Bethel Grad, International Journalist Jim Wooten Dies After a Distinguished Career

It’s not often a small, private school in rural America can claim an award-winning journalist and television correspondent as an alumnus. Yet, Bethel University has that distinction with James Terrell Wooten. Wooten died June 4, 2026.

Since graduating from Bethel College in McKenzie in 1958, Wooten received numerous awards for his portfolio of work including the Ernie Pyle Memorial Medal, Overseas Press Club Award, the Joe Alex Morris Award from Harvard University, the Blue Pencil Award from Columbia University, Overseas Press Club Award, and the Robert F. Kennedy Award. Outside the awards, he had an impressive career as a journalist, including serving as a White House correspondent for the New York Times and holding several positions with ABC News.

Known to family and friends as Jim or Jimmie, he was born July 13, 1937, in Owensville, Indiana, to the Rev. James Robert Wooten and Clara Richmond Wooten. As the son of a Cumberland Presbyterian minister, he lived in Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas and Texas while his father served various pastorates.

Following in his father’s footsteps, Wooten attended Bethel College in McKenzie, Tenn., graduating in 1958. While still a student, he was received by Princeton Presbytery as a candidate for the ministry. He subsequently attended Cumberland Presbyterian Theological Seminary in McKenzie and was ordained to the ministry on April 7, 1959. He soon discerned that journalism rather than pastoral ministry was his vocation and asked to be removed from the presbyterial roll in the mid-1960s.

Wooten began his journalism career as editor of the Weakley County Press in Martin, Tenn. He later joined the Huntsville Times, where his reporting on the Civil Rights Movement attracted the attention of The New York Times and launched a career that would take him around the globe.

Among the events he covered were the revolutions in El Salvador and Nicaragua, the American invasion of Grenada, the Bosnian and Kosovo wars, the American invasion of Afghanistan, the Rwandan genocide, Sierra Leone’s civil war, the crisis in Somalia, and the Communist coup in Ethiopia. During the Gulf War, he served as a combat correspondent embedded with the U.S. Army’s Third Armored Division and later reported from northern Iraq during the Kurdish uprising. Domestically, he covered every American presidential campaign from 1968 through 2004.

It was not the original plan for Wooten to attend Bethel. He was set to attend Purdue University and study architecture after graduating from high school in Owensville, Ind. On the day of graduation, he and his girlfriend were in a serious wreck that totaled his father’s vehicle. Feeling responsible for the accident, Wooten purchased a replacement vehicle from the money he had saved for his tuition at Purdue.

Just sixteen years old at the time, Wooten made an alternative plan to join the Navy when he turned seventeen. His parents, not wanting to see him start a military career, persuaded him to enroll at Bethel College. His father, J.R., was a Cumberland Presbyterian minister and through his affiliation with the church, the school offered discounted tuition.

It was arranged for Wooten to work for Clara Dishman. His job was washing dishes for two meals and running the hot water heater for the gym.

“With the tuition break from my father’s ministry, that seemed doable,” Wooten said in a 2004 interview. He also starched and ironed shirts for a quarter each.

In his second year at Bethel, he earned a full-ride scholarship to play basketball. With a double major in History and English, he graduated in 1958. During his senior year, he decided to become a minister based on his father’s desires. Following graduation, he married Joanne Richardson and attended the seminary.

After seminary school in Memphis, he had a short stint as the pastor of a church in Waverly. Realizing his calling was not with the church, he became a high school teacher in Greenville, Ken. While in Greenville, he worked for the newspapers in page layout, writing and sports photography. His work led to an offer to become an editor for the Weakley County Press in Martin.

By the mid-1960s, the Wootens and their two daughters, Karen and Kris, were moving to Huntsville, Ala. Working as a reporter, Wooten was in the deep South watching the Civil Rights Movement unfold.

“We were the only paper in Alabama not in chains to George Wallace,” he said, describing his paper as “an activist newspaper, which is the best kind.”

“We were young reporters; we thought we were changing the world and we were having an adventure called journalism.”

Looking back he said, “That was the oven in which my journalism bread was baked; without that kind of experience, which was rich in terms of stories, rich in terms of real history being made with George Wallace’s politics and Martin Luther King, Jr. … without that, I don’t think I would have had any skills other than ordinary skills.”

From Alabama, his career took off with stops at the New York Times and the Philadelphia Enquirer. He and Joanne had two more daughters, Katie and Elizabeth, before her death in 1978.

By 1979, he moved to television with ABC News, where he remained for over 25 years.

“It took about a year before the light bulb went on how to write for TV; everything has to be compressed into a minute-forty or two minutes long. You learn to compress information into small chunks and let pictures do at least half of the work. And you learn to live with the unfortunate fact that you can never tell the entire story. It’s frustrating, but you get better.”