Chris Mills '82 leaves his job with the Philadelphia Inquirer to become Haverford's new Director of Communications.
Chris Mills '82 had his dream job: deputy managing editor for online and multimedia content for the Philadelphia Inquirer.“I had the best job I'd ever had,” explains Mills, but after interviewing for the job of Director of Communications at Haverford, he realized he was“more interested in coming back [to Haverford] the next day… than I was going back to my terrific job at The Inquirer.”
Well before he heard that Haverford was looking for a new Director of Communications, Mills was considering a move out of newsrooms.“I often wondered what it would be like to apply [newsroom] skills and experience in the service of an institution like Haverford, where you have not just reporting of events but also the creation of events.”
Creating a communications center – or a newsroom – at Haverford won't be an easy task.“This is new territory for most institutions, including this one,” says Mills,“It's not like we can say ‘It's just going to be like this' because we're inventing ‘this.'"
Before returning to Haverford this spring, Mills spent the better part of 25 years in newsrooms. He turned a senior year internship at Philadelphia's Channel 3 news desk into a part-time job, and has worked in newsrooms ever since.
“I'm a curious person who likes to find out things and blab about them,” says Mills. It was this curiosity that led him to Haverford from his hometown of Bethesda, Md., to The Bi-College News, where he wrote a music column, into the newsrooms of Philadelphia, and finally back to Haverford.
“Our goal is to enable people to connect, whether they are faculty members looking to share their work with this community, whether it's students looking to share their journey of discovery with other students and the public, whether it's alumni who want to get connected with what's happening here or to one another…The goal is to get the word out about this terrific place.”
