Rate My Professor Patti Piburn

Patti Piburn is an assistant professor of journalism in the Journalism Department, College of Liberal Arts, at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. She holds a B.S. and B.A. from Arizona State University, Tempe, both earned in 1995, an M.S. from South Dakota State University, Brookings, in 2013, and Ph.D. ABD from the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication in 2019. Piburn has worked as a journalist since 1995 and as an educator since 2006. Before joining Cal Poly, she anchored and reported for the KCOY (CBS 12) morning show for nearly ten years.

At Cal Poly, Piburn advises KCPR 91.3 FM, the student-run radio station, and co-led the Journalism Department's curriculum committee with Professor Patrick Howe. The committee spent several years developing a new concentration in Media Innovation, launched in fall 2023, making the department one of few offering such a program to address changes in the media industry. Her research explores the history of journalism, with a focus on yellow journalism in the American West. In 2024, she published 'Discovering the Arizona Republican Newspaper, 1890-1900: Yellow Journalism in America’s Territorial Press' in American Journalism (vol. 41, no. 2, pp. 207-230), demonstrating how the newspaper used large headlines, scurrilous reporting, attention-grabbing news, and illustrations to compete in territorial Arizona. She also published a book review of Lisa Napoli's 'Up All Night: Ted Turner, CNN, and the Birth of 24-Hour News' in 2021. Piburn received the Best Faculty Radio Advisor award in 2025, contributing to the Mustang Media Group's 43 awards from the Associated Collegiate Press and Intercollegiate Broadcasting System conferences. She has served as registrar and moderator for the American Journalism Historians Association.