Rate My Professor Alecia Swasy

Alecia Swasy serves as the Donald W. Reynolds Professor of Business Journalism in the Journalism and Mass Communications Department at Washington and Lee University, where she has taught since July 2016. She holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Journalism Studies from the University of Missouri, where she was inducted into the Kappa Tau Alpha honor society, and a B.A. in Journalism from Pennsylvania State University, during which she served as Editor-in-Chief of The Daily Collegian. Before entering academia, Swasy built an extensive career in professional journalism. She worked as a Staff Writer at The Wall Street Journal from 1988 to 1996, covering companies such as Procter & Gamble. From 1996 to 2003, she was Assistant Managing Editor and Business Editor at the St. Petersburg Times (now Tampa Bay Times), where her team produced an investigative project on the Church of Scientology that won the Gerald Loeb Award for Financial Journalism. She then served as Deputy Managing Editor for Sections at The Virginian-Pilot from 2003 to 2005 and as Assistant Managing Editor for Equities at Dow Jones Newswires from 2006 to 2007. Additionally, she reviewed books for The New York Times from 1999 to 2001. Prior to Washington and Lee, Swasy was the Tom and June Netzel Sleeman Scholar and Professor in Business Journalism at the University of Illinois from 2014 to 2016, and a Research Scholar at the University of Missouri School of Journalism and the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute.

Swasy's research interests include corporate America, social media use in legacy newsrooms, and rural poverty in America. She is the author of four books: Soap Opera: The Inside Story of Procter & Gamble (1993, Times Books; ranked by Fortune magazine as one of the Best Business Books of the Year and published in North America, China, Japan, and Germany), Changing Focus: Kodak and the Battle to Save a Great American Company (1996, Times Books), How Journalists Use Twitter: The Changing Landscape of U.S. Newsrooms (2016, Lexington Books/Rowman & Littlefield), and A Wall Street Guidebook for Journalism and Strategic Communications (2020, Routledge). She has published peer-reviewed articles in journals including Journalism, Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, and Newspaper Research Journal, and contributed a book chapter to The Routledge Companion to Business Journalism (2024). Swasy teaches courses such as business and economic reporting, media management and entrepreneurship, JOUR 371: Financial News, and JOUR 372: Coverage of the Economy. She has served as a visiting faculty member at the Poynter Institute, where she developed the first business journalism class, and guest lectured at Penn State, NYU, Old Dominion, and the University of Wisconsin. Her reports for the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute, including the five-part series A Little Birdie Told Me on Twitter diffusion in newsrooms, were widely disseminated and republished by organizations such as Pew Research, American Press Institute, and various state press associations.