Len Ackland

Associate Professor Len Ackland taught Reporting on the Environment, Reporting 3/Newsgathering 2, and a special-topics graduate course, The Nuclear West. He co-taught the Scripps Fellows Seminar.

Ackland directed the Rocky Flats Virtual Web site's "1969 Fire" exhibit, which was launched last fall. It includes text, videos, audio and photos dealing with a nearly disastrous fire at the former Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant eight miles south of Boulder. The site is at www.colorado.edu/journalism/cej/exhibit/.

Ackland continues to research nuclear weapons and nuclear power issues. His writing included an op-ed in the March 26 edition of The Sunday Denver Post in which he described a U.S. program to perpetuate nuclear weapons – the "Reliable Replacement Warhead" scheme – that is moving ahead without public debate. Such lack of public involvement is a mirror image of what occurred during the Cold War nuclear arms race, he said.

The Center for Environmental Journalism, which Ackland co-directs, hosted its ninth group of five journalists from around the nation. Those journalists, including the environment editor from National Public Radio, deepened their knowledge of environmental science and policy issues by auditing classes in various CU departments and working on independent projects.

Associate Professor Shu-Ling Berggreen taught Contemporary Mass Media, the special-topics class Children and the Media, and the master's-level Mass Communication Research Methods course, in addition to co-teaching a doctoral proseminar in Communication Theory II.

Andrew Calabrese

Professor Andrew Calabrese taught Media Institutions and Economics, the doctoral proseminar in Communication Theory, Media and the Public, International Mass Communication, and Media and Cultural Policy.

He published several research articles and book chapters, including "Communication, Global Justice and the Moral Economy" in the research journal Global Media and Communication.

In September, Calabrese presented "State and Civil Society in the Era of the MacBride Commission: An Investigation of the Role of NGOs" at the European Institute for Communication and Culture colloquium in Piran, Slovenia.

He spoke on the subject of academic freedom and responsibilities in November at the United Nations World Summit on the Information Society, which met in Tunisia.

Mindy Cheval

Instructor Mindy Cheval taught Principles of Advertising, Branding and Positioning, and Advertising Media. She became head of the Advertising sequence and established the Advertising sequence's "a2b" three-week intensive certificate program for non-Advertising majors. She also accompanied 22 students on a trip to New York City ad agencies.

Assistant Research Professor Lynn Schofield Clark (Ph.D. '98) taught Media, Self and Society, a freshman-level course for students interested in communication ethics and civic engagement. The course involved service learning, media ethics and skills in new-media communication.

Lynn Schofield Clark

Clark and Professor Stewart M. Hoover were awarded a joint grant from the Lilly Endowment Inc. of $749,000 as co-principal investigators. Hoover's project is titled "Media, Meaning, and Work: Men, Vocation, and Civic Engagement" and involves in-depth interviews with men. Clark's project includes working with local high schools to explore how young people relate their aspirations in journalism to understandings of civic engagement and how their family backgrounds, as well as media images of journalism and civic engagement, inform those aspirations.

The journal Critical Studies in Media Communication published an article that Clark co-wrote with Christof Demont-Heinrich (Ph.D. '06) and Scott Webber (Ph.D. '03). The article, "Parents, ICTs and Children's Prospects for Success: Interviews along the Digital 'Access Rainbow,' " was published in the December edition.

Clark is on the board of the International Communication Association, serving as chair of the Popular Communication Division. She will be leaving the SJMC at the end of August to take a tenure-track faculty position at the University of Denver.

Instructor Sandra Fish

Instructor Sandra Fish taught Public Affairs Reporting, Reporting 2, Newsgathering 1, News Editing and Legislative Reporting. She is preparing to teach a new required course, Principles of Journalism, this fall.           

She volunteered to teach an elective newspaper course to third- through fifth-graders at Polaris at Ebert Elementary School in Denver last fall. Her students posted stories about the school and photos to accompany their stories on a blog.           

Lee Hood

Assistant Professor Lee Hood (MA '97, Ph.D. '01) taught Newsgathering for TV, Radio & TV News and TV Reporting. She also designed and taught a new course, Broadcast for Non-Majors. In the class, News-Editorial students learned new ways to present their stories in a multimedia world. Former KUSA-TV Channel 9 anchor Ed Sardella, as well as online editor Demetria Gallegos and reporter John Ingold ('00), both from The Denver Post, made guest appearances to work with the students.

Professor Stewart M. Hoover taught the undergraduate course Mass Media and Society, and offered his graduate seminar Media, Myth and Ritual to students from SJMC as well as students in anthropology, communication, education and religious studies. He also taught the doctoral proseminar.

Stewart M. Hoover

Last fall, Hoover was a visiting professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science during his sabbatical. From London, he traveled to Rome, Berlin and Edinburgh, Scotland, to consult and conduct research. Also during that time, he traveled to Tehran, Iran, where he was the keynote speaker at the Tehran International Conference on Religion and Media.

He is undertaking a research project that looks at media and religion interaction in the cultivation of values of work, career and vocation, focusing particularly on the way men and fathers see their roles in these questions. This research is funded by a new grant from the Lilly Endowment Inc.

In March, along with Professor Diane Winston of the University of Southern California, he directed a national invitational round-table on religion journalism, which was held at CU. He completed a book, Religion in the Media Age, that will be published this year by Routlege Press in London.

Steve Jones

Assistant Dean Steve Jones taught TV Production II and Lab, TV Production III and advised the student-produced "Sports Magazine" TV program. He produced 14 live Conference on World Affairs shows, including the jazz concert; 20 CU Sports Magazine Shows; 41 "NewsTeam Boulder" newscasts, including Election Coverage 2005; and eight "What Follows"programs with the CU Department of Art and Art History.

Associate Professor Michael McDevitt taught Reporting 2, Media Ethics in Professional Practice and a master's level course, Media and Politics.

McDevitt said he "was not kicked off CU Island thanks to my successful trek through the tenure-review process." He was promoted from assistant to associate professor during the summer of 2005.

Michael McDevitt

In April, he was notified that he won the Outstanding Applied/Public Policy Research Program Award for 2006, which will be presented in June at the annual ICA conference in Dresden, Germany.

McDevitt completed supervision of a three-year study on the political socialization of teen-agers that was funded by the Knight Foundation and the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. The findings illustrated how interactive civic curricula promoted the political development of high school students by stimulating news media attention and discussion in families. Data were derived from a series of field experiments in Colorado, Arizona and Florida. "The study represents the first empirical investigation of how adolescents develop political identities as a function of schools and families interacting as agents of political socialization," he said.

One of his conference papers was selected as a Top Four Paper manuscript in the Instructional and Developmental Communication Division of the International Communication Association. He wrote the paper, "Deliberative Learning: Civic Development as Discursive Transformation," with Professor Spiro Kiousis of the University of Florida.

Bella Mody makes a presentation on HIV-AIDS media campaigns at the IAMCR meeting in Taipei, Taiwan, in July.

Professor Bella Mody designed and taught an upper-level special-topics course, Electronic Empires, and a graduate-level course, Communication and International Development.

Mody presented her research at the International Association for Mass Communication Research meetings in Taiwan and at the Asian Mass Communication and Information Centre annual meetings in Beijing in the summer of 2005. During the latter, she invited Zhengrong Hu, director of the National Radio and TV studies Center at the Communication University of China, to visit the SJMC. Hu was a deCastro visiting professor at SJMC in November and led a colloquium on recent changes in the media in China.

Mody helped the School develop a new International Media certificate program offered jointly with International Affairs Programs in Art and Sciences. Twenty high-achieving undergraduates will be admitted each year. More information is available at www.colorado.edu/Journalism/globalmedia/imc/index.htm.

She also created "Multiversity," an eight-part TV series to address race and ethnic issues on the Boulder campus.

Associate Dean and Professor Meg Moritz taught Radio and TV News and a special-topics course, Critical Analysis of Documentary. She was named UNESCO chair in international journalism education with responsibilities for creating exchange and training programs for journalists from developing and transitional countries.

She also received two grants, one from the National Science Foundation to conduct in-depth interviews with journalists who covered Hurricane Katrina. Her research will be presented at a Ford Foundation conference in New York, at the Natural Hazards Conference in Boulder and at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication annual conference in San Francisco. The other grant, for $10,000, is for a summer reporting seminar on China, which will be taught by Jim Schiffman, CNN International news producer, whose specialty is China. He has also been an adjunct instructor at the School.

Maura Troester Nuñez

Assistant Professor Maura Troester Nuñez taught Branding and Positioning and Advertising Campaigns. In addition, she started two new research projects, one focusing on the social construction of place and the other focusing on social constructions of creativity in advertising. She presented her early findings to the Rocky Mountain chapter of the American Studies Association and at the School's weekly graduate colloquium.

Associate Professor Janice Peck taught Media and Public Culture and doctorate-level Theories of Mass Communication, History of Mass Communication and Proseminar in Communication Theory II.

She received the James P. Murphy Award for Top Faculty Paper from the Cultural and Critical Studies Division of AEJMC for a paper titled "The Blindspot in the Political Economy vs. Cultural Studies Debate." This is the second time her work has won the Murphy award. The paper will be published in the fall issue of the Cultural Critique.

Last fall, she initiated a discussion among faculty whose research and teaching interests focus on the intersection of media and politics, which led to the formation of the Media and Politics Working Group. They kicked off the initiative with two colloquium presentations in the fall, one of which was a presentation of her research on Oprah Winfrey's media empire. Her presentation titled "Transcending Race?" explored the racial politics that unites Winfrey's work and Bill Clinton's new liberalism.

Professor Robert Trager taught Mass Communication Law, Press and the Constitution, and a special-topics course on Electronic Media Law and Regulations. Along with Joseph Russomanno  (Ph.D. '93), an associate professor at Arizona State University, and Susan Dente Ross, an associate professor at Washington State University, he wrote "Law of Journalism and Mass Communication," a textbook published by McGraw-Hill in 2006.

Paul Voakes

Dean and Professor Paul Voakes taught Media Ethics and Responsibility. His book, "Working with Numbers and Statistics: A Handbook for Journalists," was published in 2005. He joked that  it "has clawed its way up to No. 2,201,938 on the Amazon.com bestseller list, right behind 'The Wild Ass of the Ozarks' and 'Understanding Low Cost Road Building.' "

He is also co-author of "The American Journalist in the 21st Century," published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates in 2006. It is an analysis of the profession based on interviews with 1,400 journalists.

He was elected to the board of directors of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.

Associate Professor Jan Whitt taught Critical Thinking and Writing and Literary Journalism for the School, and for the CU-Boulder Division of Continuing Education she taught Contemporary Media.

Whitt coordinates between 12 and 20 sections of Critical Thinking and Writing each semester and works with the graduate students who teach the classes. She also taught Contemporary Media, Introduction to LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) Issues, and Literature and Journalism of the West.

The latter is the capstone course for CU's Center of the American West certificate program.

Whitt received a teaching award from the Multicultural Business Student Association and Office of Diversity Affairs, and a manuscript award – the Mary Ann Yodelis Smith Feminist Scholarship Award – from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.

She said one of her most enjoyable experiences this year was participating in the Academic Management Institute for Women, organized by the Colorado Network of Women Leaders.

She was also a consultant for the Leadership Education for Advancement and Promotion, or LEAP, program at CU and vice president of the Southwest Education Council for Journalism and Mass Communication.

Whitt published articles in the Journal of Popular Film and Television and Studies in Popular Culture and chapters in "American History Through Literature" and "The Enduring Legacy of Old Southwest Humor." 

She presented papers on film, literary journalism and an early Denver newspaperwoman at four conferences.

This fall, her book "Secret Sharers: The Other Women in American Journalism" is to be published by the University of Illinois Press, and her collection about novelist Carson McCullers titled Reflections in a Critical Eye is to be published by University Press of America.

Tom Yulsman off of Orcas Island, Washington, in Puget Sound

Associate Professor Tom Yulsman taught Science Writing, the Scripps Fellows seminar, Science and Environmental Journalism and Reporting 3/Newsgathering 2.

His feature article, "Snow Daze," appeared in the January-February 2006 issue of Audubon. "In the story I describe a mammoth avalanche in 2003 on Pendleton Mountain west of Denver and use the event as a take-off point to discuss the beneficial effects snowslides like this have on the ecology of mountainous areas," he said. Yulsman also had three columns published in The Denver Post, on the face off between religion and science over evolution, on the politicization of science and on the failure of the Kyoto climate change treaty to do much about global warming.