Betsy Alderman
Dr. Betsy Alderman, department head and professor of communication at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, also holds the Luther Massingil Professorship and a University of Chattanooga Foundation Professorship. Her teaching areas include media writing, publication editing and design and television news production. She had also directed the department’s internship program.
In 2012, Dr. Alderman and two colleagues produced “Reaching the Light: The Story of the Desegregation of the University of Chattanooga.” The documentary has been shown on local television and public education channels.
She also conducted extensive award-winning research in the area of job burnout and stress among journalists in the 1990s. While doing that research, she served as a consultant to a major national newspaper editing systems company. She also served as a consultant and trainer for The Krystal Company and for several newspapers in the southeast. More recently, Dr. Alderman has conducted research in the area of assessment in journalism higher education and the use of professional internships to assess learning outcomes. Her writing has been published in both academic journals and professional trade publications.
Dr. Alderman’s professional experience includes work in public relations, print journalism and television news. Her “claim to fame” is that she replaced The Today Show’s Matt Lauer in her first job in television.
Dr. Alderman earned her B.A. and M.A. from the School of Jouralism at Marshall University, where she began her teaching career in the 1980s. She earned her doctoral degree in higher education administration at West Virginia University.
