SCHOLARSHIP & ENGAGEMENT FACULTY NEWS

Don Allen

COLIN AGUR published “Newly minted: Non-fungible tokens and the commodification of fandom” in New Media & Society.

The University of Minnesota Student Veterans Association (SVA) appointed DON ALLEN as their new faculty advisor. The SVA is a student-led veterans group that supports the veterans of our country’s military services, and the goal is to help student veterans smoothly transition from servicemember to scholar.

SID BEDINGFIELD’s latest book has received an award from the American Historical Association (AHA). Journalism and Jim Crow: White Supremacy and the Black Struggle for a New America, a collection of research essays co-edited by Bedingfield and Kathy Roberts Forde, won the Eugenia M. Palmegiano Prize for the best book on journalism history published in 2021. The AHA honor follows similar awards from the American Journalism Historians Association and the Association of Education in Journalism and Mass Communication History Division.

VALÉRIE BÉLAIR-GAGNON was on sabbatical during the fall semester working on an edited book titled Happiness in Journalism, which explores experiences, concepts, methods and best practices for journalism well-being.

DANIELLE BROWN presented the LIFT project at the Knight Foundation’s Informed Conference in November 2022. The conference brings together key leaders and experts to engage around the biggest questions at the intersection of technology, media, and democracy. The LIFT project seeks to mitigate the harm of dishonest, misinformed, and incomplete narratives amplified by the news media by circumventing systems through trusted messengers in Black communities. This solutions-based project currently centers on the perspectives, experiences, and dynamics of Black communities. A public report of the findings from research in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area will be released in April 2023.

DANIELLE BROWN and RUTH DEFOSTER presented their paper “How memorable is Black Lives Matter? Predictors of perceived and salient memories about Black civil rights protests” at the Southern Political Science Association conference in Florida in January.

MATT CARLSON has published two recent journal articles. He is co-author with Nikki Usher of “Journalism as historical repair work: Addressing present injustice through the second draft of history” appearing in the Journal of Communication, and co-author with Hubbard School Ph.D. student Andrew Locke of the Journalism Studies article, “How news organizations sell native advertising: Discourses of integration and separation on in-house content studio web sites.” He is also the author of the book chapter “Journalists, epistemology, and authority” in the Routledge Companion to News and Journalism.

GAYLE GOLDEN wrote an op-ed for the Star Tribune called, “Rumors of Minnesota Daily’s death are exaggerated.” She also serves as co-chair of the Women’s Faculty Cabinet.

In August 2022, JISU HUH served as a visiting scholar at the University of Melbourne in Australia. Her visit was funded by the University of Melbourne’s Dyason Fellowship and

University of Minnesota’s Global Programs & Strategy Alliance International Travel Grant Fund. During her visit, she gave public lectures in the School of Culture and Communication and offered a public webinar involving both University of Minnesota and University of Melbourne’s scholars and graduate students under the title of “Computational Strategic Communication Research in the Data-Driven World.” During the visit, she also worked on multiple research projects with faculty members at the University of Melbourne and developed a collaborative research grant proposal. Huh’s research proposal developed in collaboration with Wonsun Shin (Ph.D. ’10) at the University of Melbourne, Australia, titled “Privacy and trust equilibrium of personalized social media ad acceptance,” has been selected for funding by Meta Platforms, Inc., under Meta’s 2022 People’s Expectations & Experiences with Digital Privacy RFP. This award comes with an unrestricted research grant of more than $100,000.

MARK JENSON was elected to the National Executive Education Committee (NEEC) of the American Advertising Federation (AAF). He also moderated a panel on “State of DEI Efforts in the Agency Business” in December 2022.

SHERRI JEAN KATZ published “Vaping flavors and flavor representation: A test of youth risk perceptions, novelty perceptions, and susceptibility” in Nicotine and Tobacco Research.

JANE KIRTLEY took part in the closing debate at the Media Law Resource Center’s London Conference 2022: International Developments in Libel, Privacy & Free Expression Law, on

Sept. 20, 2022. She was teamed with KC Gavin Millar to argue against the proposition: The Internet Has Failed Us As A Society. She filed written comments with the Minnesota Supreme Court prior to their Sept. 20 hearing on whether to revise the Minnesota General Rules of Practice to expand media camera access to Minnesota courts. She had previously provided written and live oral testimony to the Supreme Court Advisory Committee for the Rules of Criminal Procedure on Feb. 25, 2022. The committee report recommended making no changes in the current rules, which restrict camera access to criminal trials and require the consent of all parties.

On Oct. 20, 2022, MARÍA E. LEN-RÍOS served as a panelist on a webinar series “Race in the Classroom.”

The session was titled “Making a Difference: How Hispanic Scholars and Practitioners Strengthen PR.” Event sponsors included the Institute for Public Relations, the PRSA Educators Academy, and The University of Texas at Austin’s Moody College of Journalism. On Nov. 17, 2002, Len-Ríos served as a discussant on a panel at the National Communication Association conference session titled “Public Relations Research Then and Now: Lessons from Leading Scholars on Building the Future of Public Relations and Strategic Communication” featuring prominent theorists Glen Cameron (Missouri), James E. Grunig (Maryland), Robert L. Health (Houston), and Maureen Taylor (Sydney).

SCOTT LIBIN led a session on Navigating Intergenerational Newsrooms at the September convention of the Radio Television Digital News Association (RTDNA) in Indianapolis. He also facilitated an ethical decision-making exercise on Grappling with Conflicting Values for the Minnesota Library Association at its October convention in Duluth. Libin wrote the sections on Activities, Thinking About Media Literacy, and Questions for Discussion and Critical Thinking in the newly published 8th Edition of Media Today: Mass Communication in a Converging World

REGINA MCCOMBS spoke virtually with the Women’s Leadership Academy for YSEALI nations, a hybrid conference held at the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok, Thailand, on Storytelling for Nonprofits and NGOs in August. She also spoke virtually on Cross-Media Storytelling for a program on multimedia journalism put on by the Media Institute of the Caribbean in September, and had one-on-one sessions with journalists from around the Caribbean. McCombs moderated an afternoon session with a group of international photojournalists for a U.S. State Department’s International Visitor Leadership Program put on by Global Minnesota in September. In October, she started a video training program for MPR News, and served as their photo editor on election night. McCombs’ students had the chance to have photos published in the MPR News galleries that night.

SCOTT MEMMEL was nominated for the College of Liberal Arts’ 20222023 Arthur “Red” Motley Exemplary Teaching Award.

REBEKAH NAGLER published an article titled “Vulnerability to the effects of conflicting health information: Testing the moderating roles of trust in news media and research literacy” in Health Education & Behavior. Collaborators on this research included Marco Yzer, Rachel Vogel (medicine), Sarah

Gollust (public health), and Alex Rothman (psychology).

AMY O’CONNOR received a Grant-InAid for more than $36,000 from the University of Minnesota Office of VP for Research for her research on the Iron Range mining communities called “Mine Life: Communication, Work and Identity.”

HASEON PARK had a paper accepted recently for a presentation at the 2023 annual conference of American Academy of Advertising titled “A cross-cultural study of consumer engagement through social media influencers on Twitter: A computational comparison of American and South Korean influencers.” In the paper, Park and co-authors conducted computational analyses including social network analysis plus textual analysis to compare different engagement patterns among influencers and consumers from the U.S. and South Korea.

HYEJOON RIM published “Consumer responses to corporate social responsibility communication from stigmatized industries: E-cigarettes and consumers’ use of persuasion knowledge” in the Journal of Marketing Communications and “Triadic public-company-issue relationships and publics’ reactions to corporate social advocacy (CSA): An application of balance theory” in the Journal of Public Relations Research.

ADAM SAFFER was invited to serve on the 2022 Bob Heath Award Committee for the International Communication Associations’ Public Relations Division to select the top article in the field. He also serves on the editorial boards for the Journal of Advertising and the Journal of Public