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The Reed College of Media and College of Creative Arts will merge to form the new WVU College of Creative Arts and Media as of July 1, 2024. Get details.

Emily Hughes Corio

Teaching Professor, Journalism Program Chair

M.S.J. (West Virginia University)

Emily Hughes Corio joined the WVU Reed College of Media in August 2011 and teaches courses in audio and video storytelling and special topical reporting courses. In 2018 and 2019, she co-led a collaborative reporting project that brought together faculty and students from WVU and George Washington University. In 2019, the team focused on in-depth and explanatory reporting on the opioid epidemic's impact to children in West Virginia.

Corio was also one of three WVU professors who worked on an experimental journalism class in 2015 and 2016 that combined sensor, data and science journalism to report on water quality in northern West Virginia. In 2014, Corio developed a new course, "Adventure Travel Writing and Photography," that she teaches yearly. This course ultimately led to Corio developing the college's Sports and Adventure Media major that launched in 2018. She was the 2018 recipient of the college's annual Outstanding Teaching Award.

Corio spent a decade working in public media as a journalist before joining the College of Media. She's an award-winning reporter who served as the Assistant News Director for the statewide public television and radio network in West Virginia. Her reporting and stories have aired on NPR’s “All Things Considered” and “Morning Edition,” WNYC’s and PRI’s “The Takeaway,” and the CBC. In 2014, Corio won a “Best of Festival” award from the Broadcast Education Association for a story she produced on the recovery of the Cheat River after years of mining pollution. In 2008, she was awarded a Knight Center for Environmental Journalism Fellowship to study impacts of climate change in Alaska. Corio began her career at Allegheny Mountain Radio, a community radio station in Pocahontas County, WV, as the News and Public Affairs Director. 

She graduated from the Broadcasting and Cinema Department and the Honors Program at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro in 2001 and received her Master of Science in Journalism from WVU in 2009. She researched community radio news for her master’s project and developed a reporter training manual that the National Association of Community Broadcasters made available to community radio stations across the country. Corio is also the faculty advisor to the WVU chapter of RTDNA.