A publication of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Summer 2011
SHAPING THE FUTURE: JEAN FOLKERTS’ TENURE AT CAROLINA WAR STORIES: A LOOK AT JOURNALISM DURING THE CIVIL WAR Q&A WITH ‘THE FACEBOOK EFFECT’ AUTHOR AND TECH JOURNALIST DAVID KIRKPATRICK
CONTENTS
School of Journalism and Mass Communication Jean Folkerts Dean 919.962.1204 jean_folkerts@unc.edu Dulcie Straughan Senior Associate Dean 919.962.9003 dulcie@email.unc.edu
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DEAN JEAN FOLKERTS: CONNECTING
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WIKILEAKS AND THE FIRST AMENDMENT
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BOOK REVIEW: THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS
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Q&A WITH ‘THE FACEBOOK EFFECT’ AUTHOR AND TECH JOURNALIST DAVID KIRKPATRICK
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N.C. JOURNALISM, ADVERTISING AND PUBLIC RELATIONS HALLS OF FAME INDUCT NEW MEMBERS
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MOVE THE CROWD: ONLINE COMMUNITY MANAGEMENT AND CROWDSOURCING
ON THE MOVE WITH MOTION GRAPHICS
SHAPING THE FUTURE: JEAN FOLKERTS’ TENURE AT CAROLINA
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Anne Johnston Associate Dean for Graduate Studies 919.962.4286 amjohnst@email.unc.edu Napoleon Byars Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies 919.843.7274 nbyars@email.unc.edu Speed Hallman Associate Dean for Development and Alumni Affairs 919.962.9467 speed_hallman@unc.edu Louise Spieler Associate Dean for Professional Education and Strategic Initiatives 919.843.8137 lspieler@unc.edu
Jay Eubank Director of Career Services and Special Programs 919.962.4518 jeubank@email.unc.edu Monica Hill Director, North Carolina Scholastic Media Association 919.962.4639 mihill@email.unc.edu Jennifer Gallina Director of Research Administration 919.843.8186 gallina@email.unc.edu Stephanie Willen Brown Park Library Director 919.843.8300 swbrown@unc.edu David Alexander Director of Information Technology and Services 919.962.0281 davidale@email.unc.edu Kyle York Assistant to the Dean for Communications 919.966.3323 sky@unc.edu
Maura Murphy Associate Dean for Business and Finance 919.843.8287 murf@email.unc.edu
Editors Morgan Ellis, Kyle York Designer Lauren Norwood, UNC Creative Printer HarperPrints Read the Carolina Communicator online at jomc.unc.edu/carolinacommunicator. Carolina Communicator is a publication of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. © Copyright 2011, UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication. All rights reserved.
@uncjschool facebook.com/uncjschool
Address corrections: Amy Bugno School of Journalism and Mass Communication Campus Box 3365, Carroll Hall Chapel Hill, N.C. 27599-3365 amybugno@unc.edu 919.962.6881
CONTENTS
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REESE FELTS DIGITAL NEWS AND AUDIENCE RESEARCH PROJECT
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37TH FRAME — 2011 EXHIBITION
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RADIO LATIJAM: UNA PRODUCCIÓN DE JÓVENES LATINOS Y LA ESCUELA DE PERIODISMO Y COMUNICACIÓN
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NEW MEDIA AND POLITICS
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INTERDISCIPLINARY HEALTH COMMUNICATION AT CAROLINA
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WAR STORIES: A LOOK AT JOURNALISM DURING THE CIVIL WAR
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REFRAMING MEXICO
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EXCHANGES WITH TOP INTERNATIONAL JOURNALISM SCHOOLS PROVIDE UNIQUE STUDY ABROAD EXPERIENCE
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TAKING SIDES ON NET NEUTRALITY
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NEWS BRIEFS
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Cover: Respite for a rambler: Cowboy Scott Dunn was down on his luck in Star, N.C., when Jim and Mary Callicutt found him in a local restaurant. After inviting him to church, and later into their home, Dunn worked to get his life in order with the help of the Callicutts. (Photo by Josh Davis)
SUMMER 2011
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FROM THE DEAN
Dean Jean Folkerts: Connecting Dear alumni and friends, Welcome to the summer 2011 edition of the Carolina Communicator. This is the last magazine the school will publish while I am dean, and I’d like to take the opportunity to thank you for your commitment to the school. When I was hired in 2006, I was charged with transforming a strong program into one that embraced the future of digital media. I believed deeply in this vision for the school, but I knew a dean could achieve a vision only with tremendous support and hard work of countless other people. Five years later, I believe we can all take great pride in what we — students, faculty, staff, alumni and friends — have accomplished together. We have created an integrated hub of digital activity at Carolina, and I believe we have risen to the highest levels of leadership in the digital media environment. Here’s why I think so. We created the Reese Felts Digital News and audience research initiative with a $4.1 million bequest from one of the school’s greatest friends, Reese Felts. Reesenews.org stories are winning major national awards. The “Staying in Bounds” interactive game helped explain the intricacies of NCAA compliance rules for student-athletes. It won the best online sports reporting award from the Society of Professional Journalists. We believe it is the first time an interactive game has won a major award in a reporting category. So, our students are now creating new digital tools to tell complicated stories and better inform audiences. The school has made a major impact within the group of top journalism schools participating in the Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education and its experimental News21 reporting project. Carolina’s News21 contribution — Powering a Nation (poweringanation.org) — has won more than 40 national and international awards, including a Webby nomination and an Award of Excellence in Pictures of the Year International. It was a finalist in the professional category of the Online News Association awards. Business Insider named Powering a Nation one of the 18 most innovative alternative news stories of 2010 (the only student work cited), and World Press Photo — known for holding the world’s most prestigious press photography contest — recognized Powering a Nation among the top three interactive productions in the world. Powering a Nation also was chosen as the most viable project presented at Chancellor Holden Thorp’s weeklong Entrepreneurship Bootcamp this year. The bootcamp takes promising projects to the next level through an intensive focus on implementation strategies, cost, selling the idea, raising money, developing goals and assessing progress. We’ve instilled a pervasive digital culture in the school. We revised the curriculum to include digital experience for all students and deepen their digital understanding and skill sets.
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We created an innovative online M.A. in Technology and Communication that focuses on interactive media, the Internet and digital economics. The program is rigorous, yet convenient for professionals who want to re-tool for the future of communication technology. We revamped our Knight Chair in Journalism to a new Knight Chair in Journalism and Digital Media Economics, and we established a Knight Chair in Digital Advertising and Marketing. This makes us one of only two journalism schools with two Knight chairs. The scholars and professionals who serve in these chairs will unlock the potential of digital media for both journalism and strategic communication. Our exceptional faculty now count among their ranks experts in social media, crowdsourcing, online video and multimedia production. They work on meaningful projects that harness the power of digital media to achieve bold goals such as improving public health, giving citizens greater access to government and, yes, preserving quality journalism in the face of major technological and economic upheaval. The UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication has become an international leader in digital media. Our work is helping to show the way for our peer institutions and for the industries we serve. I’m proud of what we are handing off to the school’s next dean, and I’m excited for my successor that he or she will enjoy the same extraordinary support that the Carolina J-school community has given me. My sincerest thanks.
Jean Folkerts, Dean
WIKILEAKS
WIKILEAKS AND THE FIRST AMENDMENT BY DEAN C. SMITH
The Obama administration has launched an unprecedented crackdown on leakers who provide sensitive information not to foreign governments (aka, spying) but to the media in order to disseminate that information to the public.
So it has come to this. Daniel Ellsberg, hero of the Pentagon Papers case and once dubbed “the most dangerous man in America” by the Nixon administration, was arrested this spring. Not because he had revealed the government’s dirtiest secrets about the Vietnam War — that’s still his badge of honor — but for protesting the detention of his contemporary counterpart U.S. Army Pvt. Bradley Manning. Manning was being held in solitary confinement at a military brig at the Marine Corps base at Quantico, Va. Among other things, he is charged with aiding the enemy — a capital offense — for his alleged role in leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks, the online whistleblower site. Ellsberg joined other protesters to make the point that whistleblowers who expose government corruption are not villains but heroes. “I identify with him more than anyone else I’ve seen in the last 40 years,” Ellsberg told The Washington Post. Not everyone agrees. The Obama administration has launched an unprecedented crackdown on leakers who provide sensitive information not to foreign governments (aka, spying) but to the media in order to disseminate that information to the public. Including Manning’s case, the Department of Justice has launched five such whistle‑ blower prosecutions in just two years. How does that compare to past administrations? According to politico.com, the federal government launched only three similar leak-to-the-media prosecutions in the preceding 40 years. That’s an unexpected record for a president who campaigned on a pledge of creating the most transparent administration in history. “We need to empower federal employees as watchdogs of wrongdoing,” Obama said. Of course, that was before WikiLeaks began releasing U.S. State Department cables that exposed bad-faith negotiations with foreign allies and U.S. Army video that showed American soldiers gunning down Iraqi civilians and two reporters for Reuters.
SUMMER 2011
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WIKILEAKS
A right, a need or
a want? The ethics of WikiLeaks by Temple Northup When evaluating the ethics of releasing sensitive information, it helps to make the distinction if the public has a right to know, a need to know or just a want to know the information.
More unexpected throughout the debate over WikiLeaks and its celebrity-seeking publisher, Julian Assange, has been the reaction and commentary of some American journalists. Some writers have called for Assange to be prosecuted under the Espionage Act of 1917. Some have said the U.S. military should use a cyber-attack to “shut down” WikiLeaks. At least one has called on the CIA to assassinate Assange. When was the First Amendment rescinded? Any Carolina journalism student who has successfully completed “Introduction to Communication Law” could explain to these journalists why they are so mistaken.
In the U.S., we often proclaim an inherent “right” to know a wide range of information, but the reality is our rights relate to a fairly limited scope of information, such as proceedings in the U.S. Senate. So, what type of information does WikiLeaks contain? The vast majority is not anything we have a right to know.
Julian Assange
First of all, the last time an American government official suggested killing a few journalists as a warning to others, it was probably Gen. Sherman advising Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. Suffice to say, Lincoln declined. Second, Assange is not a government employee and is not subject to the same rules for handling classified information as Manning. If the government prosecuted Assange under the Espionage Act, it would need to prove that he was involved in the illegal procurement of the leaked documents. The government has never — repeat, never — prosecuted a third-party publisher such as a journalist under that law, even if the documents were illegally obtained by someone else. Finally, shutting down WikiLeaks, as some journalists and politicians have continued to demand, would be an unconstitutional prior restraint on the press so obvious that one of my media law students could argue that case on behalf of the press and win hands down.
But is it information we need to know in order to make informed decisions in our society, or is it something we merely want to know out of curiosity? WikiLeaks publishes its fair share of both. It published the secret rituals of a sorority, not a need-to-know type of information. Its release is ethically dubious. It released footage from a U.S. Army helicopter showing the killing of journalists, highlighting what could be a “shoot first, ask later” mentality in the military. That could influence future voting and political decisions, so it is information we may need to know. Its release is ethically justifiable. When information is ethically justifiable for publication, it is imperative that it be vetted in order to confirm authenticity and remove any information that threatens the safety
It is not surprising when government officials demand their secrets be kept. But it is surprising, and saddening, to hear journalists demand it. As Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black lamented to his colleagues in the Pentagon Papers case: “It is unfortunate that some of my brethren are apparently willing to hold that the publication of news may sometimes be enjoined. Such a holding would make a shambles of the First Amendment.” Dean C. Smith earned his doctoral degree from the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication in May 2011. As a doctoral student, he taught “Introduction to Communication Law.”
of individuals who are implicated in the documents or who procured the documents. (When The New York Times received the Pentagon Papers from Daniel Ellsberg, the staff pored over them for five months before publishing the first article.) Only after conducting a thorough analysis of all to-be-released information — and establishing that it represents something the public has a need to know — can WikiLeaks find itself standing on firm ethical ground. Temple Northup is a 2011 doctoral graduate of the school. As a doctoral student, he taught
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media ethics courses in the school. CAROLINA COMMUNICATOR
BOOK REVIEW: THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration BY MEREDITH CLARK Isabel Wilkerson, former national correspondent and bureau chief at The New York Times and the first black woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for journalism, visited Carolina in February 2011 to discuss her book, “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.” Her visit was hosted by the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication, the Gillings School of Global Public Health, the Center for the Study of the American South, and the Center for Global Initiatives. View her talk at http://youtu.be/3ECkvollSek. Wilkerson met with students in a small group setting in the J-school. Meredith Clark, one of the students who met with Wilkerson, reviews the book for the Carolina Communicator.
To begin piecing together the economic, cultural, political and social factors that influenced some 6 million African-Americans to leave the South during the early to mid-20th century seeking a chance at prosperity in the northeast and western United States, perhaps its best to begin where Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson chose to end: with methodology. In researching her book — “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration” — Wilkerson scoured academic reports, literature, Census data and newspaper clippings, and then binded her findings with rich details from hundreds of one-on-one interviews. The story arcs read with the ease of fiction. As a whole, her work is a powerful example of how cultural history can illuminate our understanding of society’s modern existence. For the journalism history student, the book is a case study in piecing together seemingly disparate sources and applying narrative-form writing to add to scholarship via a cultural approach to historiography. The storylines of three migrants shed light on the conditions of their time and the evolution of the status of blacks in America. We steal away from the biting poverty of the Mississippi cotton fields to the bitter cold of Chicago with Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, a wife, mother and sharecropper. We hold our breath as farm laborer George Swanson Starling escapes lynching and shuttles back and forth to New York as a train porter,
an occupation that keeps him connected to the land of his origin. We endure a tense cross-country ride with Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, a doctor from Louisiana whose pride is so wounded by his experiences there that his whole life’s existence, from his bedside manner to his choice of vice, is an attempt to redeem his permanently wounded pride. Outside of academia, little is known of the Great Migration — a discrepancy Wilkerson attributes to the unwieldy nature of the shift and its length, which runs from just after World War I to the mid-20th century. Using scholarly texts published from the 1920s to the 1960s, Wilkerson explores the migration and contextualizes its consequences, including white flight in Chicago and Detroit, the demographic changes that contributed to inner-city rioting in black communities in northern cities, and the creation of densely populated black communities created during the mid-20th century in unlikely urban centers in the North, Midwest and West that had few, if any, ties to the slave trade that brought blacks to the United States a century before. Wilkerson follows the three “streams of migration,” noting that the currents of economic opportunity and family ties pull migrants out of southern states along the Atlantic and up into the big cities of the eastern seaboard. The central flow of migrants originates around the Mississippi River and channels into the iron giants of Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago and other major centers of industry in the Midwest. Those west of the Mississippi, who settled along the Pacific coast, took the greatest journey. Wilkerson’s work drives home her observation that the millions of black Americans who fled the South during the Great Migration have a common bond with their counterparts who passed through the gates at Ellis Island. That is, oppressed people will go “as far as it takes to reach safety with the hope that life will be better wherever they land.” Wilkerson’s thesis, and the catalyst for her 10-year research project which birthed this work, is that the factors that spawned the Great Migration are deserving of academic inquiry, particularly through the lives and experiences of the migrants who made the journey. SUMMER 2011
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Q & A — DAVID KIRKPATRICK
Q& A with ‘The Facebook Effect’ author
and tech journalist David Kirkpatrick
David Kirkpatrick, best-selling author of “The Facebook Effect,” gave the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication’s Roy H. Park Distinguished Lecture in spring 2011. Kirkpatrick, regularly ranked one of the world’s top technology journalists, was a writer for Fortune for more than 20 years, most recently as the senior editor for Internet and technology. The Carolina Communicator conducted a Q&A with Kirkpatrick with questions submitted by J-school faculty, staff and students.
With Facebook, timing seemed to be everything — or almost. What consumer media tools or technologies do you see out there today that are just a cycle or two ahead of their time? I don’t think there are any that are comparable to Facebook at this point — services which are obviously on a path David Kirkpatrick to semi-ubiquity. However, there are a number of things that are percolating which are likely to become important. Location-based group assembly services like GroupMe are very important and seem to be gaining momentum. Also, there are very interesting experiments underway in real-time television on the Internet — participatory programming which is only meaningful in real time. Networks are the ones who should be pioneering this, but as usual they are not. It’s a form suitable more for the computer than the TV, and yet I see the potential it could supplant conventional programming, especially for reality programming. What do most Facebook users not know about Facebook that they should know? People should realize that while Facebook offers substantial privacy protections, there are not and cannot be any guarantees. There is always the risk that somehow your data will be exposed whether Facebook wants it to be or not. So you should be super-careful about what you include in your Facebook data. I always say I would not put anything there I wouldn’t want to see on the front page of the newspaper. But there is a further level of concern here. What people don’t realize is that by “friending” someone they
by “friending” someone they are empowering them over their are empowering them over their data. Facebook is intended to be a medium that you use to connect with people you really know. If you instead use it, as so many do, to collect friends and turn it into a numbers
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Mark Zuckerberg often talks of Facebook as a utility. What does that analogy mean for news organizations that are struggling to find a digital business model? And are there any hints at what it might mean for future regulation of utilities that are “coded” rather than “piped”? I think the insight for media organizations in Facebook’s notion of itself as a utility is the extreme faith it bespeaks in the power of software, which media companies almost without exception have generally disregarded.
The reason both Google and Facebook are becoming such important media companies is because they recognized that the media was increasingly being produced elsewhere, and their challenge was merely to organize it and provide platforms for its display and consumption. Then there becomes a huge opportunity to display advertising in conjunction with that. News organizations that believe that mere quality of content will win are likely to find themselves at a growing disadvantage. The media organizations that I believe will win in the long term are those like The New York Times that recognize to succeed they need a combination of quality content and superior software access methodologies — and also those who recognize that the customer/consumer/ reader is as important as the professional producer in the evolving ecosystem. Creating forums where the two parts of this equation can intersect and interact richly will be the area of greatest innovation in content production. Many people are aware that sites like Facebook aren’t truly “free” to use, giving away massive amounts of information about themselves in exchange for using the service. But many aren’t aware of the depth and sophistication of this personal data gathering and use by these companies, and how their lives fit into Facebook’s business strategy. Should Facebook be more forthcoming about how and why personal information is used? I do think Facebook should be more forthright and explicit about what it is doing with people’s data and how privacy controls are manipulated. I also think the privacy controls need to be significantly and constantly improved, which in general they have not been.
People should be under no illusion that there is a free lunch. On the other hand they should feel glad
Q & A — DAVID KIRKPATRICK
competition, you are potentially putting your data and privacy at far greater risk. This is because you are implicitly trusting all those “friends,” even the ones you don’t actually know, to treat your data respectfully. Often those people don’t do that, which is why researchers speak of the pervasive problem on Facebook of peer-to-peer privacy violations.
that Facebook and Zuckerberg are resolute that the kind of information that is delivered to users in the form of advertising must be something that is likely to be found as useful. There is a deep cultural aversion to spamming people at Facebook. That doesn’t mean there won’t be enormous opportunities to make money with ads. What do you make of companies like Zynga — the makers of FarmVille, Mafia Wars and other widget/app games for social networking sites — that turn enormous profits from social gaming experiences driven by micropayments? Is this the future of business on Facebook? Will widgets/apps become serious engines for major PR/ad campaigns in the future? Are there any privacy or ethical issues tied to these kinds of games? Gaming has proven to be one of the most popular online social activities. Games will more and more be used by marketers. I am impressed by Zynga and a few other companies of its type. I don’t find them intrinsically perfidious in any way. There have been miscellaneous ethical and privacy issues, but the range of games is so vast that to make generalizations would be difficult here. But I would say — watch social gaming. It is one of the great innovations of our time, whether we like it or not. And when video enters into it, the field will become all the more important. A top Google developer said “At Google we say ‘Don’t Be Evil,’ but we know that all companies eventually suck even if they don’t become evil. Our goal is to expand mean time to suckage.” Facebook is about 7 years old; how long do you think Facebook has before it sucks? What could extend their mean time to suckage? I believe that the cycles of company creation and destruction are accelerating along with most of the rest of life these days, driven by technology change. The problem is not “suckage,” but it is bureaucracy. Companies begin to exist for their own sake. Google is today on a cusp — still in many ways pursuing the genuine vision that propelled its founding 13 years ago, and in other ways acting like the giant multi-billion-dollar Wall Street-driven monolith that it is. Larry Page has returned to try to reinvigorate the former part of the culture, but it’s hard. Facebook has an advantage — Mark Zuckerberg is the single absolute ruler who cannot be deposed. That means he can ensure that the company moves forward in sync with his vision. It can move faster and less bureaucratically than if it was run by the typical company committee. But there is now a single point of failure, and it could also potentially fail disastrously if he makes a fundamental miscalculation. I don’t see this as imminent, but it cannot be dismissed as a risk. SUMMER 2011
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HALLS OF FAME
N.C. Journalism, Advertising and Public Relations Halls of Fame induct new members Joseph Mitchell, Roy Park Jr., Gene Price, Chuck Stone, Ed Williams and Clarence Whitefield were inducted into the N.C. Halls of Fame in Journalism, Advertising and Public Relations during an April 10 ceremony in Chapel Hill. Bill Goodwyn and David Oakley received Next Generation Leadership Awards. The N.C. Halls of Fame, based in the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication, honor individuals who have made outstanding, career-long contributions to their fields. Honorees must be native North Carolinians, or must have made significant contributions to the state. The Next Generation Leadership Award is given by the N.C. Halls of Fame to recognize individuals who represent the next generation of leadership in their fields. Mitchell, a reporter and writer who chronicled the lives of ordinary New Yorkers, was born to a Fairmont, N.C., farm family in 1908. Critic Stanley Edgar Hyman said he belonged to a literary — not merely journalistic — tradition that includes Faulkner, Bellow, Joyce and Defoe. Mitchell, who died in 1996, was inducted posthumously into the N.C. Journalism Hall of Fame. Park, who was inducted into the N.C. Advertising Hall of Fame, built a 40-year career in advertising that included agency work for J. Walter Thompson and Kincaid Advertising, and he has served as
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president and chairman of Park Outdoor Advertising since 1984. He is president and chairman of the Triad Foundation, which funds graduate-level fellowships at UNC’s journalism school. He received a Distinguished Alumnus Award from UNC in 2005. Journalism Hall of Fame inductee Price served more than 50 years as managing editor, editor and editor emeritus of the Goldsboro News-Argus while the newspaper earned more than 40 state and national awards for editorials, investigative reporting, feature writing and public service. Stone, a Journalism Hall of Fame inductee, is the Walter Spearman Professor emeritus at UNC’s journalism school. He came to Carolina after an extraordinary career as a journalist, editor and columnist at several newspapers including the Chicago Defender and the Philadelphia Daily News, where he was the first black columnist and first black editor. Journalism Hall of Fame inductee Williams won numerous awards for writing and widespread recognition for innovation and leadership during his 35-year career at The Charlotte Observer. His columns and editorials were part of Observer projects that won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 1981 and 1988.
Whitefield, who distinguished himself over a 50-year career in journalism and public relations, was inducted to the N.C. Public Relations Hall of Fame. The 1948 Carolina graduate became public relations director for Duke University until returning to Carolina to lead the General Alumni Association. He earned the rare distinction of being known as “Mr. Duke” and “Mr. Carolina” at different times in his career. Next Generation Leadership Award honoree Goodwyn is the president of global distribution and CEO of Discovery Education for Discovery Communications. The UNC journalism school alumnus oversees all content distribution sales and marketing activity on behalf of Discovery’s more than 100 worldwide networks, including Discovery Channel, TLC, Animal Planet and Science Channel. Oakley, also a Next Generation Leadership Award honoree, is president and founding partner of the BooneOakley agency in Charlotte, N.C., which was named Southeast Small Agency of the Year by Advertising Age in 2009. Its website (booneoakley.com) was honored in the 2010 Google Creative Canvas.
CROWDSOURCING
Move the crowd: online community management and crowdsourcing BY DAREN BRABHAM Daren Brabham joined the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication faculty in July 2010. He teaches public relations courses and conducts research into online communities and the role of new media in society.
Can’t find the answer to a tough question? Need to really connect with your audience? Want it to happen in real time? Crowdsourcing is a process through which organizations can leverage the collective intelligence of online communities by soliciting input to help solve problems and make production decisions. It blends traditional, top-down management with creative, bottom-up, open innovation from online communities. Threadless.com is an unusual company that uses a crowd‑ sourcing business model. Anyone can join the Threadless online community for free, and once they do, they can help decide the clothing options the company will produce and sell back to them. In 2006, just six years after launching, Threadless had a profit margin of 35 percent from the sale of 60,000 shirts per month, all without anything resembling traditional advertising or public relations.
I study companies that use crowdsourcing, learning what motivates people to participate in these processes, and discovering how organizations can build and sustain productive online communities. What is clear is that the successful organizations devote considerable resources to managing these online communities, often with dedicated online community managers. At their core, these online community management jobs are public relations jobs — and new job opportunities for our graduates. Online community managers develop close relationships and trust between customers and brands, encouraging not just participation and feedback from customers but also creative production and cooperation. These are PR functions even if they do not quite resemble traditional PR practice. Online community managers are less likely to send out press releases, pitch stories to journalists or buy ads. They are likely to spend more time chatting with customers on discussion boards and tweeting news stories. Companies like Threadless are becoming more common today, and mainstream companies are also opening themselves up to creative input from online communities, such as through usergenerated advertising contests. My students and I are looking at the dynamics of online communities and collecting the best practices of today’s pioneering online community managers. We are teaching students to become these new kinds of PR practitioners.
Threadless members upload graphic design ideas for t-shirts to a gallery on the site, where
So, how exactly does it work at Threadless?
other members can rate the designs on a simple 0–5 scale. After a week in the gallery, the highest rated designs are printed by Threadless and sold in a typical online storefront on the site. The business model eliminates a lot of risk for Threadless, collapsing product development and market research into a single, ongoing process driven by the online community. The staff members at these companies do not merely use these online communities. In order to be successful, staff members must immerse themselves in the day-to-day experience of the community. At Threadless, for instance, staff members check in on the site frequently, keeping their finger on the pulse of the more than half-millionmember community and watching the conversation in the discussion forum rapidly unfold. They add to the conversation when it makes sense, responding to customer questions and complaints and even engaging in the humorous banter between Threadless members. Their immersion in the online community serves the company well. The Threadless community is fiercely loyal and very active. They come up with the ideas, pick the ideas they want, buy the products they choose, and tell their friends about the site. That leads to profits.
SUMMER 2011
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MOTION GRAPHICS
On the move with
motion graphics BY TERENCE OLIVER
If you use the Internet, watch TV or go to the movies, you are seeing motion graphics — whether you realize it or not. Motion graphics are visual storytelling techniques that mix words, photos, graphics, video, sound, voice-over narratives and animation to report news and entertain audiences in a fresh, dynamic and clear manner. Nearly every movie or TV show has motion graphics in the title sequence and credits. And I estimate that about 15 minutes of every hour of broadcast television includes motion graphics. I watched an hour of “Celebrity Apprentice” recently to test this theory. Motion graphics were in the opening credits and in a startling 25 out of 30 commercials during the show. But motion graphics today are going far beyond credits and commercials. More and more consumers get their news and information through mobile smartphones and tablet devices, and it is opening up a new frontier for motion graphics designers. My goal is to help my students and the industry use graphics to tell stories effectively on the platforms their audiences are using.
Left: Powering a Nation motion graphic stills. To see the graphic in action, visit poweringanation.org. Credit: Ashley Bennett
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In spring 2011, I taught the school’s first motion graphics course. Students utilized Adobe After Effects to develop motion graphics, enabling them to communicate in some of the most sophisticated, contemporary and effective methods in digital media today. Adobe has taken notice of our work at Carolina, and they are featuring us as a success story in their marketing materials. In fact, the Adobe piece features the school’s first motion graphic — which was developed in 2009 as the centerpiece to the school’s award-winning Powering a Nation multimedia site about U.S. energy use, part of the national News21 experimental reporting project funded by the Carnegie Corp. and Knight Foundation. You can view that graphic and a new one that supports our “Six Words About Energy” campaign at poweringanation.org. Motion graphics command attention and entertain the audience while informing them. They are powerful tools to not only tell a story, but also to make the story much more likely to be seen, heard and shared. Terence Oliver joined the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication as an assistant professor in July 2010. Before coming to Carolina, he taught at the Ohio University School of Visual Communication, Kent State University and the Poynter Institute.
SHAPING THE FUTURE
JEAN FOLKERTS’ TENURE AT CAROLINA Shaping the future When Jean Folkerts took over as dean at the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University administrators and school faculty, alumni and friends asked her to lead the school in a direction that embraced technology and innovation while holding strong to the core values of journalism and scholarly research.
“I came to the school in 2006 with a charge to help the school make a transition to the new, digital media environment, and above all — as a donor and longtime friend of the school told me early in my time here — to ‘take good care of our school,’” Folkerts said. “I hope I’ve done that.”
Folkerts came to Carolina from the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University where, in 2001, she was named Teacher of the Year by the Freedom Forum. Her academic career — which included stints at the University of Texas and Mount Vernon College in addition to GWU — was preceded by professional work as a reporter, freelance writer, magazine editor and assistant press secretary to a Kansas governor. She served as editor of Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly and on editorial boards for other major journals. She also served on the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication’s executive board.
Folkerts’ leadership guided Carolina’s J-school to a major curriculum overhaul; a strong role in the Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education and the News21 project; expanded international programs; significant interdisciplinary and industry partnerships; transformative facilities upgrades; new scholarships, fellowships and professorships; and the Reese Felts Digital News and audience research initiative. “Together with our alumni, faculty, students and staff, I think we have created a climate of constant innovation and a desire to be the best,” Folkerts said.
“Jean is an exceptional, innovative leader in journalism and mass communication education during a time of great change in the media industries.” — Chancellor Holden Thorp
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HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE FOLKERTS ERA
Jan. 9, 2008
2007 Folkerts traveled to 28 N.C. towns and cities and another 13 around the U.S. to meet with alumni and friends to chart the new course for journalism and mass communication education at Carolina.
July 1, 2006 Folkerts became dean of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication and Distinguished Alumni Professor.
Carolina journalism students became the first to collaborate with ESPNU on its Campus Connection program to employ students in game broadcasts. The students helped cover the UNC vs. UNC-Asheville game in the Smith Center.
August 2007 The school’s M.A./J.D. program accepted its first students to the dual degree program with the law school.
March 5, 2007 The UNC Center for Media Law and Policy, a collaborative initiative of Carolina’s J-school and law school, held its first major event — an address by Federal Communications Commission chairman Kevin Martin.
March 27–28, 2008 The symposium “Raising the Ante: The Internet’s Impact on Journalism Education and Existing Theories of Mass Communication” drew 29 leading researchers and practitioners for a lively discussion of new and revised theories that will guide journalism and journalism education in the future.
March 2008 The Carolina News Studio — a partnership between the J-school and University Relations — opened in Carroll Hall to provide faculty and administrators opportunities to share their expertise broadly with TV and radio outlets.
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CAROLINA COMMUNICATOR
JEAN FOLKERTS’ TENURE AT CAROLINA
Shaping the future “She really cares about what you care about … and she’s devoted to solving any problem no matter how big or how small if you come to her.” — Rebecca Putterman, reesenews.org
“Jean did it with intelligence and grace.” — Roy Park Jr., Triad Foundation
Feb. 4, 2009 July 7, 2008 The Carnegie Corporation of New York and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation selected UNC to join 10 other top journalism schools in the Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education to adapt journalism education to the challenges of the news industry.
The school was recommended for re-accreditation from the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (ACEJMC). In its concluding report, the visiting team said the school “has earned a reputation as one of the premier programs in journalism and mass communication.”
July 1, 2009 The school implemented a new curriculum that takes into account changes in the news and communication industries, including the move toward increased use of a wider variety of channels to communicate. The school’s core classes — News Writing, Professional Problems and Ethics, and Introduction to Mass Communication Law — remain the same.
June 2008 The school launched the Carolina del Norte project focusing on the implications of a growing Latino population in North Carolina. Carolina del Norte helped lead to the formation of the Latino Journalism and Media (LATIJAM) project in the school.
Sept. 6, 2009 Carolina journalism students launched an experimental reporting website — poweringanation.org — that explores U.S. energy use. The project is part of the Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education’s News21 project.
August 2008 The school partnered with the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games for 31 Carolina J-school students to travel to China to help cover the games.
Sept. 9, 2009 The school commemorated 100 years of journalism and mass communication education at Carolina during the 2009–10 academic year. The centennial observance began on Sept. 9, the anniversary of the first meeting of UNC’s first journalism course taught by Edward Kidder Graham.
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HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE FOLKERTS ERA
Sept. 24, 2009
March 12, 2010
The journalism programs at UNC and North Carolina Central University partnered with Durham civic and church leaders, volunteers and residents to launch the Northeast Central Durham Community VOICE, a community news publication serving Northeast Central Durham (NECD).
The school increased its focus on the business side of digital media with the creation of a new Knight Chair in Digital Advertising and Marketing, funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
Oct. 1, 2009 Folkerts announced a $4.1 million gift from the estate of UNC alumnus Reese Felts — the largest single gift ever by an individual to the school — to fund an experimental student news project and audience research initiative.
April 26–30, 2010 Oct. 4–5, 2009 The school hosted a meeting of deans from top journalism programs participating in the Carnegie-Knight Initiative.
Raleigh attorney Wade Hargrove was honored with the establishment of an annual media law colloquium at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
CAROLINA COMMUNICATOR
The school hosted the 35th annual Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) Southeast Colloquium in Chapel Hill.
The school partnered with several other organizations to co-sponsor the 2010 World Wide Web Conference (WWW2010) in Raleigh.
Oct. 28, 2009
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March 11–13, 2010
June 11, 2010 The school finished first overall in the Intercollegiate Competition of the 50th annual Hearst Journalism Awards, often called the Pulitzers of college journalism.
JEAN FOLKERTS’ TENURE AT CAROLINA
Shaping the future
Jan. 1, 2011 June 30, 2010
The school accepted applications for the new Master of Arts in Technology and Communication, a master’s degree for working professionals taught entirely online. The first class will enroll in fall 2011.
The school set its record for fundraising — $7.7 million in private gifts — in a year. Since Folkerts became dean, donors established four new distinguished professorships and many new graduate and undergraduate scholarships while the school significantly increased grant applications and research funding.
February 2011 The school announced a new business journalism undergraduate major that will begin in the 2011–12 academic year in partnership with the KenanFlagler Business School.
Sept. 24, 2010 The school dedicated its newly converted high definition television studio, funded with a $400,000 gift from Capitol Broadcasting Co.
April 18, 2011
Nov. 2, 2010
The school announced a new partnership with Bloomberg News in which its editors and reporters will teach a business reporting course in the school.
Pioneering innovative ways of delivering news and information, the school launched reesenews.org, an experimental news website designed to give students multimedia experience and to help small- and medium-sized news organizations better understand consumer uses of media.
Alumni, friends, faculty, staff and students honored Dean Jean Folkerts at an April 9 dinner at the Carolina Inn, thanks to anonymous donors who made gifts to underwrite the event. Ed Vick, chair of the school’s board of advisers, emceed an evening that included remarks by UNC Chancellor Holden Thorp, J-school professor Cathy Packer, and Al May, a colleague of Folkerts’ at George Washington University. Folkerts surprised her husband Leroy Towns — a strategic communication professor in the school — with a gift naming the Leroy Towns Atrium in the school. The dinner included a video tribute to Dean Folkerts. View the video at youtube.com/uncjschool.
“You’ve led the School of Journalism and Mass Communication to new heights. You’ve helped us look over the horizon toward the future of media in North Carolina and the nation. Thank you for your service to our students, to our citizens and to this great state.” — Gov. Bev Perdue SUMMER 2011
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REESE FELTS DIGITAL NEWS
Reese Felts Digital News and audience research project The Reese Felts Digital News project — a signature program of the UNC journalism school’s push into the digital media environment — launched its news site, reesenews.org, in November 2010. The project is funded by a $4.1 million estate gift by Carolina alumnus Reese Felts with a mission to help industries, companies and entrepreneurs create innovative solutions for content, advertising and marketing through student-based research and experimentation.
Reesenews.org attracted more than 300,000 page views from its launch through the close of the spring 2011 semester. In the spring it averaged more than 23,000 unique visitors per month. Each story provides lessons and insights into the dynamics of digital news production, distribution and audience engagement. The Carolina Communicator asked student reporters, designers and programmers to share their experiences with a few stories that found different paths to success.
Staying in Bounds
Projects
by Pressley Baird In June 2010, the NCAA started investigating the University of North Carolina football team, alleging players had improper contact with NFL agents and received impermissible benefits. Yahoo! Sports broke most of the news during the investigation. Newspapers across the state wrote about it. ESPN picked it up. We wondered how reesenews could cover it our own way. We decided to build a game that put the user in the shoes of an NCAA football player. How difficult would they find it to navigate the rules?
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responses, associated NCAA rules, etc., can all be updated using simple text.
REESE FELTS DIGITAL NEWS
a text file (XML) through which the questions, characters, backgrounds,
Staying in Bounds was recognized with the best online sports reporting award from the Society of Professional Journalists — believed to be the first time an interactive game has won in a reporting category.
Return of The Rat by Amanda Ruehlen The Rathskeller project is about the re-opening of a Chapel Hill institution — a restaurant nicknamed The Rat with a rich history and connection to Carolina alumni. It was a natural opportunity for storytelling — and the perfect subject for The game is simple. Users are presented with 10 scenarios and must
a story that would launch at the same time as the reesenews experimental
decide how to handle them. After they make their decisions, they find
news site.
out what they did right and wrong according to NCAA rules. The game hands out a punishment based on any rules violated, and it also shows
We knew the biggest audience for this piece would be decades of alumni
opportunities missed.
with ties to The Rat. We wanted them to be able to experience the excitement and nostalgia of the re-opening from wherever they live and
My work to develop this game meant reading the NCAA’s 434 pages of
work now. And it was an opportunity for reesenews to connect with a very
guidelines. I worked with a UNC compliance officer to make sure the
important market for us.
punishments programmed into the game were realistic. The biggest challenge was making sure the game was applicable to universities other than Carolina. Auburn, Ohio State and other prominent schools were under investigation at the same time, and we knew our work could have value beyond the NCAA’s particular investigation of Carolina football.
Teamwork was the only way to make it work. But I think the biggest reason for our success was the freedom to take chances even if they led to failure — that’s part of the reesenews mission. —Pressley Baird We needed a designer and programmer to make my reporting come to life as the game. Enter Kristen Long, our director of interactive design, and Seth Wright, our multiplatform developer. Kristen made design decisions based on usability and style to create a cohesive package. She was careful to use photos and colors that were not entirely Carolina-specific — reinforcing the idea that our topic was broader than the situation with Carolina football.
We hope other organizations will take our files and create their own versions of this game. I’d like to see how the structure of the game can be applied to different topics. —Seth Wright
We decided to give folks a tour of the restaurant by creating an interactive map out of an iconic image from The Rat’s old menu. It allows viewers to explore The Rat and learn about its past, present and future. We wanted to pay particular tribute to the history and people that are a part of The Rat’s story, so we did one-on-one video interviews with the people that knew The Rat best — its staff. These interviews were rich enough on their own, so they stood alone as the sidebar.
Seth programmed the game to randomly select 10 questions from a bank
We had the interactive map and great video, but there was still a powerful
of questions. He wanted reporters to be able to easily update the game
story yet to be told — and it lent itself to a more traditional form of
and edit the questions even if they lacked programming skills, so he used
journalism. We produced a 2,000-word piece that was a result of 15
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REESE FELTS DIGITAL NEWS interviews, Wilson Library archives, public records, old newspaper articles
an interactive designer and a photographer. This was one of the first
and construction plans.
reesenews stories, and our unofficial story team was something of a preview into how the newsroom would function going forward. Now
Journalism and technology are merging together at lightning speed,
each story starts from the ground up with a tight knit story team of
and technology is constantly evolving. I went into this story as a writer
reporters, designers, programmers, photographers and anyone else
with limited audio, video and graphic skills — but I realized quickly we
who can provide a skill to help tell the story.
needed all of those skills to do justice to the story. I collaborated with
The Hillside Journey by Shane Ryan
I followed the team during the next six weeks as it progressed through the playoffs on its way to the school’s first state championship. The
One weekend in October 2010, I read in the
coaches and players granted me unprecedented access, and I realized
Durham Herald-Sun about a football player
quickly that the Hillside story went much deeper than Vad Lee. At every
named Vad Lee. The descriptions were glowing;
layer, a compelling personality awaited, from the coaches to the players
as a senior quarterback at Durham’s Hillside High, Lee was in the midst
to the community surrounding the team. I wanted to create a local
of an undefeated season. I decided to watch him play the following
sports series that focused on character and drama and narrative. Those
Friday, in Hillside’s last game of the regular season. What I saw was
are the stories I grew up loving, and they were the inspiration behind
a player so dynamic, so electric, so … everything, that I had to write
The Hillside Journey.
about him. Two days later, part one of The Hillside Journey series was published on reesenews.org.
The Hillside Journey series found success in the Durham community. I think that can be attributed to the honesty, humor and drama in the piece. I only knew the principal characters for six weeks, but I felt heavily invested in their success, and I was able to write from a fresh, spectator’s perspective. The reesenews editors gave me carte blanche to tackle the story with my evolving vision for it that would have been difficult to “pitch.” It gave me freedom, and that’s when the best work is done. I think this level of freedom stands in contrast to the experience of many sports writers at daily newspapers today who face increasingly strict limitations. The world is not a simple place, and the PHOTO: JOSH DAVIS
work of those who try to explain it shouldn’t be either.
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The Society of Professional Journalists awarded “The Hillside Journey” the top honor for in-depth reporting in its Region 2 Mark of Excellence Awards.
REESE FELTS DIGITAL NEWS
twitter.com/reesenews facebook.com/reesenews
Reesenews and social media We fully embrace social media tools at reesenews.org. We reach many more readers than we could without using them, and they allow us to more effectively target specific audiences. Social media drive about 26 percent of referrals to reesenews.org. Facebook accounts for about 16 percent. Twitter accounts for about 8 percent. Other social media platforms combine for about
BY NOEL CODY
Our guide to the best practices for live-tweeting appealed mainly to media professionals, so we tweeted directly to influential professionals to promote the piece and to encourage them to share the content. When readers recommend a story to their own network of friends and followers (and so on), a story can go viral within a certain community. This is the online equivalent of word-of-mouth marketing. A relatively new feature in the Facebook metrics and analytics tool allows us to track the number of impressions and click-throughs associated with someone sharing a reesenews story link via their Facebook page. We have only a very small and incomplete sampling of this data to date, but it is showing that a social recommendation of a story is a very powerful thing. On average, a single share of a single reesenews story leads to about 650 impressions and six click-throughs. Again, the data is incomplete at this point, but the bigger message is clear. We’ll be doing more work to refine and understand these metrics.
Rather than just publish links to our stories, we work to make a two-way connection with readers. 3 percent of referrals. For the sake of comparison, search engines (primarily Google) refer about 20 percent of our traffic. One of the most important ways we use social media is to share our own content. However, rather than just publish links to our stories, we work to make a two-way connection with readers. We ask their opinions on the news, and we’ve held specific online events to encourage users to engage — like a gingerbread house competition in which Facebook users voted by “liking” photos. Different stories attract different audiences, and social media allow us to adjust our distribution strategy on a story-by-story basis. Our story, “The Return of The Rat,” about the re-opening of a popular Chapel Hill restaurant, was of great interest to the Carolina alumni audience. So we participated in conversations on Carolina alumni Facebook fan pages to help distribute that story.
Referrer Type Report Legend
Instances
While social media are perfect for reaching many audiences, others simply gather elsewhere online. For instance, the piece about the Hillside High School football team was viewed nearly 1,500 times, but the vast majority of its traffic came from local sports forums. I invite you to take a look at our full metrics reports for both the fall 2010 and spring 2011 semesters. Links to both can be found at reesefelts.org.
Page Views Report
Mon. 10 Jan. 2011–Sat. 23 Apr. 2011
15,000
Page Views
Other Websites Typed/Bookmarked
10,000
5,000
Social Networks Search Engines
% of total
10 14 Jan 2011
18 22
26
30
3 Feb
7
11
15
19
23
27
3 7 Mar
11
15
19
23
27
31
4 Apr
8
12
16
23
Selected Period Graph Generted by SiteCatalyst using Report Accelerator at 12:33 PM EDT, 25 Apr 2011
Graph Generted by SiteCatalyst using Report Accelerator at 8:55 PM EDT, 26 Apr 2011
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REESE FELTS DIGITAL NEWS
WRAL.com’s John Clark to lead Reese Felts Digital News John Clark, general manager of WRAL.com, is joining the Carolina J-school faculty to lead the Reese Felts Digital News project. Clark helped build WRAL.com into one of the most successful local news websites in the nation, growing traffic to more than 1 billion page views last year. He deployed a mobile news strategy and established a strong social media presence for the site, which has won the Edward R. Murrow Award for best broadcast-affiliated website, the Editor & Publisher award for best local TV-affiliated website and a regional Emmy for continuing coverage, among other awards under Clark’s leadership. Dean Jean Folkerts said Clark’s leadership is a significant boost to the journalism school’s digital mission. “He understands the critical importance of audience research to the news industry, and he will build a powerful research infrastructure for reesenews.org,” said Folkerts. “He knows where technology is taking us, and his students are going to shape the future of the mobile news platform.”
“I’m excited to be a part of such a critical project for our industry,” said Clark. “As the Web matures and the mobile world explodes, students in the digital newsroom will develop theories and test them in a practical, real-world environment — and report the findings back to the industry.” “John has always had a passion for teaching, and there is not a better position in the world for a person with his background and experience,” said Jimmy Goodmon, vice president and general manager of the CBC New Media Group that operates WRAL.com. “There is not a better person than John to bring a real world digital newsroom experience to the students of today and our colleagues of tomorrow. UNC and its students will be well served by his experience, his knowledge, his kindness and his passion for helping others grow and learn.”
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PHOTOJOURNALISM
The 37th Frame, Carolina photojournalism’s annual student-run photo contest and exhibit, features the best student work from the past year. This year’s exhibition featured 37 single images — in spot news, general news, feature, sports action, sports feature, portrait, pictorial, illustration and photo story categories — selected from hundreds of submissions. The images were judged by a panel of professional photojournalists from organizations that included The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Virginian-Pilot. The following are some of the images featured in the 37th Frame exhibition.
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Above: Jessey Dearing Eric Tiser, right, a lifelong shrimper from Venice, La., works on his boat with deckhand Marvin Smith, left, after helping a friend (center) get his boat running. Many shrimping areas have been closed due to the BP oil spill. “Everything just got right since Katrina, but where I like to shrimp at is all closed down,” said Tiser, who has been placed on suicide watch because of financial burdens and the stress of losing everything since the oil spill.
Right: Andrew Dye Mari Remiz, 16, lays on ‘her’ corner in Vetia Vienti tres in Buenos Aires. Remiz is one of many youths whose life is consumed by an addiction to Paco, a drug created from the paste left over from cocaine production. Between 2001 and 2005 the number of young Paco addicts in Argentina rose by 200 percent.
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CAROLINA COMMUNICATOR
PHOTOJOURNALISM
Catherine Orr Actor Pablo Mikozzi takes a final smoke break before beginning his one-man show, “Por el Lado Mas Bestia.” Mikozzi is a performer in Buenos Aires’ famous underground theater circuit that is known for intimacy and edginess that can’t be found in larger commercial theaters.
Kevin Ziechmann A green Chrysler is parked on a lawn on Merritt Mill Road in Chapel Hill, N.C., to show off a new paint job.
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PHOTOJOURNALISM
Cristina Fletes Grayce MacDonald, 86, of Franklin, N.C., anxiously awaits her next heat. MacDonald has already won three gold medals in the North Carolina Senior Games in swimming and is hoping to earn a fourth.
Jessica Crabill Emily Thomas of Pittsboro, N.C., gets ready to mount her mustang, Ledoux, for the first time while her father, Jim Thomas, watches.
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CAROLINA COMMUNICATOR
PHOTOJOURNALISM
Margaret Cheatham Williams “There’s not much you can do, except to be there and to love her,” Katie Williams, right, said about her mother, left, who passed away recently after a 13-year battle with Parkinson’s disease.
Brittany Peterson An old barn illuminates at dusk on New Year’s Eve 2010 as the sun reflects off of the snow and onto the clouds as cars pass by.
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RADIO LATIJAM
Radio Latijam una producción de jóvenes latinos y la Escuela de Periodismo y Comunicación Latina and Latino teens in Chapel Hill and Carrboro play music and speak their minds every week in an hour-long, Spanish-language program on WCOM FM 103.5. credit through the University’s APPLES program that builds sustainable partnerships between University students and faculty and N.C. communities. They gain a deeper understanding of Latino life and culture while practicing their Spanish. Katelyn Ferrugia, a Carolina J-school senior, wrote about her work on the radio show with the teens. “They made me feel important and made me realize what an impact I was having on their lives,” she said. “What I don’t think they will ever know is how much they have truly impacted mine.”
It’s called Radio Latijam, and it operates under the guidance of UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication faculty and students. Radio Latijam is one of several projects under the auspices of the Latino Journalism and Media at Carolina (Latijam) program based in the school. Professor Lucila Vargas directs Latijam and forms strategic partnerships with other Carolina departments, local media and other organizations to serve the growing Spanish-speaking communities in North Carolina. Local teens gain valuable media experience through Radio Latijam, and they fulfill service-learning requirements needed to graduate from high school. It connects teens with Carolina students and faculty, fostering friendships and mentoring relationships. The radio show builds on the work of Laura Wenzel, who founded the nonprofit organization Pa’lante in 2003 with local Latino youth and produced Radio Pa’lante, which aired from 2005–2010 on WCOM. Students taking Vargas’ “Latina/o Media Studies” course may choose to volunteer at Radio Latijam and earn service-learning
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CAROLINA COMMUNICATOR
“There is a real need for bilingual journalists and strategic communication professionals who can create culturally sensitive messages,” Vargas said. “Latijam helps to address that need.” Last fall, in conjunction UNC’s Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, and Department of English and Comparative Literature, the journalism school established a Certificate in Latino Journalism and Media to create career opportunities for students in bilingual, English- and Spanishlanguage media.
Find Radio Latijam on Facebook, and learn more about Latino Journalism and Media at Carolina (in English or Spanish) at latijam.jomc.unc.edu. Radio Latijam airs live on Fridays from 5–6 p.m. on WCOM FM 103.5. It also streams live at wcomfm.org.
THE
NEW MEDIA AND POLITICS
New media and politics BY DANIEL KREISS
Daniel Kreiss explores the impact of technological change on the public sphere and political practice. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in political science from Bates College, and he earned both a master’s degree in journalism and a doctoral degree in communication from Stanford University. After working as a postdoctoral associate in law and a fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, he joins Carolina’s J-school faculty in summer 2011.
How has technology impacted participation in electoral politics and civic affairs? To what extent does technology empower citizens to speak in the public sphere? How do political and journalism organizations shape — and how are they shaped by — social media platforms such as Facebook? What are the democratic promises and perils of conducting much of our political, economic and social lives online? These are some of the questions I seek to answer through my research into how technological change interacts with American political and civic life. And I’m exploring many of my findings in a forthcoming book from Oxford University Press — “Taking Our Country Back: The Crafting of Networked Politics from Howard Dean to Barack Obama” — in which I present the largely untold history of new media and political campaigning. Extensive fieldwork during the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections in states from Iowa to Nevada and in-depth interviews with more than 50 political staffers active during three presidential cycles form the backbone of the book.
THE HUFFINGTON POST DRUDGE REPORT
DRUDGE REPORT HUFFINGTON POST
THE HUFFINGTON POST DRUDGE REPORT DRUDGE REPORT THE HUFFINGTON POST
The story begins with a group of young, technically skilled Internet staffers who came together on the Howard Dean campaign for the Democratic nomination in 2004 and created a host of innovations in tools and practice. Dean eventually went down in defeat, but these staffers launched political consultancies and joined other campaigns, carrying their new way of organizing online to many other Democratic organizations, including Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. They helped make history, successfully pioneering the use of new media in politics. Part of my charge at Carolina is to create scholarly and public understanding of new media in politics. My research shows that technology alone is not the primary driver of changes in political practice, and it reveals that networked politics is rarely as radically democratic as many suggest. In the end, elections are still won and lost by campaigns that can use new media to achieve the very old metrics of politics: fundraising and votes. At the same time, citizens have more ways of making their voices heard and helping the candidates they favor. But this does not necessarily mean that they have greater say over policy issues or that politicians are more responsive to their new media-powered constituents. I’m joining the faculty at the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication because there is no better place to study the implications of changes in communication technology. Carolina’s faculty are distinguished scholars; its research and professional programs explore the most important issues in communication and media; and the students are among the most talented and motivated at any university in America.
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INTERDISCIPLINARY HEALTH COMMUNICATION
IHC@UNC promotes effective health communication Effective health communication influences people to make decisions and choose behaviors that are good for their health. It’s a simple concept, but it requires an interdisciplinary approach — the coordination of a wide range of expertise — to do it well. The UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication is at the center of the Interdisciplinary Health Communication (IHC) initiative at Carolina along with the University’s Gillings School of Global Public Health, School of Information and Library Science, School of Medicine, School of Nursing and Department of Psychology. Top faculty at these premier programs are collaborating to build a new science of health communication. They are establishing Carolina as a leader in health communication research and in training a new generation of professional health communicators. Carolina IHC faculty and students are evaluating how people process health information and how they feel about the choices they make. They research e-health, message tailoring, risk communication, health decision making, dissemination, media effects, psychological processes, usability of electronic medical information and health marketing. Every 10 years the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services publishes a report detailing objectives for improving the health of the nation. The most recent report — Healthy People 2020 — was released late last year, and it sets
ambitious goals for health communication and health information technology for the next decade. The report points to social media and emerging technologies that will continue to accelerate communication among peers and to create new platforms and opportunities for health experts to connect with each other and with patients and their families. Social marketing tools and techniques will enable wider distribution of targeted health messages. It’s within that context that Carolina’s J-school has intensified its focus on health communication — and become a destination for some of the top health communication minds in the country. At least four full-time faculty at the school already specialize in health communication, and this year the school welcomes two new experts to the fold — Brian Southwell and Seth Noar (see stories next page). Southwell takes a joint position as a research professor in the school and a senior research scientist at RTI International. Noar accepts a joint appointment to the journalism school and the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. The school has also announced that it will offer a new master’s degree track in interdisciplinary health communication, which builds on a graduate certificate in interdisciplinary health communication that has been offered at Carolina since 2007. For more information, visit ihc.unc.edu.
IHC students manage the vibrant Upstream (upstreamdownstream.org) blog to encourage dialogue and debate on health communication. The name reflects the idea that health communicators sometimes feel like they are moving against a current of misinformation, myths and other barriers to health and well-being. Many believe to get to the source of any given health problem — whether the cause is environmental, socioeconomic or behavioral — they must move upstream.
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CAROLINA COMMUNICATOR
Teen pregnancy prevention
New health communication faculty at the J-school
Jane Brown studies how media affect the
Brian Southwell
sexual knowledge,
I spent nearly a decade
attitudes and behavior
at the University of
of teenagers. She edited
Minnesota trying to
“Managing the Media
spark enthusiasm in large undergraduate courses and serving as director of graduate studies. I found myself needing to refresh my own connections to the
on Teen Sexual Behavior and Attitudes”
traditional and new media to promote healthy
for the National Campaign to Prevent
behavioral changes among individuals and
Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy to inform
communities. This type of research involves
practitioners and program providers about
my students into the world to pursue.
between academic research and applied projects. I’m a research professor at the journalism school, and I’m a senior research
communication program of their social policy, health and economics research unit. At RTI, I develop and oversee national and state-level media campaign evaluations and research projects on topics that include cancer screening, risk counseling for people living with HIV, and the use of emerging smokeless tobacco products, among others. Three themes describe my research interests: the relevance of social networks for mass media campaigns (including both off-line relationships and those facilitated online by social media), the impact of aging on campaign outcomes, and the challenges of addressing and working with low-income populations. I hope to build on that work both at UNC and at RTI, and I look forward to finding new ways to help students do work that benefits society.
understanding and
the most up-to-date research on teens and
applying behavioral
media influence.
theories that help us to
At Carolina, I’m in a position to build bridges
Triangle Park, where I work with the health
of Media (From Television to Text Messages)
My research looks at how we can harness
kinds of jobs and projects I had been sending
scientist at RTI International in Research
Monster: The Influence
Seth Noar
INTERDISCIPLINARY HEALTH COMMUNICATION
Health communication project sketches
understand the behavior
HPV vaccine disparities
change process; testing
Joan Cates addresses racial and gender
message design theories
disparities in human
and frameworks to
papillomavirus (HPV)
best understand what
vaccine acceptability in
types of messages will be most resonant
North Carolina. HPV is the
and persuasive with target audiences; and
most widespread sexually
evaluating interventions in carefully designed
transmitted infection in
randomized trials and quasi-experimental
the United States and can
designs in the field.
lead to several kinds of cancer and genital warts.
A large majority of my research to date has been focused on HIV/AIDS. I have worked on NIH projects developing and evaluating
Substance abuse prevention
televised media campaigns to increase safer
Nori Comello tests the
sexual behaviors. I also have been the principal
effectiveness of messages
investigator on a National Institute of Mental
to prevent alcohol,
Health-funded project testing the ability of a
tobacco and other drug
computer-delivered intervention to increase
abuse. She explores behavioral willingness,
correct and consistent condom use among African Americans visiting an STD clinic.
which describes not what people intend to do, but rather what people are willing to do when
At UNC, I will be doing significantly more
they are in a situation that makes engaging
work in the cancer area, and I look forward
in a behavior an easy, attractive or expected
to collaborating with several colleagues in
choice. For example, if a person decides to quit
the J-school, Lineberger and the Gillings
smoking, but is at a party with friends who
School of Global Public Health. I am interested
are smokers, how willing would he or she be to
in developing and evaluating interactive
smoke in that situation?
interventions like smartphone apps, and broader community-level interventions like
Shaken Baby Syndrome prevention
campaigns to reduce cancer risk factors such as
Heidi Hennink-Kaminski
poor diet and physical inactivity among at-risk
works with researchers
populations in North Carolina.
from UNC, Duke and the University of British Columbia on social marketing campaigns and other tools and strategies to help save infants’ lives by raising awareness of normal infant crying. The project is funded with a grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. SUMMER 2011
29
CIVIL WAR JOURNALISM
WAR STORIES a look at journalism during the Civil War BY FRANK FEE
Journalism changed significantly during the Civil War, owing to heightened reader demand for news, improvements in technology, and innovations in staffing and organizing news organizations. With secession and the onset of war, demand for news was voracious. In North Carolina, firsthand accounts described newspapers being passed along from person to person until they were in tatters. John Kimberly, a UNC chemistry professor during the war, gave a glimpse of one way citizens got war news in 1861: “We manage to get every night a paper published the same morning at Richmond or Petersburg — About eight o’clock every night everybody in town assembles at the hotel to wait for the hack — As soon as it arrives there is a tremendous rush — the paper is seized, the crowd gathers in [sic] the porch of the hotel, and a reader is perched upon a bench to read the news — It is truly a picturesque scene.” To satiate the demand for news, editors gathered news in a variety of ways during the war. Larger newspapers could afford to hire correspondents to cover the armies, filing reports by telegraph and mail. The largest newspapers could even provide correspondents with dispatch riders to speed the news into print. Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside reading newspaper with Mathew B. Brady at Army of the Potomac headquarters. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
William Woods Holden Some of North Carolina’s
peace, even if it meant North Carolina seceding
primary step towards promoting the honor of
leading newspaper editors
from the Confederacy. Holden’s peace agenda
N.C. had they pitched old Holden into the streets
in the Civil War era strongly
and criticism of the Confederate government
and broke his neck instead of his press.”
opposed secession. But
excited passions at home and in the field, and
when the state did secede
he and his newspaper office in Raleigh were
Holden would go on to become governor under
in 1861, these editors put
threatened a number of times. On the night of
the federal occupation after the war and in 1871
their newspapers behind the
Sept. 9, 1863, Georgia troops traveling through
became the first governor in the nation to be
effort — at least for a time.
Raleigh ransacked his newspaper, shutting the
both impeached and removed from office, after
paper for several weeks.
forming a state militia that dealt roughly with
The most controversial editor in North
30
citizens as it enforced civil rights legislation.
Carolina — possibly in the entire Confederacy —
On hearing of the attack on Holden’s newspaper,
was William Woods Holden, proprietor of the
North Carolina Pvt. Jacob H. Hanes wrote his
On April 12, 2011, N.C. state senators pardoned
North Carolina Standard in Raleigh. Despite
brother: “I was verry [sic] much pleased to hear
Holden after convening for a special session in
professing loyalty to the Confederacy in the
of the soldiers making a raid upon old Holden’s
the old Capitol building in Raleigh — the location
early years, by 1863 he stridently argued for
office. It undoubtedly would have been the
of Holden’s conviction 140 years earlier.
CAROLINA COMMUNICATOR
Background images and William Woods Holden lithograph courtesy of the North Carolina Collection, Wilson Special Collections Library, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
war’s end, however, elaborate, multi-element blocks of large bold type were common atop news stories, providing readers key details. Although printing technology was still a few years away to reproduce photographs, wooden engravings provided large and detailed images of battle maps and likenesses of military heroes. Weekly magazines — notably Harper’s Weekly and Frank Leslie’s Weekly — served up elaborate drawings and sketches depicting battlefield valor.
CIVIL WAR JOURNALISM
While road and rail traffic could prove unreliable, editors frequently wrote of events based on information from travelers. Interviews and first-hand accounts became more and more important. Occasionally editors were confounded by conflicting reports by telegraph and from first-hand accounts of travelers. When facts differed, editors sometimes published both.
The paradox for Southern newspapers was that as reader demand surged, resources — particularly cash, paper, advertising revenue and manpower — dwindled. Wartime exacerbated economic pressures on publishers and though some papers enjoyed years of publication, others, such as the Plaindealer in Hillsborough and Raleigh’s Weekly Conservative and Democratic Press, lasted only a year or less.
War news also came from the troops themselves. Newspapers carried letters from soldiers reporting battle action and soldiers seeking to extol or correct misinformation about the battlefield performance of a particular unit. Some editors even arranged for soldiers to write regularly and paid these correspondents small sums. Although not all newspapers could afford the service, the telegraph was a key source of news. As often happened, parallel structures emerged in the South after secession, and news cooperatives — such as the Associated Press in the North and the Confederate Press Association in the South — used the telegraph to speed news to client papers. Coverage also included complete casualty lists with family and friends often learning the fate of loved ones on the battlefields through print. These reports were not always accurate, however. A Hillsborough (N.C.) Recorder account of the Battle of Fredericksburg in December 1862 reported that Confederate Generals Joseph B. Kershaw and John B. Hood had been killed. In fact, Hood died in 1879 and Kershaw in 1894. The paper’s accounts initially gave the loss of Confederate soldiers at no more than 500 killed and 2,500 wounded, and Union losses at 1,000. Later tallies put Union casualties at 13,353 compared with the Confederates’ 4,576. While news gathering and content changed as a result of the war, news presentation also changed to drive readership, particularly among Northern newspapers. In the antebellum period, stories often appeared without headlines. If a headline was offered, often it was a flat, one-line topic identifier. By Above: The New York Herald front page on Nov. 23, 1862, with a map of Fredericksburg, Va., in anticipation of battle. Courtesy of Frank Fee.
As resources such as paper became scarce, many of the South’s newspapers became smaller and less typographically appealing. From full-size bright white pre-war pages, the newspapers ran on half-sheets of exceedingly dingy paper as the war wore on. By 1865, 26 of the state’s papers published in 1861 were out of business.
Inverted Pyramid The inverted pyramid form of a news story — a summary lead followed by subordinate facts in descending order — became common during the Civil War when the telegraph was an important source of fresh news. The form allowed the story to be cut from the bottom without losing the main idea. While historians debate whether it was journalists or the war department that devised it, it remains a lasting influence of Civil War-era journalism.
Frank Fee is a journalism historian and associate professor at the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Students in his “Mass Media and United States History” course researched journalism during the Civil War as part of a class project, and Fee credits those students as his 21 co-authors. They are Will Bocholis, Inaki Iosu Borda Etxeberria, Nicole Brosan, Rachel Coleman, Caitie Forde-Smith, Will Futrell, Jeremiah Gerlach, McKay Glasgow, Robert Grimmett-Norris, Maria Harrigan, Jessica Hayes, Jennifer Joyner, Megan Kennedy, Jacob Klein, Rachel Lewis, Alexander Linder, Emily Lucas, Brittney Ormond, Lisa Pepin, Christina Serrano and Kate Sievers. Fee gave a talk about news in Orange County (N.C.) during the Civil War as part of the UNC library’s commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the conflict. View it at the school’s YouTube channel — youtube.com/uncjschool.
SUMMER 2011
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REFRAMING MEXICO UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication students spent 10 days over spring break in Mexico documenting stories of everyday life. In partnership with journalism students at Tec de Monterrey in Mexico City, the students launched the multimedia website “Reframing Mexico” at reframingmexico.org. The project seeks to reframe thinking about Mexico City and offer a different view than the more prevalent mass media portrayals of Mexico as a hotbed of gang violence, drug trafficking and a struggling
M. Christina Serrano To Fight for My People: Escalated violence in the southern state of Oaxaca has driven the indigenous Triqui people out of their homes and into the streets of Mexico City.
economy that produces illegal immigrants. Students developed a range of stories showcasing the heritage, culture, social issues, people and places that capture the complexity of life in one of the largest cities in the world. The following are some of the images the students collected for the project.
View the stories at reframingmexico.org. Stephen Mitchell A Wrestler’s Dream: No longer the star he once was, Mexican professional wrestler “Cachorro Mendoza” now strives to give back to younger generations. “I never considered myself an idol because idols end,” he said.
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CAROLINA COMMUNICATOR
Daniel Turner In the Moment: Actress Silvia Carusillo hopes to challenge the 60-year dominance of telenovelas and develop a new style of television for the modern Mexican audience. “The people are coming to realize that there are distinct ways to view reality, no longer just one melodramatic way to see it,” she said.
REFRAMING MEXICO
Vanessa Patchett To Overcome: People with a disability face strong social and economic discrimination in Mexico. Luis Antonio Valdez lost his arm after an accident at an industrial laundry facility. “I have many goals. One is to show my children that, in fact, a disabled person can achieve great things,” he said.
Terri Flagg Dark Life: Pamela Ortiz defies common stereotypes about darks (goths) in Mexico City — not that she cares what anyone thinks. “I like to be spontaneous and sincere, just be myself; that’s why I don’t regret anything,” she said.
Megan Camm Free to Love: For a year, Tania Yuridia Granados Monroy waited for a positive pregnancy test. But two months after conceiving, she found herself in Santa Martha Acatitla Penitentiary on kidnapping charges.
SUMMER 2011
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INTERNATIONAL PROGRAMS
Exchanges with top international journalism schools provide unique study abroad experience BY MICHAEL PENNY
Meghan Prichard interned at Peppercom in London as part of an ongoing program of the school. “The international perspective contributed to my understanding of how public relations operates in other countries,” Prichard said. “It was one of the most defining experiences of my life.”
Each year, about 100 Carolina J-school students participate in study abroad programs through the University for academic credit. These students gain valuable insight into other cultures and learn how to communicate effectively in an increasingly interconnected world.
allowing students to take advantage of unique experiences tailored with their interests in mind.”
The school has established study abroad exchanges with four leading journalism and mass communication programs that include Catholic University of Argentina in Buenos Aires; University of Navarra in Pamplona, Spain; Sciences Po in Paris; and City University in London. Students in these programs take classes in reporting, public relations and advertising. The partner schools send students to study at Carolina, creating an opportunity for students in Chapel Hill to meet and learn from their international peers.
“If you are serious about becoming a journalist, I don’t think you can overstate the importance of having international experience,” Gumbel said. “It provides a different and very valuable perspective on everyday life. Once you spend a few months in another nation, you stop taking things back home for granted.”
The school also encourages faculty exchanges with its partners. This spring associate professor Chris Roush traveled to the University of Navarra for a week to teach business journalism while University of Navarra professor Natalia Rodriguez traveled to Chapel Hill to lecture on Spanish public relations. “Our students benefit enormously by having a deeper personal understanding of how the world communicates,” said Louise Spieler, associate dean for professional education and strategic initiatives, who oversees the school’s study abroad programs. “Our exchanges build the school’s global presence while
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CAROLINA COMMUNICATOR
The partnership with Sciences Po, one of France’s premier universities, has been active since 2009. Each spring, J-school students join a small group of journalism students from around the world at the Undergraduate Journalism Program for International Students. The program was established by Peter Gumbel, a former Wall Street Journal and Time Magazine reporter, who now runs Sciences Po’s Center of the Americas.
Students who attend the program explore Paris with notebook and video recorder in hand, investigating French culture and society. Classes are taught by Sciences Po faculty, most of whom are practicing journalists. Students are asked to visit immigrant suburbs to interview residents about living in France, investigate the selection process for world heritage sites at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and meet with Parisian sommeliers to delve deeper into the French wine culture. Nick Andersen, a Morehead-Cain Scholar and double major in journalism and history, attended Sciences Po last year. “I made great connections with journalism students from around the world — China, Russia, Thailand, Australia and others. It showed me many different approaches to journalism,” Andersen said. Sonya Chudgar, one of three J-school students studying at Sciences Po this spring, said the program opened her viewpoint of what being a journalist in the modern world means. “The courses encouraged us to regard how news is presented in America versus the rest of the world,” Chudgar said. “The best class time came when we discussed the differences between American journalism and European journalism, and the impact that freedom and the government has on how people absorb the news.” Michael Penny is the school’s assistant director for professional and international programs.
BY NATASHA DUARTE Should private companies that provide broadband or wireless services be allowed to control the flow of information over the Internet? That is the crux of an ongoing debate about net neutrality in Congress, the Federal Communications Commission and the courts. FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell visited the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication during the spring 2011 semester to talk about net neutrality with media law students and faculty in the school. The term net neutrality refers to the idea that all content on the Internet should be treated equally. When you surf the Web, send an email or stream video, packets of information travel through the Internet. In some cases, Internet service providers (ISPs) might need to slow down certain packets of information in order to manage the flow of traffic on the Internet because some content takes up more bandwidth than others. But the pro-net neutrality concern is that an ISP has the technical ability to speed up, slow down or even drop certain content to advance the ISP’s economic or political interests.
Recent history of
net neutrality
Net neutrality advocates worry about cases
prohibits a service provider from slowing down
like one reported in August 2005 on the Brad
the transmission of content without good reason.
Blog, run by journalist Brad Friedman. The blog reported that Comcast and other email
The FCC has been criticized for not specifically
providers were blocking emails containing
defining what constitutes reasonable and
the term meetwithcindy.org, a website run by
unreasonable discrimination. The December
antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan, whose son
2010 order gives ISPs the flexibility to manage
was killed in the war in Iraq. Comcast did not
“congestion, security and other issues” and
admit to intentionally blocking emails, but Brad
to use business models where customers
Blog posted an update saying that the problem
can pay different rates for faster or slower
stopped after the initial story was posted.
service. It forbids the use of “pay for priority” arrangements, where companies can pay for
In addition to concerns about censorship, such
their content to be delivered faster than their
network practices also raise concerns for
competitors’ content.
publishers and consumers of content on the Web about the lack of transparency in those network
While the transparency rule applies to all
practices. When content loads slowly or a user
broadband providers, the no-blocking and
sees an error message, it is almost impossible
no-unreasonable-discrimination rules apply
to know whether a website or application is
differently to wired and wireless providers.
purposely being slowed down or blocked.
The no-blocking rule is less strict for wireless broadband providers like Verizon Wireless and
In December 2010, the Federal Communications
AT&T, which may not block lawful websites or
Commission approved an Internet nondis-
applications that compete with the companies’
crimination order based on the concept of net
voice and video services. The rule forbidding
neutrality. That order — and even the FCC’s legal
unreasonable discrimination applies only to
authority to regulate broadband providers at
wired ISPs.
all — has met significant resistance in Congress and the courts. The FCC net neutrality order may
The FCC justified issuing different net
not stand, but an examination of the order sheds
neutrality rules for wired and wireless Internet
light on the different positions in the debate.
providers by citing the emerging nature of wireless technology, the opportunities available
The FCC’s order forbids wired broadband
for innovation and the increased competition
April 2010 The U.S. Court of Appeals for
providers like Comcast and Time Warner Cable
among wireless providers compared to fixed-
the D.C. Circuit held that the FCC did not have the legal authority to impose neutrality requirements on broadband providers.
from blocking or unreasonably discriminating
line providers.
against websites or applications. Similar regulations already apply to telephone
During his visit to Carolina, McDowell said most
companies, which are required to process all
FCC votes are unanimous and bipartisan, but
information the same way regardless of who
the net neutrality debate in Washington is split
is making the call or what he or she is saying.
along party lines, with most Democrats favoring
January 2011 Verizon Communications Inc.
The new FCC order gives more freedom to
the new FCC order and Republicans largely
and MetroPCS Communications Inc. sued to overturn the FCC’s net neutrality rules on the grounds that the FCC lacks the legal authority to regulate the private companies that own and operate ISPs.
wireless providers.
opposing it. On the Republican side, opposition
The FCC’s net neutrality rules have three
competitive market forces are more effective
components: transparency, no blocking and no
than government regulation and is part of a
unreasonable discrimination. The transparency
general push for deregulation. Democrats argue
rule requires ISPs to disclose their network
that without government intervention, large
management practices; the no-blocking rule
companies have too much control over the flow
prohibits the blocking of any lawful content;
of information on the Internet.
December 2010 The Federal Communications Commission approved an Internet nondiscrimination order based on the concept of network neutrality.
March 2011 The House Subcommittee on Communications and Technology voted 15–8 to block the net neutrality rules, and the House Energy and Commerce Committee followed suit in a 30–23 vote March 15.
NET NEUTRALITY
Taking sides on net neutrality
to net neutrality is founded in the belief that
and the no-unreasonable-discrimination rule
The debate continues.
SUMMER 2011
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NEWS BRIEFS Students intern in China as part of school program
J-school junior named 2011 Burch Fellow Bryce Butner, a junior journalism and English double major from Burnsville, N.C., will travel to Alaska to document the controversy surrounding a proposed open-pit copper mine as part of the Burch Fellows Program in the College of Arts and Sciences. He was one of six undergraduates selected. Butner also won the Attaway Award given by the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication, in honor of UNC graduate Roy Attaway, a prominent outdoor writer and former editor of Yachting magazine. The award funds travel and expenses for a UNC J-school student who proposes a story or journalism project focused on outdoor recreation.
Park Fellow wins Page Society case study competition Second-year master’s student and Roy H. Park Fellow at the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication Andrea Goetschius won the grand prize in the Arthur W. Page Society’s 2011 case study competition with a case study of the National Football League’s response to medical research on football-related concussions. Her winning case study, “Just a Ding? The NFL Responds to Research on Football-Related Concussion,” examined how the wave of football veterans with degenerative brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy required the NFL to finally acknowledge, and act on, the connection between repeated concussions and the condition.
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CAROLINA COMMUNICATOR
Lauren Ratcliffe, a senior double major in journalism and political science from Charlotte, and Lauren Russell, a junior journalism major from Wilmington, N.C., were selected to intern at China.org.cn in Beijing in summer 2011. Both students edit and report for the news website’s English-language department. The website is part of the Chinese government’s China Internet Information Center.
Park Fellow wins Overseas Press Club scholarship Megan Camm, second-year master’s student and Roy H. Park Fellow, was awarded an Overseas Press Club Foundation Scholarship. She was among 14 aspiring foreign correspondents selected by a panel of leading journalists. Her winning essay described the enduring ethnic conflict between tribes in the northern Congo, seen through the eyes of feuding tribesmen trying to aid a sick child. Camm is pursuing a career in international reporting with a focus on human rights issues in Africa.
Top 40 radio’s Rick Dees delivers spring commencement address Comedian and radio personality Rick Dees, a 1972 UNC Radio, TV and Motion Pictures alumnus, gave the commencement address during the J-school’s ceremony on May 8 in the Dean E. Smith Center. The Rick Dees Weekly Top 40, his internationally s y ndica ted radio show, is heard each weekend by more
than 70 million people around the world. View his commencement address at youtube.com/ uncjschool.
Stevenson named N.C. College Photographer of the Year Arkasha Stevenson, a December 2010 photojournalism graduate, was named N.C. Press Photography Association’s 2011 College Photographer of the Year. In addition to the top student award, Stevenson won Best in Show in the NCPPA’s Pictures of the Year (POY) contest for “Safekeeping,” part of a short documentary at the 2011 Mountain Workshops. John Adkisson, also a December 2010 grad and 2010 NCPPA College Photographer of the Year, was named runner-up as six Carolina photojournalism students took home 19 POY awards.
Cloud recognized by American Copy Editors Society Bill Cloud, who teaches editing at the school, is this year’s winner of the Glamann Award from the American Copy Editors Society (ACES). Cloud was honored for nearly 30 years in the classroom at the school and for his work with ACES since the organization was founded. The annual award recognizes people and organizations that have contributed to the society and the craft. It is named for Hank Glamann, ACES co-founder and a former member of the organ‑ ization’s executive committee.
NECD community news project marks first anniversary with growing support A newspaper and website for residents of Northeast Central Durham is in its second year of operation, thanks to a growing coalition of sponsors and community partners. The NECD Community Voice provides neighborhood news, information and features for area residents. The monthly print version of the Voice
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is distributed to schools, offices, convenience stores, churches and businesses throughout Durham. The website is durhamvoice.org. Last year Capitol Broadcasting Co. (CBC) of Raleigh made a three-year, $15,000 grant to the Voice, and N.C. Mutual Life Insurance Co. of Durham gave $1,500. Other donors, including the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, Scientific Properties, Wolf Camera, Time Warner Cable and The Daily Tar Heel, made gifts to support office space, printing, outreach events and stipends for the Voice’s teen reporters. The Voice was launched in 2009 through a partnership between the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication, N.C. Central University’s journalism program, the city of Durham and local civic, educational and church leaders. Its mission is to mentor community youth, encourage civic engagement and build leadership, writing, photography and technology skills.
Alumna Charles named NABJ Journalist of the Year Jacqueline Charles, a 1994 alumna of the school, was named the National Association of Black Journalists’ Journalist of the Year. Charles is the Caribbean correspondent for the Miami Herald. She has drawn acclaim for her coverage of triumphs and tragedy in Haiti in the aftermath of the devastating 2010 earthquake.
models to make the medium profitable for the news organization. Prior to that, King served as editor of innovations and special projects at washingtonpost.com. He has won awards in the National Press Photographers Association’s Best of Photojournalism competition for video, best use of multimedia and multimedia/photo editing; Pictures of the Year competition for best use of multimedia; and an Eclipse Award for Media from the National Thoroughbred Racing Association for his multimedia coverage of the 2007 Kentucky Derby.
ing issues that are reshaping journalism and mass communication. The program is designed for working professionals with at least three years of communications-related experience. All courses are taught online. Students travel to campus twice: for a two-day orientation in August and for a weeklong summer residency between the first and second years of the program. The deadline to apply for fall 2012 admission is Jan. 1, 2012. More information is at matc.jomc.unc.edu.
Stone Program wins University Diversity Award The Chuck Stone Program for Diversity in Education and Media in the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication won the 2011 University Diversity Award for an academic unit. The awards recognize significant contributions to the enhancement, support and furtherance of diversity on the campus and in the community. Each year the Stone Program attracts a diverse group of rising high school seniors for a one-week residential summer program that immerses the students into writing, research, design, photography, online media and TV news production.
Inaugural M.A. in Technology and Communication class gets 100 percent acceptance rate The school’s new online Master of Arts in Technology and Communication had a 100 percent acceptance rate for its inaugural group of students, who will start their coursework in August.
Washington Post video editor Steven King to join faculty Steven King, editor and director of video at The Washington Post, is joining the faculty at the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication to teach multimedia courses. At The Post, King led a team of video journalists and video editors since July 2010, creating multimedia stories while creating new revenue
“We had a truly outstanding field of finalists for the 20 available places in the program, and paring the list down was extremely difficult,” said Louise Spieler, associate dean for professional education and strategic initiatives, who oversees the program. “The MATC admissions committee was very impressed with our applicants’ qualifications and credentials. We’re thrilled that everyone offered admission is enrolling.” The first class includes four J-school alumni. The MATC is an innovative online master’s degree that focuses on interactive media, the Internet and digital economics, address-
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Nonprofit Org US Postage PA I D Chapel Hill, NC Permit no. 177
the university of north carolina at chapel hill campus box 3365, carroll hall chapel hill, nc 27599-3365
Audrey Whitmeyer-Weathers In the early hours of the morning, a woman walks through an alley just off Franklin Street in Chapel Hill, swinging her apron back and forth, while on her way to work.