Matthew Veto

Matt Veto is a professor of practice and the faculty adviser to the Brown and White student newspaper. He teaches writing and multimedia classes and advises the staff of more than 120 students that creates, edits and publishes the Lehigh student newspaper on a bi-weekly basis. Prior to his appointment at Lehigh, Veto was a lecturer and student newspaper adviser in the journalism and mass communication department at Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pennsylvania. Before that, he taught news reporting and multimedia courses at the Missouri School of Journalism where he earned his master of arts degree in 2013. An award-winning newspaper reporter and broadcaster, Veto has worked in newsrooms across platforms since 2000. At Missouri, he served as the deputy editor of Vox Magazine and a graduate assistant sports editor for the Columbia Missourian newspaper. He also spent time working as a reporter for KBIA Radio, an NPR-affiliated station in Columbia, Missouri. There he won first place in the 2012 Society of Professional Journalists Region 7 Mark of Excellence Awards for a feature titled "Second chance, first opportunity through basketball." The story detailed the challenging home and school life of a teen who found solace in the basketball program at an urban, non-traditional high school. Before his time in Missouri, Veto spent seven years as a news and sports reporter at the Dispatch and the Rock Island Argus based in Moline, Illinois. There, he covered minor league baseball and hockey, as well as high school sports and metro news for a 45,000-circulation daily newspaper. He introduced multimedia storytelling to the sports department through blogging, podcasts and videos. His documentary style video titled "Overcoming the Silence" — featuring a high school wrestler excelling on the mat despite his deafness — won first place in the 2011 Northern Illinois Newspaper Association Awards. Early in his career, Veto served as a radio station sports director and news reporter. He broadcast the play by play for numerous college and high school football, basketball and baseball games. He credits much of his early success to the hands-on, one-on-one instruction he received as an undergraduate at St. Ambrose University, in Davenport, Iowa. He has adopted a similar, personal instruction style that grounds practical instruction in the theoretical principles guiding 21st century journalists toward ethics, transparency and fairness. Veto lives in Bethlehem with his wife, Stephanie. He continues to write and create short documentary videos in addition to his work at Lehigh.