Lewis Z. Koch

Lewis Z. Koch has been an investigative reporter for over 30 years.

While at NBC Television News, he was the recipient of two of Chicago's highest awards for investigative journalism and community service the Jacob Scher Awards. He was the first journalist from television news ever to have won the award and the first journalist ever to win it twice. His television experience includes producing news and documentaries for NBC News in Chicago and producing a weekly three hour television talk show and various news programs for CBS in Chicago.

Lew Koch was recently appointed Technology Contributor for Public Radio station WBEZ. He has also been a contributor to the PRI Radio Show "Marketplace."

He has been the author of a weekly column "Open Sources" for the Ziff-Davis Publication, "Inter@active Week." He also serves as Special Correspondent for CyberWire Dispatch (CWD), a email column on the Net, started by MSNBC's Brock Meeks, which circulates to 600.000 people across the Internet. Lew began writing on the Internet for Jeff Pulver's Top Ten Sites, reviewing media. Koch then went on to write a column for Upside Magazine's Web site, called "CyberSense."

His columns have covered such issues of computer/Internet security, freedom of speech on the Internet, hackers, encryption, intellectual property rights and cyberwarfare, the Justice Department and the FBI, NIST and now covers those same issues in his "Open Sources" column. In 1999 Koch was asked by NASA to lecture on the psychology of hackers.

Jeff Frentzen of PCWeek Online (November 18, 1996) wrote that Koch's "Cybersense" column made him one of eight "special people...pundits" writing online columns, the "real McCoy" and "well researched and deserving of your eyes and ears."

Lew Koch's television documentaries included a one hour special dealing with the street violence that accompanied the 1968 Democratic National Convention. In 1969, he wrote and produced a 3 ½ hour documentary about the events of that year. Koch also wrote and produced a half hour prime time documentary dealing with the murder by Cook County State's attorney of two Chicago Blank Panther party members, one of whom was its president Fred Hampton. Koch also supervised the program "Byline" which was a weekly series of shorter television documentaries and interpretative journalism analysis.

He was also one of the founding editors of the Chicago Journalism Review, the first journalism review owned and operated by working journalists, founded to criticize the media.

In 1972-1974 Koch was director of the Urban Journalism Fellowship Program at the University of Chicago, a program for journalists to study and research without deadline pressures.

Koch wrote seven teleconferences for the American Medical Association including two teleconferences on AIDS "Youth and AIDS" and "The AIDS Crisis." He also wrote and produced four half hour documentaries dealing with the plight of children in foster care.

He is the coauthor of The Marriage Savers (with Joanne) Coward, McCann, which became the cover story in Psychology Today magazine. He was also a contributing editor for Psychology Today Magazine under editor T George Harris.

As a syndicated columnist for Newspaper Enterprise Association (now United Media, a division of ScrippsHoward News Service) Koch won the Family Service Association Award for his columns on child abuse. (Joanne Koch was coauthor of the columns.)

Koch also was a contributing editor for Chicago magazine where he wrote on legal and education issues, as well as family concerns.

After leaving television news, Lew coauthored a syndicated newspaper column, two books, as well as writing and producing documentaries.

Lewis has been a speech writer for several CEOs, a consultant to the Tribune Corporation as well as Public Affairs Director for the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University.

Lew Koch has taught journalism at Loyola University, De Paul University, Columbia College and lectured at NASA, John Marshall Law School, Yale University and Columbia University, Graduate School of Journalism, National-Lewis University (on writing for and about the Internet.). Koch has studied with Herman Kahn at the Hudson Institute and Saul Alinsky at the Industrial Areas Foundation.

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