Burnis Reginald Morris has been a senior consultant with Sommers & Associates since 1990. A veteran journalist, newspaper executive and communication consultant, Morris is founder and director of The Fourth Estate and The Third Sector, associate professor and the first Samuel S. Talbert Lecturer in journalism at The University of Mississippi.

Morris is spending 2003-2005 as Carter G. Woodson Professor at Marshall University’s School of Journalism. He specializes in improving coverage of organizations and people the media tend to ignore. He used his interest in improving coverage of nonprofits to create The Fourth Estate and The Third Sector, a mid-career workshop for journalists who cover charities and philanthropy, funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

He is the author of Nonprofit News Coverage: A Guide for Journalists (1993), and Covering Nonprofit Organizations and Their People: A Journalist’s Guide (1998). His third book on nonprofits will be published in late 2004. Morris has also studied and written on the growth of private foundations, created workshops to encourage minority students to enter the journalism profession and to enhance journalists' understanding of science, and introduced computer-assisted reporting to the Mississippi journalism community.

He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in journalism from Ole Miss and a Master of Public Administration degree from the University of Dayton. Morris' background includes stints as a New York Times intern, Journal Herald (Dayton, Ohio) business editor, Atlanta Constitution night city editor, Charlotte Observer city hall reporter, Palm Beach Newspapers assistant business manager and Austin American-Statesman's director of community relations and director of marketing services. He has studied urban education for the Charles F. Kettering Foundation and was a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow, Freedom Forum professional in residence at the University of Kansas, an American Society of Newspaper Editors' summer professor in residence at the Dallas Morning News, and visiting scholar at the Freedom Forum’s First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University.