John Clogston

Who was John Clogston?

John Clogston was a ground-breaking scholar in the area of news media images of people with disabilities. He made a significant contribution to mass communication research through his development of five media models, which can be used in content analyses of news coverage of people with disabilities and disability issues. He was the author of Disability Coverage in 16 Newspapers published by the Advocado Press in 1990. He had been a wheelchair user since a car accident in 1985.

Clogston was a founding member and eventually chair of the Media and Disability Interest Group of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. The Media and Disability Interest Group gives out an award in his honor to the Top Student Paper at each year's annual convention.

He was assistant professor of journalism at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb at the time of his death, where he taught courses in news reporting, broadcast news, and electronic news gathering and editing.