Rotary Club of Logan, Utah

Jay Black named Rotarian of the Year

Logan’s century-old Rotary Club has named Jay Black as its 2025 Rotarian of the Year.

The annual award is for a member who demonstrates exemplary service above self, leadership within Rotary and the community, meaningful professional and personal impact, dedication to Rotary ideals, and consistent engagement and reliability.
Jay has been involved in Rotary since 1967, when he had a Rotary Foundation Fellowship for International Understanding and spent a year as a graduate student at the University of Queensland, Australia. At the end of that year he and his American fiancé, Leslie, were married in Brisbane.
A member of the Logan Rotary Club since 2003, he has served as club president and on a half dozen committees, including fundraising through an annual Golf and Ribs event that funds dictionaries for all third graders in Cache and Rich counties and scholarships to USU and Bridgerland tech. He and fellow Rotarians work on a variety of community projects such as highway cleanup and Garff Gardens maintenance, support for the food pantry and humanitarian center, and other services when called upon.
He was on the USU Department of Communication faculty from 1977-1987, where he won the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences’ Professor of the Year award in 1986. His wife Leslie taught kindergarten and first grade in Smithfield before Jay got lured away to head up the department of journalism at the University of Alabama and Leslie had a stellar career as Alabama state teacher of the year.
Jay wrapped up his teaching career as an endowed professor of media ethics at the University of South Florida. In 2003 he and Leslie returned to Logan for a busy retirement.
During his career, Jay worked on four newspapers and authored or co-authored a dozen books on media and society and media ethics, co-founded the Journal of Mass Media Ethics (now in its 40th year), and presented more than 500 seminars, workshops, and research papers. He earned a PhD in journalism and sociology from the University of Missouri in 1974, and taught at Miami and Bowling Green universities in Ohio, USU, Alabama, South Australia, South Florida, and North Carolina. In 1996 he was named National Journalism Teacher of the Year.
In Logan, Jay and Leslie have been avid supporters of the American Festival Chorus, Utah Public Radio, Cache Valley Unitarian Universalists, Cache Valley Humanitarian Center, Sunshine Terrace, Cache Humane Society, Threshold Singers, and the Logan Library.
They are the parents of daughters Laura, a professor of organizational development, and Stephanie, a pediatric anesthesiologist. They have four grandchildren.

Logan Rotarians hand out 2500 dictionaries in local schools:

Thousands of students in Cache and Rich counties are receiving their own dictionary from members of the Rotary Club of Logan this month. Club members are personally handing a dictionary to every third-grade student in Cache and Rich Counties – 2500 this year. Logan Rotary has been handing out
dictionaries to students for more than 20 years for a whopping 44,000 dictionaries distributed.
“We continually hear from third graders and their teachers how much they value these books,” said club President Nick Morrison. “As long as that continues, we will provide them.”
In addition to supporting education, local Rotary members are committed to promoting peace, fighting disease, providing clean water and sanitation, saving mothers and children, and growing local economies.
Rotary International is a global network of 1.2 million neighbors, friends, leaders and problem-solvers who come together to make positive, lasting change in communities at home and abroad.
Find out more about Logan Rotary at loganrotary.org and on Facebook and Instagram.