LEARNING
GRADUATE STUDENT NEWS Christopher Terry
Matthew Weber
CHRISTOPHER TERRY published a
Benton Foundation op-ed on the FCC’s Supreme Court petition in the Prometheus Radio Project cases, and had an article about the cases accepted for publication in the Federal Communications Law Journal.
BENJAMIN TOFF and Ph.D. student
Nicholas Mathews have embarked on a large-scale study of social media engagement with local and community news, which involves examining 2.4 million Facebook posts made over a two-year period by news organizations in three states (Arizona, Minnesota, and Virginia). The project, which was proposed for a special issue of the journal Digital Journalism, will assess different factors believed to be fueling the crisis facing local news by testing how ownership, audience demographics, and the platform itself are impacting engagement patterns online.
EMILY VRAGA received the Sharon
Dunwoody Early Career Award from her alma mater, the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She also published an analysis of correction behavior on social media regarding COVID-19 in The Washington Post in May.
MATTHEW WEBER published a new
article in Digital Journalism that examines new models for supporting local news, and examines how some states are taking action to provide aide to the industry. In addition, Weber was the keynote speaker at the WARCNet kickoff conference in Aarhus, Denmark. He gave a virtual keynote about the importance of media archives as a research tool in the current media environment.
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MURPHY REPORTER ❙ Summer 2020
JONATHAN ANDERSON received
the top student paper award in the History Division at the 2020 AEJMC Southeast Colloquium for his paper “Adjudicating press freedom: Legal dimensions of the Minnesota News Council.” He also presented a paper in the Law and Policy Division titled “The right to know about the right to stay: Access to information about immigration courts.”
MICHELLE CHEN will join Brock
University (St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada) as an assistant professor.
MARY CORNELIUS was named
communications specialist for Minnetonka Public Schools.
CHUQING DONG will be joining the
faculty at Michigan State University's College of Communication Arts and Sciences as an assistant professor.
YUMING FANG received a Human
in Data Fellowship from the Digital Arts, Sciences, and Humanities (DASH) program, which supports faculty and students looking to employ digital methodologies and technologies in their research, engagement, and teaching, for her research “Empowered social bots: Content analysis of bots-created anti-vaccine information on Twitter.”
NICHOLAS MATHEWS’ paper “Life
in a news desert” about the study of how a Central Virginia weekly newspaper's closure impacted its community residents won top student paper award for the Journalism Studies Division of the International Communication Association's annual conference in May 2020.
SCOTT MEMMEL was awarded the
Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication Ralph D. Casey Dissertation Research Award, the highest honor a graduate student in the School can earn. He was also named a postdoctoral associate in the Hubbard School.
FERNANDO SEVERINO will be joining the faculty at California State University Dominguez Hills as a tenure track assistant professor.
ALLISON STEINKE virtually pre-
sented two papers at the 2020 International Communication Association Conference: “A voice for the voiceless: Social justice, emotions and the detached journalist” with co-author Valerie Belair-Gagnon; and a solo-authored paper, "Prosecution, protection, prevention and partnership: The strategic ritual of emotionality in sex trafficking news media coverage.”
SARAH KAY WILEY’S paper “Identity, autonomy, and press freedom in computational journalism” won the top student paper award for the Journalism Studies Division of the International Communication Association's annual conference in May 2020.
