Faculty Pages

Len Ackland

Associate Professor Len Ackland has been on sabbatical during the 2008-2009 academic year. He was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship for a study focusing on Germany’s plans to phase out nuclear power use by 2022. That country currently gets about 25 percent of its electricity from 17 nuclear reactors.

Ackland also received a Fulbright fellowship award to attend a two-week German Studies Seminar – “Science and Society: The Impact of Science on Policy Formation” – in Berlin and Brussels last June.

Assistant Professor Deserai Crow (’97) taught TV Reporting, Radio and TV News, and Mass Media and Public Opinion. She is associate director of the Center for Environmental Journalism.

Deserai Crow (’97)

Her paper “Stakeholder Behavior and Legislative Influence: A Case Study of Recreational Water Rights in Colorado” was published in the Social Science Journal. Another paper, “Responsive Public Officials and Engaged Citizens: Myth or Reality? A Case Study of Water Rights Policy in Colorado,” will be published in Public Organization Review this year.

She made presentations this spring at the Midwest Political Science Association’s conference in Chicago and the Southwest Political Science Association’s conference in Denver.

Instructor Paul Daugherty (MA ’93) taught Principles of Broadcast Production, NewsTeam, Advanced Video Editing and Advanced Video Camera. He has also supervised the Broadcast Projects course. He is head of the Broadcast sequence.

Paul Daugherty (MA ’93)

Daugherty’s Video Editing class produced two half-hour episodes of a science magazine show called “CU Science Update.” He’s also published three class-related Web sites and another for his documentary about the issues and concerns surrounding the human consumption of kangaroos at www.jumpsteak.com.

In addition, Daugherty directed a live show presented by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jim Sheeler (MA ’07) based on Sheeler’s book Final Salute. His recent professional work ranges from shooting nature and science documentaries in Australia to making fundraising videos for the Humane Society of Boulder Valley.

Daugherty has been a researcher, writer, photographer and editor for episodes of “Space Class,” a NASA-supported interactive Web show for middle schoolers that teaches concepts in space science. He hired SJMC students to host the episodes, which have featured CU scientists and astronauts. He also traveled to Hawaii’s Big Island to shoot footage for Project Pisces, a research effort that will study designs for lunar habitats.

Currently, Daugherty is in production on a series about animal husbandry called Zoo Keeper Journal, about zoos around the world. It includes wildlife footage that he’s shot in Africa. He’s worked with many animal subjects, from koalas to zebras, and has begun post-production on an episode about a keeper and her chimpanzees. His spring and summer pastime is chasing and photographing severe storms on Colorado’s eastern plains.

Stewart Hoover

Professor Stewart Hoover taught the graduate seminar in Media, Myth and Ritual as well as the Ph.D. Proseminar this year.

In July, he gave the keynote speech to the Media and Religious Transformation in Africa conference in Abuja, Nigeria. In August, he delivered two papers and led a plenary session at the Conference on Media, Religion and Culture in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

In November, his book “Religion in the Media Age” was featured in an author-meets-the-critics session at the American Academy of Religion in Chicago.

Mike McDevitt

Associate Professor Mike McDevitt taught Media Ethics & Responsibility and Public Affairs Reporting. He is head of the SJMC News-Editorial sequence.

He published an article on how young people acquire motivation for confrontational and illegal activism. McDevitt worked with SJMC doctoral student Ally Ostrowski on the manuscript “The Adolescent Unbound: Unintentional Influence of Civic Curricula on Ideological Conflict Seeking,” which was published in the journal Political Communication.

He worked with Mary Caton-Rosser (Ph.D. ’06) on “Deliberative Barbarians: Reconciling the Civic and the Agonistic in Democratic Education,” an article to be published in the education journal InterActions. The essay argues that U.S. civic education is ineffective largely due to the intolerance of parents for political discussion among high school students.

McDevitt traveled to the University of Texas at El Paso to deliver a plenary talk for the Reinventing Community Media Conference.

Bella Mody

Professor Bella Mody taught the graduate course on International Mediated Communication and the capstone required course on Global Media for seniors in the International Media certificate.

Started two years ago, the International Media certificate program (www.colorado.edu/Journalism/globalmedia/imc/index.htm) had 43 students from SJMC and International Studies programs as of this spring. The certificate was designed to help students improve their marketability by focusing on international issues.

Mody’s global outreach continues to feature the Research and Learning Group of the BBC World Service Trust (BBCWST). Last year, she chaired panels presenting BBCWST research on social drama at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association in Montreal.

This July, she will be a faculty member at BBCWST’s annual knowledge-sharing workshop that brings research teams together from 14 countries in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. The workshop will be held in Uganda. Findings from BBCWST field work will also be featured in Mody’s next book, “Designing Messages.”

The Bilbao Spain committee of the U.N. High Commission for Refugees invited her to present the research of more than 20 students and SJMC faculty on how the world’s press represented the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Darfur, Sudan. The meeting was held in October.  Faculty from Universidad Rey Juan Carlos Facultad de Ciencias de la Comunicación will be using the SJMC research as a template for their own research on the coverage of Darfur by the Spanish press.

Meg Moritz

Professor Meg Moritz taught ethics courses for graduate and undergraduate students as well as the TV Documentary course.

She served as a Fulbright Senior Scholar at the University of Malta, where she was in residence for a month and consulted on the development of an internationally oriented master’s program in video and film. She was also named a Reuters Fellow for 2009 to Oxford University’s Center for Research into News Media.

Moritz continued her work on trauma coverage with a research project on the Virginia Tech shootings and associated ethical issues surrounding the identification of the killer as a “23-year-old South Korean here in the U.S. as a resident alien.”

She was invited to present the work at a trauma conference funded by the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. The paper she presented, “Students as Creators and Consumers of e-News: The Case of Virginia Tech,” recently appeared in the book “E-journalism: New Directions in New Media and News Media.”

SJMC doctoral student Sunyoung Kwak co-authored the chapter and researched how the story was handled in South Korean media as well as how it was discussed on blogs and social networking sites used by South Korean students studying in the United States.

A second publication, “Getting It Straight: Gay News Narratives and Changing Cultural Values,” appeared in The Routledge Companion to News and Journalism Studies.

Associate Professor Janice Peck taught Ph.D. Proseminar, Mass Communication History and Theories of Mass Communication. She also developed and taught for the first time a new course, Sociology of News, which is a graduate seminar focusing on the scholarship and research on news and news media.

Her book “The Age of Oprah: Cultural Icon for the Neoliberal Era” has generated substantial national and international attention because of its world-famous subject. Since the book came out last year, she has done interviews with newspapers, magazines and radio and television programs in the United States, including The New York Times, “Today Show,” The Denver Post and Chicago Magazine.

She was also interviewed by national news media from Canada, France, Australia, Sweden, Denmark and the United Kingdom. The book was also recently translated into Korean, and she was informed by Yule Kim (MA ’98), now employed at a think tank in Seoul, that it has received extensive positive coverage in South Korean newspapers. Peck presented research at four conferences: National Communication Association, Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communication, American Journalism Historians Association and the Media Spiritualities and Social Change conference sponsored by the SJMC’s Center for Media, Religion and Culture. She was also invited to present her research on celebrity philanthropy at the Symposium on Social Issue Media at Northwestern University.

Associate Professor Brett Robbs taught Advertising Campaigns and Introduction to Creative Concepts. He co-edited, with Deborah Morrison, the book “Idea Industry: How to Crack the Advertising Career Code.”

Scholar in Residence Jim Sheeler (MA ’07) taught Reporting 2 and Magazine/Feature Writing.

In the past year, his book “Final Salute” was honored as one of five finalists out of more than 500 nominated books for the National Book Award in nonfiction and was named one of the 10 best books of 2008 by The New York Times book reviewer Janet Maslin. He spoke to numerous conventions throughout the country and discussed the sacrifices of military families on dozens of broadcast outlets, including “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,” “NBC Nightly News,” NPR’s “Fresh Air with Terri Gross” and CSPAN’s “BookTV.” In December, he gave the commencement address to fall 2008 SJMC graduates.

Rick Stevens

Assistant Professor Rick Stevens taught Newsgathering 1, Public Affairs Reporting and Digital Newsroom.

Stevens presented four conference papers examining the application of copyright norms to digital content, the role of YouTube and bloggers in environmental disaster coverage, the role of popular cultural frames in the 2008 presidential election and historical portrayals of violence in American entertainment media.

In addition, Stevens published three academic journal articles and two academic book reviews.

Professor Robert Trager taught Press and the Constitution, and Mass Communication Law.

The second edition of “The Law of Journalism and Mass Communication,” which he wrote with Joseph Russomanno (Ph.D. ’93) and Susan Dente Ross, is to be published in July by CQ Press.

Jan Whitt

Professor Jan Whitt taught Contemporary Media; Introduction to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Studies; Literature and Journalism of the American West; Women and Popular Culture; Literary Journalism, and Media History.

Two of Whitt’s books were published. One of them, “Women in American Journalism: A New History,” is a finalist for the 2008 ForeWord Magazine Book Awards.

She also wrote “Settling the Borderland: Other Voices in Literary Journalism,” which was named in “A Dozen Best: A Review of Literary Journalism Scholarship” by American Journalism.

Her 2007 book “Reflections in a Critical Eye: Essays on Carson McCullers” won first place in the culture category in the 2008 Eric Hoffer Book Awards and second place in the women’s issues category in the 2007 ForeWord Magazine Book Awards. It was one of three finalists for the 2008 Colorado Book Awards in the collections/anthology category.

In addition, Whitt wrote articles about Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” and the film “Brokeback Mountain” that were published in Journalism History and Popular Culture Review, respectively, and presented conference papers about Hillary Clinton, the literature and journalism of the American West course, and allegory in work by Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell and Roger Rosenblatt.

She volunteers for Golden Retriever Rescue of the Rockies and Wyoming Herding Dog Rescue.

Associate Professor Tom Yulsman taught Science Writing, the Scripps Seminar, Principles of Journalism and Reporting 3. He is co-director of the Center for Environmental Journalism and director of the CU Graduate Certificate in Environment, Policy and Society.

With the help of the CEJ’s graduate research assistant, Jordan Wirfs-Brock, Yulsman designed and launched the CEJ’s new blog, CEJournal (www.cejournal.net).

It went live in late December and by early April was averaging more than 1,000 page views a week. He has written most of the content so far and averages at least one blog post a day.

“The highlight for me came right at the beginning, with coverage of the worst environmental catastrophe in the history of the southeastern United States – a coal ash spill at a Tennessee Valley Authority coal plant,” he said.

“It was ignored by the mainstream news media for days. Bloggers picked up the slack and finally shamed major outlets like CNN and the networks into covering the event.”

The blog also is a platform for work by students focusing on environmental journalism. Yulsman is currently working on a redesign that will make CEJournal more of an online magazine platform than a straight blog.

Yulsman co-directed the first International Environmental Journalism Summit with a colleague from the Center for Strategic and International Affairs in Washington, D.C.

The event brought European and American environmental journalists together in Boulder for several days to encourage conversation about issues of mutual interest, including coverage of climate change and the crisis in journalism.

He is helping to organize the second such summit, planned for the end of May in Stockholm.