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Matheny Receives Prestigious Marshall Fellowship
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News Over Wireless General Manager Sam Matheny |
CBC’s News Over Wireless General Manager Sam Matheny has been selected to receive a prestigious Marshall Memorial Fellowship. He will be traveling to Europe for three weeks during the spring of 2007, visiting about 7 countries with other Marshall Fellows.
The Marshall Fellowship Program’s mission is to “deepen understanding, promote collaboration and stimulate exchanges of practical experience between Americans and Europeans.” Candidates must be between the ages of 28-40 years old, be actively involved in the community of national affairs, be engaged in business, journalism, politics or public service. It provides emerging leaders who have not had spent much time in Europe, with a global experience. This very diverse group from all over the country has 17 alternates as well.
Competition is stiff for the Marshall Fellowship; only 53 fellows from the United States were selected this year. Matheny was one of four North Carolinians nominated and accepted. The rigorous application process included being nominated, then writing two essays, getting several letters of recommendation and completing an interview with a six person panel from the German Marshall Fund.
Matheny has worked in a variety of technological areas with Capitol Broadcasting Company, including launching DTV Plus in 1999 to experiment with digital broadcasting. He is currently the General Manager of the CBC New Media Group’s News Over Wireless, a custom application service that enables local broadcasters to deliver news and information to mobile phone users.
Based on his areas of interest, Matheny has several goals for his Marshall Fellowship trip which he shared with capcom:
He wants to explore “digital communications and how the Europeans are moving from analog to digital (broadcasting, internet, mobile) and the impacts on democracy.” He wants to know how this compares with the US and if there are “lessons we can apply as an industry and/or as a company here at CBC.”
Secondly Matheny wants to explore “Education and establishing transatlantic relationships for NCSU’s College of Management.”
“I serve on the advisory board for the CoM and have been working with the Dean and fellow board members to help develop the program,” Matheny explained. “With the increasing number of global companies it is important for our education programs to provide meaningful opportunities to develop relationships. While most folks think of really big companies like GSK, SAS, Lenovo, IBM, we should remember smaller companies also work globally…Microspace provides service to Europe for example.”
Matheny is also interested in seeing how Europe deals with immigration and poverty.
“Europe, like the US, is wrestling with how to handle immigration,” he explained. “I’d like to really understand the what is driving immigration in Europe, what the challenges are, how they are managing it (or trying to), what the parallels with the US are, etc. North Carolina has one of the fastest growing Latino populations in the US and it is happening because there is opportunity here. It is pure economics. Is the same true for Europe? Is it about finding economic prosperity, gaining greater freedom, or something else entirely? And, how are the governments and peoples responding?”
The German people gave a gift to create the Marshall Memorial Fellowship Program in 1972, as a memorial to the postwar Marshall Plan aid.
