2024 Honors Day Speaker: Dodie Cantrell-Bickley

Dodie Cantrell-Bickley is a Senior Lecturer at the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia. Recently inducted into the Georgia Association of Broadcasters Hall of Fame, Cantrell logged over three decades in television, including seven years as president and general manager leading CBS, NBC, and ABC stations. 

She began her career working in various broadcast roles including as an investigative reporter, anchor, executive producer, and news director.  As vice-president and news director of WMAZ-TV in Macon, GA, where she launched one of the first local news websites in the nation.

A winner of multiple broadcasting and journalism awards, she was promoted to president and general manager of WMAZ-TV. In 2008, she transferred to Jacksonville, Florida where she assumed the roles of president and general manager at WTLV and WJXX.

In 2012, Cantrell retired from broadcasting to prioritize her ongoing research on the Nazi era and write two books. The Reason of Fools and A Reason to Fear are both set in Germany during and after World War II. The books are fictionalized accounts based on her mother’s life growing up in Germany under the rule of Adolf Hitler and include interviews with African American soldiers who served in the war. Cantrell maintains that it was her mother’s stories about how Hitler shut down the free press in Germany that inspired her career in broadcast journalism.

Cantrell earned an MFA from Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication. She is also a graduate of the Gannett Broadcast Management Program, the National Association of Broadcasters Leadership Development Program at Northwestern University and a graduate of the Center for Creative Leadership’s, Leadership Development Program.

In 2013, Cantrell-Bickley joined the faculty of the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia where she teaches broadcast and digital journalism. She has served on the board of the Carole Kneeland Project for Responsible Journalism and currently serves on the Board of Governors for the Southeast Emmys.

She was inducted into the Emmy Silver circle in 2018. Of all the honors and awards that Cantrell has received, she reveals that in addition to her daughter, she is most proud of playing a leading role in the adoption of digital news delivery at the community level. She also takes great satisfaction in the fact that a Russian tank operator from World War II and a Tuskegee Airman both testified that her books are completely accurate based on their personal experiences. Cantrell has been married to Randy Bickley for thirty years.