By Melanie Escalante
Go to the third floor of the College of Media and Communication building on the corner of 15th Street and Flint Avenue and you’ll find iMacs in almost every classroom, audio booths, various pieces of equipment available for students to check out and Texas Tech’s very own radio station.
Randy Reddick, professor of journalism and creative media industries for the past 32 years, came to Texas Tech in July 1990 and enlightened staff and faculty members about how computers and the internet were going to change their daily lives.
Reddick said he was presented with a multitude of opportunities in 1996 and decided to take a leave of absence.
“I spent a lot of time traveling, working with journalists and with media companies, meeting corporate officers and so forth in Europe, Asia, North America teaching them how to do data journalism and how to do internet things,” Reddick said.
Reddick said during his leave of absence he stayed in contact with his connections in Lubbock. It was in that time period that he received a phone call from Jerry Hudson.
Randy Reddick
Photo taken by Melanie Escalante at TTU
“Jerry brought me out to Lubbock one year to lead some training if you wish, for the faculty during a faculty retreat on what the internet was going to be doing, what it’s likely going to be doing to our discipline and education,” Reddick said. “At some point or another the conversations turned to, ‘gee, wouldn’t you like to come back?’”
Reddick said he came back in 2003 to help turn the School of Mass Communications into the College of Media and Communication and create a PhD program for students.
“We had to go through a lot of self inspection and whatever to define who we are, who we wanted to be and to decide , ‘well, what is it about our program that’s unique and all those things,’” Reddick said. “We had outgrown the old building. It was to the point that we were building offices in hallways. There was a nice foyer off the elevator on the second floor in the old building — bam, it became office space.”
Reddick said the next challenge began when the college started growing. There were more students, more faculty, more staff, a change in technology which ultimately placed a new demand on technology, and no idea how to manage it all.
As a result of the challenge, he wound up back in administration as assistant dean over technology.
“My job basically — and this was very rewarding — was to come up with some sort of a written plan and a roadmap that says ‘this is what this college needs to support, this curriculum, this is the technology we need, these are the hands that we need, these are the people that we need,’ and so between 2015 and 2018 I spent researching that and working on that, and building that and putting together a team,” Reddick said.
Jerry Hudson, founding dean of the College of Media and Communication, said Reddick was the leader and motivator they looked to for answers.
“If Dr. Reddick had not come back in 1995, we would’ve struggled tremendously,” Hudson said. “I think his contributions would’ve delayed us five or six years to find somebody with his breadth of knowledge that was important for us to cultivate within the program, to benefit students and to show faculty members how they can use technology and computers to the benefit of the students in a changing world so rapidly. We didn’t skip a beat because of him.”
Reddick said between 1995 and 2014 he was still working on projects outside of the university. In 2003, he received a phone call from the Philippines and was asked to develop an online master’s level course to teach data journalism to journalists in the Asia-Pacific region.
“These folks live in Island nations and it was very difficult for them to do what we normally do; that is drop everything and spend a year or two somewhere else. They couldn’t do that,” Reddick said. “They convinced me that this was a worthy project. There was some funding available and I developed this program and I started teaching it for them in ’04.”
Reddick said through connections gathered from the project he was able to work with journalists in the Philippines, Australia, China, Singapore, Malaysia, Borneo, Xiachuan, Myanmar, Srilanka, Pakistan and Fiji.
Brandi Addison, previous student of professor Reddick and current freelance journalist for The Dallas Morning News, said Reddick was well known in the College of Media and Communication because of his research and success in academia.
“It was clear that he was passionate about the field. He was optimistic about what young journalists were bringing to the industry,” Addison said. “He was also just a really good guy to mentor as far as what you need to do to produce some hard hitting journalism.”
Addison said she credits Reddick for her ability to produce high quality enterprise stories.
“He always encouraged us to look at the data, to submit public information requests, to do all the hard work because ultimately that’s going to be the better work. His requirement to do true in-depth journalism is inspirational,” Addison said.
Reddick said in 2012 he helped create The Hub, a multimedia platform news operation that students would run and create content for.
Todd Chambers, associate dean for undergraduate affairs, said he and Reddick started the program and then handed the position of faculty advisor to Pete Brewton. The goal was to create an inclusive media platform that would be open to the college and other students on campus.
“Man, those students that got this up and running, I mean literally they created something from nothing,” Chambers said. “When we were moving over to the building, at the first staff meeting all we could show them is the space where their cubicles were going to be.”
Randy Reddick said the most gratifying part of watching the publication grow has been seeing students catch the vision and take hold of it. After three to four months students kickstarted the publication, within the year progress was steady and within two to three years awards were piling in.
“The best work is done at The Hub when you have some very inspiring — you have some self feeding interchange, intermix between faculty and students — and that was some of the magic that we had when I was actively involved with that,” Reddick said. “They would come up with ideas and my job was to figure out how to make it happen.”
Chambers said Reddick is not only going to have a special place in the college, but a special place for him.
“It’s cool to think about The Hub as kind of a trailblazing place and then to look back and say, ‘yup, you know who’s involved with it? Dr. Randy Reddick,’ because Randy was a trailblazer,” Chambers said. “He was basically the first one to write a book about the internet from a journalism perspective; when you start putting those things together and then you look at 20 years later when we’re forming The Hub — that’s not coincidence that Randy Reddick’s involved.”
Reddick said he is retiring in August to spend time conducting family history research and playing with his nine grandchildren.
Todd Chambers said Reddick’s legacy will be long felt in the College of Media and Communication.
“We’ve been very very blessed to have him as part of our community here, in teaching but also in sharing these amazing transformative learning experiences for our students,” Chambers said. “He’s always been willing to try new ideas. That’s what I really really like about Dr. Reddick.”
About The Hub@TTU
