Suzanne Lysak

Suzanne Lysak has taught broadcast journalism for more than 25 years. Her 20-year career in TV newsrooms included work as a reporter, anchor, producer, executive producer and news director. She won two Los Angeles Area Emmy Awards as a KCBS-TV morning news senior producer, coordinating coverage of wildfires. Earlier in her career, she won an American Women in Radio & Television national award for her reporting of a series titled “Private Battles: Women in the Military.”

Lysak joined the Chapman University faculty in 2019. She received a Dodge College Faculty Excellence Award in 2026. From 2009-2019, she was an associate professor of broadcast journalism at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. There she received the Meredith Professor Teaching Award, a campus-wide recognition. She also previously taught at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Va., and as an adjunct at the University of Southern California.

Lysak teaches the capstone course Chapman News; under her leadership this live weekly student newscast has won more than 25 regional and national Mark of Excellence awards, an annual national collegiate journalism competition sponsored by the Society of Professional Journalists.

Her research, published in peer-reviewed journals, focuses on how journalists use social media as well as how constantly evolving technology effects the delivery and impact of journalism. She has worked as a consultant in newsrooms in emerging democracies in Eastern Europe and has been a featured speaker internationally on the topic of teaching journalism ethics.

Lysak is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists, the Broadcast Education Association and the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC).