Long term JCCM editorial board member Joe Scanlon has died on May 2 2015 at the age of 82. We will remember him as as a passionate scholar who combined teaching at the Carleton School of Journalism and Communication and writing on such divers topics as handling mass death, citizen response to diaster and of course diaster journalism until this year. Just weeks before his death he approached the editorial office about his new project on the use of disaster stories in folk songs. The first draft of his article started with the example of the famous ‚Fields of Anfield’ song of the Liverpool football fans that remembers the 1989 crowd crush incident in Sheffield that killed 96 Liverpool supporters and injured 766. It may be the second Liverpool song that comes to mind remembering Joe, “You’ll never walk alone’ because of his eagerness to work with others, to teach and to inspire them.

As a tribute to his work we publish his unfinished paper on disaster folk songs on our site.