Keith P. Sanders (UI SJMC Ph.D., 1967)

As a newspaper sports editor, I covered sports events, designed pages, wrote headlines and columns. As a professor, I taught survey research, sampling, statistics, content analysis, experiments, and Q Methodology, introducing students to mass communication theories such as agenda setting, the two-step flow of information, gatekeeping, uses and gratifications, the Spiral of Silence, and more.

That’s not a normal progression. How in the world did that happen?

As a teenager, I was a voracious reader of sports books. I made regular trips to the library and almost always returned with a book in my bike’s basket. My favorites were John Tunis and Clair Bee (I still have Bee’s Chip Hilton books), but I wasn’t particular. If it was sports, I was interested. I suspect I inherited the reading gene from my mother, who taught high school English (and French, Latin, and music earlier in her career.)

Although I made high school teams in basketball, baseball, and cross country, it was obvious early on I was not going to earn a living playing sports. If I couldn’t play them, I would write about them.

I produced sports copy for the student newspaper and the yearbook. It was fun, and the journalism teacher seemed to think I had promise, so I took the next step and majored in journalism at Bowling Green State University. I started on the sports page of the student paper, The B-G News, but finished my senior year as managing editor.

Because of my stint as ME, job hunting was complicated. Some editors were interviewing me for straight news, while others saw me in sports. I opted to become a sports editor of an 11,000 circulation paper in Ohio. As a one-person sports staff (except for a part-timer who helped cover games on weekends), I did everything from selecting and editing wire copy to laying out pages to writing stories and columns. From September to March, Fridays and Saturdays (and some weeknights) meant games to cover and write. I wrote a weekly column and seasonal ones on fishing, golf, and bowling. My writing attracted the interest of another paper and I accepted the offer, but the job responsibilities were very much the same, although there were more teams to cover.  

I loved what I was doing, but the schedule was exhausting. I was young and single and it occurred to me: “Is this what I want to be doing 10 years from now?”

As part of my regular coverage, I often came in contact with college sports information directors and I thought that might be an interesting career. I talked with a couple of SIDs and was advised to get a graduate degree. I enrolled in the master’s degree program at Ohio University.

A funny thing happened on the way to realizing my plans: I liked graduate school. I was turned on by the coursework and by the interaction with a small group of cohorts. A couple of faculty members suggested that I pursue a doctorate. Midway through second semester, my undergraduate adviser and head of the journalism program at Bowling Green, called and offered me a faculty slot. A faculty member left, and it was late in the recruiting season.

Could I come on a one-year appointment? I could… and became the faculty adviser to The B-G News, and taught copyediting. Before I left Ohio University, I was recruited to be the first student in a planned new doctoral program in journalism. The plan was that I would return to OU on an assistantship after my year at Bowling Green. But not long after my return, the campus graduate faculty senate voted down Journalism’s proposed doctoral program. I continued taking courses but began investigating doctoral programs elsewhere. Meanwhile, as part of my graduate assistantship, I anchored the sports news when the university’s television station (WOUB-TV) debuted. My research on doctoral programs led me to the University of Iowa School of Journalism and Mass Communication (UI SJMC).

It was another critical career decision. The Iowa program was everything I had hoped it would be … and much more.  

Not very far into UI SJMC’s first semester, I became involved in a study Prof. Malcolm MacLean was doing with photographs. My job was to ask people to sort through the photographs, indicating which ones they liked or disliked and to what degree. Watching the sorters go through the process, I could see immediately that this was a far better way to determine a person’s preferences than by simply asking questions. This was my introduction to Q Methodology, which was to become an important part of my academic career.    
Q Methodology is a set of statistical, philosophy of science and psychological principles specifically designed to measure subjectivity (Stephenson, 1953). Q Sorting is merely a technique and is not synonymous with Q Methodology. The goal is to have an individual model her own subjectivity by sorting items (frequently photographs, news story leads, self-referent statements of opinion, or the like). The sorts are factor analyzed to produce groups of people who have sorted the items in similar ways (Sanders, 1974). Such an approach was just what MacLean was looking for to research the link between editors and audiences.

MacLean was a problem-solver, and he saw Q Method as an important tool to help gatekeepers learn more about their audiences. In a book of essays honoring William Stephenson, the creator of Q Method, MacLean (1972) wrote:

Some editors are faced with the task of providing packages that contain material of lively interest to millions of people. They simply cannot know the unique value and interest patterns of each reader, viewer, or whatever. Even if they could, the job of developing satisfying editing strategies would be overwhelmingly complex. 

With a good Q study, an editor can see reader interest patterns in terms of six or seven reader types instead of millions of patterns or a single “generalized other.” 

Armed with such information, editors can develop more refined strategies for content.

MacLean called such Q studies “editing games.”  In a typical editing game, participants would be given a set of news stories or photographs and asked to play the role of an editor. They might be instructed to sort the stories/photographs the way they think the readers of a newspaper or magazine would. They might also be asked to do additional sorts assuming different scenarios: for example, sort the way you would if you were working for your “ideal” newspaper/magazine, or a publication aimed at young adults, etc. Other approaches might be to include professional gatekeepers, student journalists, and potential readers. Did the pros do a better job than the students? How well did either do at predicting readers’ preferences?

Q Method was one tool in MacLean’s problem-solving. Another tool, the Westley-MacLean Model, offered guidance about what to research in the mass communication process (Westley-MacLean, 1957). The model was the first to recognize the role of interpersonal communication in the mass communication process, and it led to countless studies. A third tool involved MacLean’s concepts about how to use factor analysis to develop systematic ways of developing research questions (MacLean, 1965).

Not long after I retired, I looked back at my days at Iowa and wrote (Sanders, 2001): “MacLean was a wonderful teacher, and he was far ahead of his time in using innovative research techniques and creating research designs. He was the tide that raised our ships.”

I taught two sections each semester of UI’s basic newswriting course and in my last year I served as adviser to The Hawkeye, Iowa’s award-winning yearbook.

Having reviewed information on the Iowa faculty, I was not surprised to be challenged in the classroom. What I had not expected was to learn so much from my doctoral student cohorts. Some 25 or 30 in number, they were an impressive group, virtually all with solid professional experience, and some who were assistant or associate profs elsewhere who needed a PhD for final promotion or tenure. Discussions outside the classroom or at a late evening session at a bar up the street added considerably to the formal program. They were a constant source of help and support, both then and many years thereafter.

Among other fond memories of my Iowa City days were fishing the Iowa River during the walleye spring spawn, visits to the Amana Colonies, and golf with various student cohorts and John Bremner. Those were highlighted by the birth of my daughter.

Oh, by the way, those course hours from Ohio University? Graduate Director Art Barnes stopped me in the hall one late fall day and said Iowa would accept all of them. 

My research for a life after the doctoral program involved several attractive offers, but the chance to work with Stephenson at the University of Missouri was just too good to pass up. The world’s first School of Journalism, established in 1908, had a well-deserved international reputation. It had a daily commercial newspaper, an NBC-affiliated television station, and a PBS radio station. It was also huge, both in terms of faculty and student size. Although the Iowa program was larger than the one at Ohio, it was dwarfed by Missouri’s.

Working with Stephenson was a delight, equally because of his intellect and charming personality. Born in England, Stephenson earned PhDs in physics and psychology and became a staff member of the Institute of Experimental Psychology at Oxford. He left Oxford after the war and joined the psychology faculty at the University of Chicago where he became interested in advertising. That involvement attracted the interest of Earl English, dean of the Missouri School of Journalism (and an Iowa PhD) who was looking for someone to teach the Psychology of Advertising class and bolster the research program. Stephenson turned his full attention to communication and the practical problems involved in journalism and advertising.  “Researchers should be back-room boys for editors. Their job is to provide new insights that the editors can apply to their own publications in ways they see fit,” he once explained (Sanders, 1974).

One of the delights of working with Stephenson was receiving drafts of his work in progress. They were must-reads, not only because of their content, but because he was sure to inquire about it - and you wanted to be prepared. That interchange blossomed into an annual conference hosted at the University of Missouri, attended by his former students and scholars from near and far, who were interested in exchanging ideas and papers with Stephenson. After a few years, the group founded the International Society of the Scientific Study of Subjectivity. I was a founding member and the first treasurer. The Society has grown remarkably, mostly through its listserv and the publication of its journal, Operant Subjectivity. The annual conferences alternate between a domestic location near a university and a location abroad, often in Europe.

My stops at Ohio and Iowa had involved small classes (MacLean taught his research class in his office), and it was a bit of a shock to learn that my first graduate research methods class was to have 40-plus students. I relied heavily on using examples in class, asking a lot of questions and telling jokes (there were rumors that students debated whether my jokes were worse than those of colleague John Merrill). The Mass Comm Theory course was altogether different (about 20 students) and I was able to use many techniques I had picked up in the Iowa program. Especially useful was having students make presentations. I was to teach at least one section of the beginning research course each semester throughout my 30-plus-year career. I taught the theory course at least once a year, and later I added an advanced research course.

Throughout my career at Missouri, one of the most difficult challenges was to find a balance between teaching, research, and service. I opted to work on research with others (students or faculty). Guiding doctoral students on their dissertations was fun and intellectually stimulating, but it was also time-consuming. My wife once responded to the spouse of a visiting faculty candidate who asked: ‘What do you do in Columbia on weekends?’ 

“We read dissertations,” she rejoined. I ended up guiding 33 dissertations.

During my first summer at Iowa, the Association in Education and Journalism (AEJ) convention was held in Iowa City (later, AEJ became AEJMC and conventions were held in cities rather than on campuses). I stayed active in AEJMC throughout my career. Over the next 51 years, I was to miss only two of the annual conventions. I was elected to the Standing Committee on Research, chaired Mass Comm & Society Division committees (and was associate editor of its Mass Comm Review journal), and organized the annual AEJMC-KTA Awards Convention Luncheon.

Knowing of my commitment to the role of faculty in university governance, the J-School Faculty elected me to various positions, from the J-School Promotion & Tenure and Policy Committees to the campus Faculty Council, Research Council, and Graduate Faculty Senate. Those activities continued for most of my career, save for interim stints as associate dean for graduate studies, and a three-year term as chair of the Editorial Department (at that time, the J-School faculty structure had three departments: Advertising, Broadcast News and Editorial, Editorial, which numbered about 35 members, included all of the Columbia Missourian faculty and most of the graduate faculty).

In 1991, I became executive director of Kappa Tau Alpha (KTA). The national college honor society was founded at Missouri in 1910. Through its 100 campus chapters, KTA recognizes scholarly excellence by inducting students who rank in the top 10 percent of their class and promotes scholarship through its Frank Luther Mott-KTA Research Award for the best research-based journalism book of the year. Division student research paper winners are honored at the AEJMC Awards Luncheon. I served 35 years in that role, payback to the profession that had made my career so interesting.

Looking back, UI SJMC did an admirable job of providing a sports editor a satisfying academic career.

Keith Sanders Biosketch

References

MacLean, M.S. (1965). Some Multivariate Designs for Communication Research. Journalism Quarterly: 42:4: 614-622.

MacLean, Jr., Malcolm S. (1972). Communication Strategy, Editing Games and Q.  In Science, Psychology and Communications: Essays Honoring William Stephenson, edited by Brown, S. and Brenner, D.  327-344. New York: Teachers College Press, Teachers College, Columbia University.

Sanders, K. (1974). William Stephenson: The Study of (His) Behavior. Mass Comm Review, 2:9-16.

Sanders, K. (2001). Developing Ways of Learning with Malcolm S. MacLean, Jr.  In A Heretic in American Journalism Education and Research: Malcolm S. MacLean, Jr., Revisited, edited by Manca, L. and Pieper, G.W.  Columbia MO, Stephenson Research Center, University of Missouri.

Stephenson, W. (1953). The Study of Behavior: Q-technique and Its Methodology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Westley, B. and MacLean Jr., M. (1957). A Conceptual Model for Communication Research. Journalism Quarterly 34:31-38.