Dr. Bob Britten is a Teaching Associate Professor at the West Virginia University Reed College of Media. Britten has been working in journalism and news design since his junior year of college, when he was “promoted” from movie reviewer to managing editor of his campus newspaper.
In the subsequent decade he has worked as a reporter, graphics reporter, designer, art director, graphics editor and editorial director, in addition to picking up freelance writing and designing jobs. Britten has worked for newspapers of various sizes (the Greenville Record-Argus, the Meadville Tribune, the Columbia Missourian, the Seattle Times), as well as publications such as Vox (an alternative newsweekly in Missouri), Allegheny magazine, and a national agriculture magazine, Farm Journal, and its subsidiary, Beef Today. He also designed and art-directed Crescendo!, a fashion magazine in Columbia, Missouri.
Britten earned his B.A. in English (2000) from Allegheny College in Meadville, Pa., and earned his master’s (2004) and doctorate (2008) in journalism from the University of Missouri. He was also a 2003 Visual Journalism Fellow at the Poynter Institute.
Britten’s areas of interest are visual communication, rhetoric and culture, especially the role of these in building and maintaining social memory. These were the focus of his dissertation, titled, “The Face of What Came After: Memorialization of September 11 in News Images and the Shanksville Site.”
Britten has taught courses in magazine design, information graphics, interactive design, photography in society and qualitative research methods. He teaches visual communication and news design courses at WVU.
