KEVIN Z. SMITH knew he wanted to be a journalist from the moment he took his first high school journalism class at age 16. More than 40 years later with a career that spans newsrooms and classrooms, he now directs the Kiplinger Program in Public Affairs Journalism at Ohio University. He has been with Kiplinger since 2013.
He has been a longtime leader in the Society of Professional Journalists and served as national president, 2009-10. He served on the SPJ Ethics Committee from 1988-2014 and chaired the committee in its work to revise SPJ’s world renown ethics code in 1996 and 2014. He is a contributing author to five ethics text books and routinely trains journalists in media ethics. He is regularly sought by the media to comment on journalism standards.
With SPJ, he additionally served on that group’s Project Watchdog Committee, advocating for open access to public meetings and records. He is also a member of the Online News Association and the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication where he serves in the ethics division.
After graduating from West Virginia University with a degree in print journalism, he began a 15-year career in that state’s community newspapers. He was a sports editor at the Grafton Mountain Statesman, a business writer for the Parkersburg Sentinel, assistant sports editor and later managing editor at the Fairmont Times-West Virginian, and assistant city editor, regional editor, bureau chief and business writer for the Dominion Post in Morgantown, West Virginia. He worked as a staff writer covering medical stories for Bloomberg News in Washington, D.C. and was an on-call freelance correspondent for The Associated Press. He earned more than two dozen state and national awards for his reporting, photography and commentary.
He began his next career of 14 years in journalism education while serving as an adjunct at West Virginia University, before quickly moving into the profession full time as a visiting lecturer at Miami University (Ohio). He served there five years, two years as program director and earned his master’s degree in mass communication there. He later worked as an assistant professor and director of student media at Fairmont State University in West Virginia, as a journalism instructor at James Madison University in Virginia and a visiting lecturer in communication at the University of Dayton.
As student advisor to the FSU Columns newspaper and Mound annual, his students earned 53 national awards in five years from the Society for Collegiate Journalists and twice the paper was judged the best small, non-daily newspaper in the nation.
In 2009 he was honored as the outstanding professor at both Fairmont State University and Pierpont Community and Technical College.Another honor came in 2010 when he was given the West Virginia Distinguished Mountaineer Award – the highest honor bestowed by the governor for outstanding contributions to the state’s overall welfare.
In 2014 he was given the highest honor from SPJ when he was named the Wells Key recipient for his longtime contributions in advancing ethics for the Society.
Since 2014 he has been a speaker specialist in media ethics for the U.S. Department of State and has aided journalists in Sierra Leone, Uganda, Malta, Zambia, Moldova, Ethiopia, Pakistan and Jamaica with training.
In 2024 Smith was awarded a Fulbright to spend five weeks in The Gambia conducting workshops in investigative reporting and media ethics for graduating seniors and the University of The Gambia