Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture
Senior Research Associate
Jay Berman
USC Annenberg

Jay Berman, a Manhattan Beach-based journalist, has spent nearly 60 years in journalism and journalism education. He is an experienced reporter and editor who also worked as an instructor at USC Annenberg for six years, teaching classes in writing and editing.  As a reporter for the South Bay Daily Breeze in Torrance, California, he wrote the local sidebar story on the assassination of President Kennedy, covered the 9.2 magnitude Alaska earthquake in 1964 and photographed and covered the Beatles’ first West Coast news conference, also in 1964. He was city editor of the Daily Breeze and, later, the Santa Monica Evening Outlook. He detoured from journalism to serve as press secretary to Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley’s successful campaign in 1977.

Berman received his bachelor's and master's degrees in journalism from the University of Southern California. From 1981 to 1992, he taught journalism at California State University, Fullerton, and also was faculty advisor to the university's Daily Titan. He was named the California Newspaper Publisher's Association Journalism Professor of the year in 1989.

In recent years, he has been an active freelancer for the Orange County Register, Vancouver Sun, Toronto Globe and Mail and other publications. In the past year, he has had three short fiction pieces published in 34th Parallel, a Paris-based literary magazine. He was part of the team that completed the landmark study of “The Image of the Journalist in Silent Film, 1890 to 1929,” published in two parts in the IJPC Journal (the second part is scheduled for publication in January, 2020).