Michael Perkins, former reporter, BYU educator, dead at 45

Associated Press

PROVO, Utah — Michael Perkins, a former newspaper reporter who eventually became chairman of the Brigham Young University communications department, drowned Thursday in a kayaking accident in central Idaho. He was 45.

Perkins also helped create the journalism program at BYU-Hawai'i.

Perkins, of Provo, was at a family outing on the Salmon River when the accident occurred, said BYU spokeswoman Carri Jenkins.

Perkins graduated from BYU in 1982 and worked for the Deseret News as a night police reporter during the 1980s. He earned a law degree at the University of Utah in 1986. After teaching at the University of New Mexico and working at the Albuquerque Journal, he taught at Drake University in Iowa before he was hired as an associate professor of communications at BYU in August 1999. Perkins had been courted by other universities for deans' positions, and he recently became head of the media law division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communications.

Perkins' survivors include his wife and two children.