Clem Work

Basic Profile

 

Professor

The University of Montana School of Journalism

  --

United States

Email Address: 

clem.work@umontana.edu

Phone Number: 

(406) 243-2160

Clem Work came to UM in 1990 from U.S. News & World Report, where he was a senior editor. Before that, he was deputy director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press in Washington, D.C. He began his journalism career working for daily newspapers in the late 1960s in Southern California and in Denver, and obtained a law degree in 1975. Clem teaches media law, reporting, editing and senior and graduate seminars.

He also edited the Montana Journalism Review from 1996 through 2011. He and his family lived in Kumamoto, Japan, in 1994-95 on a faculty exchange. In the summer of 2000, he rode his trusty 24-year-old bicycle coast to coast in seven weeks, filing a story every night. Clem's book, "Darkest Before Dawn: Sedition and Free Speech in the American West," was published by University of New Mexico Press in August 2005 and is now in paperback edition. The book led to a gubernatorial pardon in May 2006 for all World War I sedition prisoners in Montana. He is co-producer of a one-hour documentary film titled "Jailed for Their Words: When Free Speech Died in Wartime America," released in August 2008.

Clem has been trying to expand the school's international outreach, making two trips each to Nepal and Bhutan to arrange exchanges, internships and collaboration with local journalists and educators. He was also the lead trainer in a three-week local reporting clinic that brought eight Burmese journalists to UM in August 2011. He and his wife Lucia live in Pattee Canyon, 12 minutes from campus. Daughter Cecily lives in Pasadena and has two beautiful daughters. Daughter Alyssa is attending Yale Law School. Son Brendan graduated from Swarthmore College in 2010 and is practicing journalism in Palestine.