• By ADVOCATE STAFF REPORT
• Published: Apr 5, 2009

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Pulitzer Prize winner Russell Carollo and community leader Jackie Ducote will be inducted into the Manship School of Mass Communication Hall of Fame May 1. Posthumous inductees are Hugh Mercer Blain, the first director of the journalism program at LSU, and Laurie Smith Anderson, a longtime Advocate reporter.

The ceremony will be held at the LSU Manship School of Mass Communication.

Carollo, who graduated in 1982, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for National Reporting while working for the Dayton Daily News, for his investigation of medical malpractice in the military.

The series was responsible for reforms in the military’s health-care system. Congress approved $5 million to study the problems discussed in the series.

“Russell is perhaps the nation’s most-prolific filer of Freedom of Information requests,” said Jay Perkins, one of Carollo’s professors.

Ducote has helped shape public policy and has been a crusader for education reform for more than three decades. She has worked to protect and improve Louisiana’s open meetings and public records laws to make government accountable and to influence education policymaking.

Ducote was the first woman president of the Public Affairs Research Council and the executive vice president of the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry.

She is also the co-coordinator for the Public Policy Leadership Institute of Southern Mutual Help Association and its 11-parish Rural Recovery Response to the devastation inflicted by hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Her service to the Manship School as chair of the Hall of Fame Committee, president of the Alumni Board and chair of the Journalism Building’s renovation has been exemplary. She received a bachelor’s degree in journalism in 1964 and a master’s in Library Science in 1965.

Anderson, who earned her  degree from LSU in 1975, reported for both The Advocate and State-Times during her career before her death in 2007. She was known for her award-winning work in medical reporting and feature writing.

Anderson is also remembered for her column, “The Patient Person,” written during the last 18 months of her life in which she chronicled her battle with colon cancer.

“Laurie has helped so many cancer patients in this city with her column,” said Dr. Gerald P. Miletello, a cancer specialist and Anderson’s oncologist. Her columns were later compiled into a book by Capital City Press.

Blain was instrumental in creating the curriculum around which the LSU Department of Journalism would later develop. He was recruited by then-LSU President Thomas Boyd to the English department and as faculty adviser to the campus newspaper, The Reveille, in 1908.