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Director of the National Sports Journalism Center, Indiana University School of Journalism; Louis A. Weil, Jr. Endowed Chair
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| Indianapolis phone: (317) 278-5335 | |
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Bloomington phone: (812) 855-9249
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| timfrank@indiana.edu | |
Franklin, an Indiana University graduate, assumed the role of director of Indiana University’s National Sports Journalism Center in January 2009. At the School of Journalism, he is the Louis A. Weil Jr. Endowed Chair.
Before his appointment at IU, Franklin was the editor and senior vice president of The Baltimore Sun, Maryland’s largest news organization, for five years. During Franklin’s tenure, The Sun won numerous national journalism awards and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in local reporting in 2007. The Sun’s national awards under his leadership included theh Polk Award, two national Society of Professional Journalists Awards, two National Headliner Awards, the Loeb Award, the Mike Berger Award and the top print journalism award in Tribune Co. The Sun was named the “Newspaper of the Year” three straight years by the Maryland/Delaware/D.C. Press Association. In 2008, Franklin was named one of Maryland’s most influential leaders.
Before joining The Sun, Franklin was the editor and vice president of the Orlando Sentinel for three years. During that time, the Sentinel won more than two dozen national journalism awards, including the Polk Award for environmental reporting, the Scripps Howard Distinguished Service to the First Amendment Award for its investigation into NASCAR racing safety, the National Journalism Award for literacy from the Scripps Howard Foundation, a national Society of Professional Journalist Award for nondeadline reporting, and a National Headliner Award for investigative reporting in collaboration with The Sun.
Franklin’s first top editor job was at his home state newspaper, The Indianapolis Star, a paper he led in 2000. In his year there, The Star won a national Polk Award for state reporting for an investigation into Indiana’s "shockingly inadequate oversight" of its mentally ill patients.
Previously, Franklin spent 17 years as a reporter and editor for the Chicago Tribune. His reporting assignments included Cook County government, Chicago City Hall and the Illinois Statehouse. He then rose through the editing ranks from assistant city editor to associate managing editor. Under Franklin’s leadership in the mid 1990s, the Tribune’s sports section was named among the 10 best in the nation.
In 1981, he won the Society of Professional Journalists’ Barney Kilgore Award as the top college journalism student in the nation.
In April, Franklin became the first leader from an academic institution elected to the board of directors of the American Society of News Editors, the nation’s largest organization of news executives. He has been co-chair of ASNE’s Freedom of Information Committee since April 2008.
He was a member of the Board of Visitors of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland from 2004 to 2008.
