Sandy Banks, former columnist for the Los Angeles Times and journalism professor at Cal State Northridge, has been named a senior fellow at the USC Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership & Policy (CCLP), CCLP director Geoffrey Cowan announced today.
As a senior fellow of CCLP, Banks will focus on journalism innovation in areas including homelessness, policing and criminal justice, and mental health. With this appointment she joins a renowned group of CCLP senior fellows that includes journalists, media executives, scholars and activists such as Cinny Kennard, Adam Clayton Powell III, Matthew Dowd, Nicco Mele, and Irshad Manji, among others.
“Sandy Banks has been an important journalist and advocate for the people of Los Angeles for decades, and we are thrilled that the Center on Communication Leadership & Policy will serve as a home for her work,” said CCLP Director and University Professor Geoffrey Cowan. “Her unique talents as a writer, public speaker, and teacher will bring a new dimension to our work at the Center and be of great value to our students at USC Annenberg.”
During a journalism career that spanned almost four decades, Sandy Banks has explored and explained the forces that shape our public conversations and impact our private lives.
Her 36 years at the LA Times included stints covering education, religion, criminal justice, and race relations. She also served as education editor, editorial writer, assistant metropolitan editor, and director of the newsroom’s diversity efforts. She was part of the team awarded the Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the 1992 Los Angeles riots.
Banks is best known for her twice-weekly Times columns, which focused on the universal elements that bind and connect us across culture, color, and community identity. Her perspective on social, political and economic issues – race, education, criminal justice, foster care, mental health, homelessness – was bluntly shared and poignantly rendered. Her columns provided a voice for the ignored, unheard and unknown.
Over the years her work has been honored by a broad array of journalism organizations and civic groups, including the National Council of Jewish Women/Los Angeles, Muslim Women’s League, California Teachers’ Association, Neighborhood Legal Services of Los Angeles, Southern California Psychiatric Society, Los Angeles Child Guidance Clinic, Los Angeles African-American Women’s Public Policy Institute, National Alliance on Mental Illness-Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Commission For Women, USC Annenberg Black Student Association, Greater Los Angeles Press Club, American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors, and Society of Professional Journalists/Los Angeles.
In addition to her work in print, she is a popular public speaker and has been a frequent guest on CNN, PBS, NPR, the BBC and talk radio, providing commentary on a wide range of political and social issues.
A native of Cleveland, Ohio, she is a widow and the mother of three now-grown daughters, and has lived in the San Fernando Valley since 1979. She left the LA Times in December 2015 and this spring taught “Literary Journalism” at California State University, Northridge while working on a book about her family’s history and America’s racial legacy.
About the Center on Communication Leadership & Policy
Based at the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism, the Center on Communication Leadership & Policy is a policy center that conducts academic research and organizes programs to develop ways in which communication leadership, policy, technology and mobile innovation can contribute to a more informed electorate and a better world. For more information, visit communicationleadership.usc.edu.