly: “He doesn’t just think clearly, which is what a professor of journalism is supposed to do. He also sees clearly, which is what few word-people bother to do. He knows that words-in-type have physical shape that affects the way their meaning is perceived. He even admits that readers are at first lookers, whom we must persuade to become readers.”

Dr. Ranly, ASBPE’s sixth Lifetime Achievement recipient, has served as a newspaper reporter, magazine editor, weekly columnist, and broadcast journalist. The coauthor of several textbooks, he has also won numerous awards for his teaching.

ASBPE will present the award to Dr. Ranly at its National Awards of Excellence Banquet on June 21 in Cleveland, at the Rock + Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. ASBPE’s Magazines of the Year and other national award winners will also be honored at the banquet, held the first evening of the two-day ASBPE National Editorial Conference. The Conference will be at the Marriott Cleveland Downtown.

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