Cronkite School receives Devine gift

Christine Devine, the Emmy Award-winning Los Angeles news anchor and 1987 graduate of ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, is giving $50,000 to help kick off a fund-raising campaign for the school’s new home.

The Cronkite School will soon announce opportunities for donors to permanently name rooms in the new Cronkite building, a six-story, 223,000-square foot state-of-the-art journalism education complex in downtown Phoenix that will house the school and KAET-TV, the public television station operated by ASU.

Devine’s gift, the campaign’s first from a Cronkite graduate, will go to the naming of the conference room in Cronkite News Service, the new building’s showcase multimedia newsroom. In addition, Devine has previously created and endowed a scholarship at the Cronkite School.

“It is my honor to contribute to the education of other students,” said Devine, who anchors the 10 p.m. newscast at Fox11 in Los Angeles. “I attended ASU, thanks to an academic scholarship, and strongly believe in returning the gift. I thank ASU for the opportunity to be a part of the future.”

Devine, a 2001 inductee of the Cronkite Alumni Hall of Fame, visited the school this spring to meet with students and give them advice about journalism careers. She is the winner of eight Emmy Awards, including six for best newscast.

She also has won the Sigma Delta Chi Award for Public Service in Television Journalism, the Anna Quindlen Award for Excellence in Journalism and the Gracie Allen Award from the American Women in Radio and Television. Since 1994 Devine has broadcast a segment called “Wednesday’s Child,” profiling foster children looking for adoptive homes.

She started her career as a news anchor and producer for the CBS affiliate in San Angelo, Texas, in 1988, and soon after returned to Arizona to anchor the morning news at KVOA-TV in Tucson. She joined the Fox affiliate in Los Angeles as a weekend anchor and general assignment reporter in 1990, and was promoted to weekday anchor in 1992.

“It is only fitting that Christine is the first member of the Cronkite School alumni family to make a gift to the school’s building campaign,” said Cronkite Dean Christopher Callahan. “She has always been a great supporter of the school and our students. We are enormously proud of the career success she has achieved and grateful that she has remained a close friend and great advocate of the Cronkite School over the years.”

The $71 million cost of the new Cronkite home, scheduled to open in August 2008, is covered by a $223 million bond issue approved by Phoenix voters last year to help build the new downtown campus. Private donations to the naming campaign will provide the Cronkite School with resources to recruit more top-flight faculty members, provide more scholarships and financial aid to talented and deserving students and help deliver the extraordinary professional education for which the school is known.