Matt Veto

Biography

Matt Veto is a teaching assistant professor of journalism and the faculty adviser to The Brown and White student newsroom. 

Alongside its dedicated editors and staff of more than 160 students from across campus, Veto has grown The Brown and White into an industry-reflective, nationally recognized student news outlet that aims to provide purposeful, principled and ethical coverage of the campus community and its South Side Bethlehem neighbors. 

Since becoming faculty adviser in 2014, Veto has assembled a data and information graphics department to create data-driven stories and supplementary visualizations; a video department to produce “The Brown and White Weekly” student-anchored newscast; an audience department to manage and publish social media content and a weekly newsletter; a community engagement department to actively interface with Bethlehem’s South Side residents for the purpose of inviting the community into the agenda-setting and news dissemination process; an investigative department to provide intense, watchdog-driven coverage of the campus administration and Bethlehem municipal government; a podcast department to create insightful, in-depth interview programs and audio storytelling projects; and a technology and innovation department to help keep the news outlet on the cutting edge of digital media production. Finally, Veto helped strengthen existing departments with industry standard workflows and structures.

Students at The Brown and White have earned a multitude of individual awards in state, regional and national student news contests, and several organizational awards, including a national second-place finish in the College Media Association’s “Best College Media Outlet” Pinnacle Awards category in 2021.

In the classroom, Veto teaches courses in sports journalism, advanced reporting, visual communication, multimedia storytelling, social media storytelling, journalistic editing and documentary film. 

Prior to his appointment at Lehigh, Veto was a lecturer and the 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. 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.

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, podcasting and video storytelling.

Early in his career, Veto served as a radio station sports director and news reporter. He provided play-by-play commentary 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 Easton with his wife, Stephanie, a talented multimedia storyteller and video producer, and their two children. He continues to write and create short documentary videos in addition to his work at Lehigh.