Bill Rose Tells All

Bill Rose, a prize-winning journalist who retired in 2018 as an Overby Fellow, makes a valedictory appearance to talk about his long and colorful career in the second of the Overby Center for Southern Journalism and Politics’ 2018 spring schedule. Charles Overby, chairman of the center, conducts the conversation with Rose, his friend and colleague for many years. A native of Shelby, Miss., Rose graduated from Ole Miss in 1969 and went to work for the Delta Democrat-Times in Greenville before moving on to two prominent newspapers in Florida. He served as a reporter and editor at the Miami Herald, where he was engaged in numerous prize-winning projects. As a reporter, he covered city and county government before being assigned to the Herald’s Atlanta bureau where his beat was expanded to the entire South. After five years, he went back to Miami as deputy city editor and national editor, then took over as editor of Tropic, the Herald’s Sunday magazine which won two Pulitzer Prizes. He later moved up the coast to serve as managing editor at the Palm Beach Post, where he presided over numerous new prizes. Following his retirement and return to Mississippi, Rose was named a fellow at the Overby Center in 2011 and also joined the faculty of the Meek School of Journalism and New Media. He directed a special writing program that produced student magazines that concentrated on life in the Mississippi Delta and won three times the prestigious Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Journalism Award, a national honor. In 2015, Rose was given a Silver Em, the highest honor the Ole Miss journalism school awards to people in the profession with Mississippi backgrounds. Bill has had one of the most accomplished careers of any living Mississippi journalists,” said Overby. “We look forward to hearing some of the many stories that he knows about journalists, politicians and Southern life.