Professor Stephen Bloom’s appointment as Bessie Dutton Murray Professional Scholar
Professor Stephen Bloom types "The Oxford Project" into his Google search bar.
"More than 500,000 hits," Bloom said. "I believe ["The Oxford Project"] has introduced a different way to look at journalism and how we view our surroundings."
Bloom, who teaches Magazine Reporting and Writing and Master’s Advanced Reporting and Writing, was appointed the School of Journalism and Mass Communication’s first Bessie Dutton Murray Professional Scholar for his exceptional professional work, including three published books. The three-year appointment honors Bloom’s work in research and its public impact.
Professor Stephen Bloom holds a seashell while doing work for his book, Tears of Mermaids: The Secret Story of Pearls, in French Polynesia. Photo by Stephen Bloom
"The appointment allows me to continue what I’ve always loved to do–Interview the people who don’t have a voice," Bloom said of the award that includes a slight pay raise.
Bloom lives by the principle that everyone has a story to tell if you give that person the voice to do so. He strives to look beyond the headlines by talking to the people whose names will likely never make a national paper. Most of his stories do just that.
Last year, Bloom and Art Professor and photographer Emeritus Peter Feldstein co-authored "The Oxford Project," a book that fuses more than 300 black and white photographs with real-life narratives of small town individuals from Oxford, Iowa. Feldstein photographed each resident twice, with a 21-year span between each photograph. Bloom asked a simple, open-ended question: "what has changed in your life?"
"The Oxford Project" won the prestigious Alex Award from the American Library Association, as well as the Gold Medal from the Independent Book Publishers Association for Most Original Concept. The book also morphed into a museum exhibition featured in the internationally juried Aprile Fotografia exhibition in Padova, Italy.
"‘Everyone has a story to tell, and my job, as I see it, is to make sense out of those stories," Bloom said. "What I try to do is validate and celebrate ordinary people coping with the daily demands we call life."
Before "The Oxford Project," Bloom wrote "Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America," a book investigating the struggle between a group of Ultra–Orthodox Hasidic Jews and the mostly Lutheran residents in the small town of Postville, Iowa. The little known story was named a Best Book of the Year by MS–NBC, The Chicago Sun-Times, the Rocky Mountain News and The Chicago Tribune.
Bloom’s most recent project, "Tears of Mermaids: The Secret Story of Pearls," follows the cultural, economic and political journey of pearls around the world. Bloom found that his narrative made connections among people who will never know each other but are inadvertently intertwined through the pearl industry.
His journey to places like Japan, Hong Kong, Australia and Venezuela tracks the moment a pearl is plucked from an oyster to the moment it’s strung around a woman’s neck.
"It’s a huge privilege to be able to create a global assembly line," Bloom said of the book. "The voices of these people are pure and unadulterated–it’s the unvarnished truth."
Before any books were published, Bloom worked as a reporter for The Los Angeles Times, Dallas Morning News, San Jose Mercury News and Sacramento Bee. The 3,000- to 4,000-word limit became a constraint on Bloom, who turned to book writing as an outlet to continue his stories.
"‘Postville’ and ‘The Oxford Project’ started as magazine articles," Bloom said. "They only scratched the surface of what I wanted to say; I couldn’t get the essence of the story."
Through his classes, Bloom talks to students about the book–writing track, explaining the difficulties and perks of expanding an article into a full–length book. He believes that for many magazine writers, publishing comes naturally. His unique experience offers journalism students a new outlet for their work.
"The Bessie Dutton Murray award recognizes not only his consistent and superlative professional publications but also his leadership in helping us build a modern, high-tech and high-quality school of journalism," Director of the J-MC School Dr. David Perlmutter said about Bloom.
His appointment as the J-MC School’s first Bessie Dutton Murray Professional Scholar doesn’t seem to change much for Bloom.
"It’s more of an acknowledgment of what I’ve been doing," Bloom said. "I’m thankful and grateful, but it doesn’t change my scope of responsibilities at the school."