Faculty News

COLIN AGUR, along with two Hubbard School grad students, published “Conceptualizing the roles of involvement and immersion in persuasive games” in Games and Culture. The article studied how students responded to a digital game about refugees.

SID BEDINGFIELD, with Kathy Roberts Forde (University of Massachusetts Amherst), co-edited “Journalism and Jim Crow: White Supremacy and the Black Struggle for a New America,” which was published by the University of Illinois Press and centers the press as a crucial political actor shaping the rise of the Jim Crow South.

VALERIE BÉLAIR-GAGNON (with Dr. Nikki Usher) co-edited “Journalism Research That Matters,” which was published with Oxford University Press. The book includes academics and practitioners’ contributions on most pressing and exciting areas for journalism research, from news and data literacy to changing news audiences to shifting business models for news. It provides a blueprint for overcoming the research-practice gap.

DANIELLE BROWN worked with the University of Texas at Austin’s Center for Media Engagement to build a report titled “A Better Way to Tell Protest Stories.” She also won the Vaccine Confidence Fund Grant, in partnership with Indiana University, to find ways social media messaging can help vaccine uptake in communities disproportionately facing disparities during the COVID-19 pandemic. Brown also interviewed CNN’s Abby Phillip during a live, virtual conversation for the College of Liberal Arts.

Colin Agur Sid Bedingfield

MATT CARLSON (with Seth Lewis and Sue Robinson) wrote “News After Trump: Journalism’s Crisis of Relevance in a Changed Media Culture,” which was published by Oxford University Press in October.

ELISIA COHEN, along with Milton Eder and SARA QUINN, worked on a Science Cafe project for the University of Minnesota’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute. The research team also published two articles in the Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved and Journal of Clinical and Translational Science on their research. Find the project at hsjmc.umn.edu/science-cafe.

In November, RUTH DEFOSTER, along with DANIELLE BROWN, spoke at an Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources (IJNR) workshop titled “Environmental Racism + Indigenous Communities.” It was a workshop to teach working journalists to avoid perpetuating bias in coverage of protest and indigenous communities.

In September, CRAIG FLOURNOY was quoted in “White people in the US have long controlled public institutions. Racial progress has paid the price,” one story from a USA Today multimedia series titled Seven Days of 1961, which highlighted pivotal protests during the Civil Rights Movement. The story revealed how educators, lawmakers and the news media have repeatedly blocked racial progress.

GAYLE GOLDEN served on a College of Liberal Arts committee on Recognizing and Rewarding Teaching. She also participated on a panel discussing “What is good teaching and what does it look like?” for the University of Minnesota’s Academy of Distinguished Teachers.

Valerie Belair-Gagnon Danielle Brown

JISU HUH spoke at the Duke Margolis Center for Health Policy Virtual Public Workshop “Informing and Refining the Prescription Drug Promotion Research Agenda,” which was held on Nov. 19, 2021. She discussed emerging trends in online drug promotion, her research on prescription drug promotion on emerging digital media platforms and future research directions and considerations. She also gave a virtual keynote speech to the Annual International Conference of Intelligence Science and Advertising Development, which was held in Shanghai, China, in November. Her speech discussed key trends in computational advertising practice and research and future directions in emerging artificial intelligence advertising. In December, she gave a keynote speech at the Korean Association of Advertising and Public Relations Special Seminar on Media Audience and Advertising Measurement, held in Seoul, Korea. She discussed the current trends, issues and challenges in media audience and advertising measurement in today’s increasingly complex and fragmented and constantly changing media environment, and proposed best practice recommendations.

Last fall, MARK JENSON’s Campaigns class client was Totino’s Pizza Rolls from General Mills. Four teams worked since early September and presented their final presentations to the client on Dec. 13. The challenge was to develop a complete IMC plan to help Totino’s Pizza Rolls reach their young target audience. The client, Alyx Svatek (B.A. ’14), said, “I was so excited for this experience because it was an opportunity to give back to and be involved with the School while working with the next class of creative marketers on a fun, real-life project. I was so impressed with the

Matt Carlson

Elisia Cohen

Ruth DeFoster

Craig Flournoy

Gayle Golden

Jisu Huh

Mark Jenson Sherri Jean Katz Jane Kirtley Scott Libin

Regina McCombs

Scott Memmel

Rebekah Nagler

Adam Saffer

Claire Segijn creative and strategic thinking that the students exemplified through their final presentations.” Jenson’s Ad Strategy/ Creative Development class final project was for a local company, Mr. Fuzz’s Fiery Foods. Five teams made their final project creative presentations to the client on Dec. 13.

JENNIFER JOHNSON’s Advertising Portfolio Development course ended its fall semester with critiques from 14 advertising professionals. The professionals gave one-on-one critiques to students over Zoom or in person on Dec. 13 and 15. Half of the professionals graduated from the U with a degree from the Hubbard School.

SHERRI JEAN KATZ gave the following conference presentations: “Middle School Youth and Vaping Flavor Presentation: Risk, Novelty, and Susceptibility” at the Tobacco Regulatory Science Meeting, Oct. 18-20, 2021; “Vaping Flavors and Flavor Representations: A Test of Youth Risk Perceptions and Novelty Perceptions” for the Communication Science, Health, Environment and Risk Division at the Association of Educators of Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) conference in August; and “Parental Misperceptions of Youth Vaping” for the Health Communication Division at the National Communication Association (NCA) annual conference in November.

JANE KIRTLEY wrote two articles for The Conversation, one about the FBI raid on Project Veritas titled “Project Veritas and the mainstream media: Strange allies in the fight to protect press freedom” and one about CNN and Chris Cuomo, titled “How dual loyalties created an ethics problem for Chris Cuomo and CNN.” “Revisiting the requirements of Hutchins: context and coverage in the post-George Floyd world” published in The Routledge Companion to Journalism Ethics. Libin led a session on “Which Words: Covering with Caution” at the September convention of the Radio Television Digital News Association in Denver.

REGINA MCCOMBS led the curation and judging of “Documenting a Reckoning: The Murder of George Floyd” (see page 18), a photojournalism exhibit, which is on display at the Elmer Andersen Library through March 4, 2022 and then moves to the Mill City Museum on March 14, 2022. She also facilitated a two-day photojournalism workshop with the U.S. Embassy in Brunei Darussalam. The workshop aimed to provide insights for participants to tell better stories using images and boost collaboration among journalists in Brunei and Malaysia.

SCOTT MEMMEL received an Honorable Mention Teaching and Mentoring Award for the 2021 University of Minnesota Postdoc Awards as part of National Postdoc Appreciation Week. The award was made during the Office of Postdoctoral Initiatives Postdoc Welcome Event. Very few of these awards are given, and Memmel was the only postdoc outside of the hard sciences to receive one. Director Elisia Cohen nominated him for this award.

REBEKAH NAGLER published the central results of her recent NIH-funded study “Effects of prior exposure to conflicting health information on responses to subsequent unrelated health messages: Results from a population-based longitudinal experiment,” in Annals of Behavioral Medicine. Collaborators on this work were Professors Rachel Vogel (Obstetrics, Gynecology & Women’s Health), Sarah Gollust (Health Policy & Management), Alex Rothman (Psychology) and Marco Yzer (Hubbard School).

ADAM SAFFER made a list of most published scholars in communication for 2021. He published “What influences relationship formation in a global civil society network? An examination of valued multiplex relations” in Communication Research. He also spoke at the noRth conference in September about visualizing data.

CLAIRE M. SEGIJN collected eye-tracking data in the renovated lab on the third floor of Murphy Hall last semester for her project on synced advertising and digital literacy together with Hubbard School Ph.D. candidate Eunah Kim, Hubbard School Ph.D. student Chloe Gansen, and Design Ph.D. student Garim Lee. The research is funded by the Grantin-Aid from the Office of the Vice President for Research at the University of Minnesota. She also published a literature review on personalization transparency and control in the special issue “Algorithmic Systems in the Digital Society” of Media and Communication, which was co-authored by Joanna Strycharz (University of Amsterdam), and Amy Riegelman and Cody Hennesy (UMN Libraries).

CHRISTOPHER TERRY published “We didn’t stop the fire: Media ownership policy after FCC v. Prometheus Radio Project” in the Hastings Communications and Entertainment Law Journal. He also appeared in a Scientific American documentary called “Starlink, Elon Musk, and the Promise (and Perils) of Internet from Space” talking

Christopher Terry Benjamin Toff Marco Yzer

about broadband.

In November, BEN TOFF was a keynote speaker at a German conference organized by Media in Cooperation and Transition. He also published “Depth and breadth: How news organizations navigate trade-offs around building trust in news,” the fourth in a series of studies from the Trust in News Project, a research initiative he leads with a team of researchers at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford.

EMILY VRAGA, along with Stephanie Edgerly, won the 2020 Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly Outstanding Article Award for their paper “News-ness as an audience concept for the hybrid media environment,” which was published in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly. She also won the 2021 Article of the Year award from the Communicating Health, Science, Environment, and Risk division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) for “Testing the effectiveness of correction placement and type on Instagram,” which was published in the International Journal of Press/Politics. Both awards were presented at the 2021 AEJMC conference in August.

MARCO YZER, along with several co-authors including REBEKAH NAGLER, published “Effects of culturally tailored smoking prevention and cessation messages on urban American Indian youth” in Preventive Medicine Reports and “Effects of prior exposure to conflicting health information on responses to subsequent unrelated health messages: Results from a population-based longitudinal experiment” in the Annals of Behavioral Medicine.

DIVERSITY FELLOWS FOR 2021-2022

The following professionals joined Hubbard School courses throughout the year to engage with students and offer expertise in areas from ethics and radio production to beat reporting and advertising strategy.

Matt Belanger, morning anchor, KSTP Daniel Pierce Bergin, executive producer, TPT Harry Colbert, managing editor, MinnPost Jerry Holt, staff photographer, Star Tribune Van Horgen, founder & CEO, Superhuman Mukhtar Ibrahim, founder, Sahan Journal

Jafra Johnson, social media ads strategist, Hubbard Interactive Nina Moini, reporter, MPR News Maria Pazos, planning director, Carmichael Lynch Marsha Pitts-Phillips, founder, MRPP & Associates Communications LLC Anjula Razdan, digital director, Experience Life Erica Swain, IT communications manager, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion & Digital Equity Advocate, Minnesota IT Services Nancy Yang, senior editor for audience engagement, Star Tribune