Bill Knight

Bill Knight is an award-winning journalist who’s taught at Western since 1991. The author of the 2003 books Video Almanac and Fair Comment: Essays on The Air, Knight is featured on Tri-States Public Radio with weekly commentaries.

His newest books are Horse Shoe Bottoms (2008) – a 1930s novel by west-central Illinois journalist and activist Tom Tippett, for which he wrote the biographical introduction and edited – and Rick Johnson Reader: Tin Cans, Squeems and Thud Pies (2007) a collection of rock criticism, essays on popular culture, and zany screeds by Johnson, the late Creem magazine writer who attended WIU.

Besides Knight’s books and radio work, he writes for The Labor Paper, based in Peoria, and area newspapers, including the Pekin Daily Times and dailies in Monmouth and Kewanee, and weeklies in Galesburg and Macomb. His writing has won awards from the Illinois Associated Press (Best Commentary), the Illinois Press Association (Business Reporting), the International Labor Communications Association (Best Column), and the Suburban Newspapers Association of America (Best Sports Writing).

(The inaugural issue of a new, online academic publication -- The IJPC Journal -- has Knight's feature story on the use of reporters as comic-book characters: http://ijpc.org/journal/index.php/ijpcjournal/article/view/12/14 .)

A Peoria Journal Star reporter, reviewer, feature writer and editor for seven years, Knight for six years prior to that edited the Midwest weekly the Prairie Sun, and he continues to freelance to publications such as Chicago’s Heartland Journal, Davenport’s Catholic Messenger, the Illinois Press Association’s Presslines, and Salem Press. Knight also has worked in public-affairs reporting and feature writing in radio on stations such as Peoria’s WMBD and Bloomington’s WDQX.

Knight wrote the nonfiction anthologies R.F.D., R.F.D. Journal, and R.F.D. Notebook, and the audio tape collection The Edge of Knight, edited the trade paperbacks Midwestern Gothic and Peoria People, coordinated the round-robin murder mystery Naked Came The Farmer, published columnist Walt Brasch's books Enquiring Minds and Space Aliens and Sex and the Single Beer Can, and co-authored The Eye of the Reporter with Deckle McLean and The Cub Fan's Christmas Wish with Mike Foster – accepted for inclusion in the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

Knight got his start in journalism delivering the Des Moines Sunday Register and phoning in basketball game results to area sports desks, and was first paid for writing for covering Carthage (Ill.) High School football games for his hometown Hancock County Journal in 1966.

A member of the Society of Professional Journalists, the International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors, the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, and Investigative Reporters and Editors, he won the international Newspaper Guild’s Service Award in 1990. He teaches beat reporting, sports writing, the press in pop culture, editorial writing, and reviewing, among other WIU courses.

His interests vary from media literacy and community journalism to new ownership structures for media and the Chicago Cubs.