Remembering Mark Hummels ’97

J-School alumnus Mark Hummel, who was working as a lawyer in Phoenix, was one of two people shot on Wednesday, January, 31, 2013, while meeting with his client.

Hummels graduated from the J-School and worked as a daily newspaper reporter in New Mexico, covering police news and eventually the political beat and coverage of the state capital, Albuquerque. He then enrolled in law school and in 2005 passed the bar in Arizona.

Dean Emeritus Neil Henry was Mark’s J-200 instructor and remembers Mark as “an outstanding student, who used his experience in daily journalism to forge a new career as a lawyer in Arizona. I’m heartbroken.”

In Henry’s book “American Carnival: Journalism Under Siege in an Age of New Media,” Mark is quoted about his experiences:

“Interviews, writing, framing an argument, telling a compelling story. I met a lot of lawyers while working on stories, and I came to think of them as the people who really understood what’s going on, and the ones who can make real change in the final analysis.”

“I might have been too much of a perfectionist to make it as a reporter. I was always haunted by my inadequacies. For the first few months, working the night cops beat (a shift that ended at midnight), I couldn’t sleep very well at night because I was always awakened by anxiety dreams telling me that I had mangled some fact in the story I wrote the night before. After I grew more confident in my own ability to avoid errors, I was still plagued by the feeling that I was always missing the important story that should be told. And, as mentioned, I was plagued by the mistakes of those ‘above’ me in the line of editing. I worked in a two-daily-newspapers town that made it both more fun and lot more stressful to search out scoops and try not to get beat. It’s fun when you ‘win’ and not so much when you get beat. But the competition was good for the readers.”

“I came to realize that government officials are so well-trained in obfuscation and spin that it’s next to impossible to get a real answer to most questions you ask them. This continues to drive me absolutely nuts with people in general, and with people in positions of public trust especially. I came to think of reporting ‘both sides of the story’ as either 1) reporting ‘both’ sides of the octagon, or 2) giving ‘equal time’ for the Republicans and Democrats to each tell their lies.”

Mark is survived by his wife, Dana, and their two children.