October 2007
Upcoming Events | SJMC Media Hits | Awards and Kudos |
Publications, Presentations, and Research | Murphy Hall Happenings
Emerging Digerati
Monday, November 5
5:30-6 p.m. social time and free pizza
6-7:30 p.m. Showcases
Digital Technology Center, Room 401, Walter Library
Program will feature:
The UnConvention: A Counterpoint to the Contemporary U.S. Presidential Nomination Process
By Daniel Gumnit, Executive Director, Intermedia Arts
The UnConvention is a unique project that seeks to evolve the definition of civic engagement to include experimentation in art, education, and journalism, and to create a better-informed and more politically active citizenry. Over the next year and a half, organizations affiliated with the UnConvention will host lectures, workshops, classes and exhibitions based on the theme of participatory democracy. http://theunconvention.com/
Leveraging and Critiquing Emerging Forms of Political Media
By Jude Higdon, Instructional Technology Support Team Coordinator, CLA-OIT
Web 2.0 technologies hold great promise for teaching and learning, but meaningful implementations in the classroom can prove elusive. Last year, students in a comparative political media class at the University of Southern California, learned both to produce with and critique the uses of a suite of emerging media technologies including blogs, wikis, podcasts, del.icio.us, and YouTube videos. By juxtaposing production of their own media messages using new media tools with more traditional academic critique of those tools, students became increasingly sophisticated in both their consumption and understanding of emerging forms of political media.
Join the cool kids for this year's Emerging Digerati series.
Sponsored by the Institute for New Media Studies and the Digital Technology Center.
Students to host benefit concert
The students in Section 2 of Jour 3745 will be hosting a benefit concert on December 7 from 7pm to 9pm in 130 Murphy. There will be three musical acts: (1) Cedar Avenue, (2) Breanne Durenberger and Will Hutchinson, and (3) musicians from the band Romantica will be playing an acoustic set. Audience members will "purchase" their tickets by pledging to volunteer for one of three local environmental clean-up activities in the spring: the Friends of the Mississippi spring river clean-up, the Midtown Greenway Coalition's greenway clean-up, or Beautiful U Day. The class marketing team will be "selling" tickets to the concert in SJMC classes as well as out in the community. To obtain tickets, email Mark Pedelty.
Chris Ison was interviewed on WCCO-AM’s Mondale and Jones show on Sept. 19 discussing the impact of a judge’s order removing Star Tribune Publisher Par Ridder from his job. Ison also was interviewed by WCCO-AM news reporter Steve Murphy concerning the Ridder case.
Gary Schwitzer was a guest on the HealthRadio.Net talk show, talking about how health journalists who act as zealots promoting screening tests may do more harm than good. Schwitzer was also interviewed by the Argus Leader in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, for a story headlined "KSFY, Avera partner to air health segments: Experts question whether it's really news or something else." Schwitzer was also a guest on the Minnesota Public Radio Midmorning program, discussing the state of health journalism. Schwitzer was interviewed in a Bloomberg News story, "Archer Daniels Study Finds No Link on Soda, Obesity."
Silha Center Director Jane Kirtley was quoted in the Gainesville (Fla.) Sun on Sept. 21, in a story headlined "1st Amendment ad campaign proposed." She was interviewed by SJMC graduate Jim Hammerand for a story for ABC News about the libel implications of a Web site, RottenNeighbor.com. She was also quoted in Technology Daily on Sept. 24, 2007, in "Bloggers are Sued as Congress Weighs Protections." She also was interviewed for a segment on political blogs which aired on KSTP's Channel 5 Eyewitness News on October 3, 2007 and was quoted in the Pioneer Press article "Ridder ordered out as Star Tribune publisher."
INMS Director Nora Paul was interviewed by Jean Hofensberger for a story in the Star Tribune on computer games for change that address social issues. The article ran in the Sunday, October 14 edition. In September, the INMS New Media Research Conference was featured on WCCO Radio's Rash Report. John Rash interviewed Steve Jones, the keynote speaker for the conference.
Award-winning NSAC team is the talk of the town
Members of the 2007 award-winning NSAC team were the featured guests at the American Advertising Federation's fall conference "Discovering Today's Advertising Talent" in New York. The team presented its "Together" campaign, which was praised for it's thorough analysis and creative strategy. Andrea Brown, Director, Strategic Media Planning for Coca-Cola North America said of the team's campaign, "The University of Minnesota team presented a campaign that is dynamic, creative and inspiring. It is a campaign that is clearly 'Coca-Cola'."
SJMC faculty awarded major grant from National Institute on Drug Abuse
Marco Yzer & Angus MacDonald (psychology) [Principal Investigators] with Ron Faber, Monica Luciana (psychology) and Kathleen Vohs (marketing) as co-investigators have been awarded a major grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (up to $1.1 million over three years) for research examining how adolescents and young adults process anti-marijuana messages.
The three-year project, titled The Neuroanatomical Basis of Anti-Drug Media Messages: the Impact 
of Effectiveness and Risk Factors,
will employ four studies. One study selects
existing anti-marijuana PSAs (video format) using a perceived effectiveness evaluation dimension. In a next experimental study we test whether perceived effectiveness predictably correlates with known determinants of marijuana use. A third study (also) uses physiological measures to obtain real time evaluations of the PSAs to determine the best evaluation dimension for our final study. For that fourth study participants will undergo an MRI scan. They will watch PSAs that the first studies suggested to be either effective or ineffective while in the scanner, and evaluate each PSA using a joystick.
Only a handful of studies have attempted to use brain imaging to explain communication processes.
According to Professor Yzer, "this project is a pioneering study in its integrative approach; we will identify and then correlate brain activity in certain regions with communication measures to advance our understanding of why PSAs have the effects (or non-effects) they do."
Congratulations to Professors Yzer, Faber and their colleagues on this major research opportunity and achievement.
Congratulations to the following SJMC students who won Emmy nominations this year!
Erich Schaffhauser - "Poo Power"
A report on how farmers are turning cow manure into electricity
Miyong Kim - "Facebook"
A report on how campus police are using Facebook and My Space in their criminal investigations
Jennifer Hoff - "Silvera's Widow"
A report on the widow of a police officer, one year after his death in the line of duty.
Ken Stone was the faculty adviser for all three students.
Brian Southwell has been invited to join the editorial board of Science Communication.
Graduate student Wonsun Shin won the Top Student Paper Award (1st place in the Jung-Sook Lee Student Paper Competition) in the Communication Technology Division of Annual Conference of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) held in Washington D.C. in August 2007. The paper title is "Perceived Credibility of Job Search Sites and Users' Intention to Post Resume." She also received Kappa Tau Alpha Research Award as an author of the best student paper.
Stacey Kanihan and Kathleen Hansen have been awarded a grant from the Page Center at Penn State University for a project titled, “Commitment to Social Responsibility and the Role of Communication Managers in the Executive Elite.” They will receive $7,000 for the 2007-08 year to conduct this research, which includes a survey of S&P 500 corporations to examine the relationship between organizational power structure and a firm’s social responsibility efforts. Graduate student Sara Blair, whose research interest includes gender roles and corporate responsibility, will be assisting with this project
Dona Schwartz's work is featured in the Spectra '07 National Photography Triennial at Silvermine Guild Art Center in New Canaan, Conn. This triennial exhibition of photography was juried by Peter MacGill of Pace/MacGill Gallery, NYC. A portrait from "On the Nest" was chosen for inclusion. 1400 photographs were submitted and 136 were chosen for the exhibition. The show will open on October 14 and run through November 17. The Kinsey Institute at Indiana University has acquired a photograph from her Sanctioned Sex series for its permanent collection. It's currently included in the exhibition, "Kinsey Confidential," at the Kinsey Institute Gallery, August 27-December 21. Her work is also featured in the July/August issue of Camera Arts and the August issue of 10,000 Arts, Minnesota's Creative Quarterly.
Gary Schwitzer spoke at the 2007 FOCUS conference, an international conference on public trust and research in humans, in Ottawa, Ontario. His talk was titled "Misplaced Priorities in the Coverage of Health and Medical News." Schwitzer also spoke to the Minnesota Department of Health Media Advisory Network. He also addressed the Foundation for Informed Medical Decision Making annual medical editors meeting in Jackson Hole, Wyo. Schwitzer got his grant renewed for the Health News Review Web site by the Foundation for Informed Medical Decision Making. In three years, he has received more than $330,000 in grant support for this project.
Director of the Institute for New Media Studies Nora Paul gave a talk on evolving audience expectations at the Communications Media Management Association regional conference in September. She also gave a talk on digital storytelling forms at the Journalism and Women Symposium conference in Door County, Wisc. She continues to write a monthly column for Online Journalism Review on digital design and usability issues for online news with co-researcher Laura Ruel.
Jane Kirtley was an invited participant at the Media Law Resource Center London Conference, held Sept. 17-18, 2007 at Stationers' Hall in London, where she took part in roundtable discussions about international developments in libel, privacy, newsgathering and new media law. The following week, Kirtley appeared at the Florida FOI Summit marking the 30th Anniversary of the Brechner Center for Freedom of Information at the University of Florida in Gainesville on Sept. 20 and 21, 2007. She appeared on a panel, "Hit the Ground Running: FOI Advice from the Experts" on Sept. 20 and delivered a lecture, "Windows on the World: A Global Perspective on FOI" on Sept. 21.
Daniel Sullivan (adjunct instructor) delivered a paper, "On Seeing Ghosts at the Monte Cristo Cottage," at the O'Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Conn., Oct. 13. The Monte Cristo Cottage was Eugene O'Neill's vacation home as a boy and is the scene of his "Long Day's Journey into Night." As director of the Center's National Critics Institute, Sullivan spent two summers at the cottage.
Mark Pedelty and two University of Minnesota undergraduate researchers, Desdamona Racheli and Pete Noteboom, presented a paper titled "Music as Strategic Communication: Popular Music and Social Movements" at the Midwest Popular Culture Association (MPCA) annual conference, Friday, October 12, in Kansas City. Pedelty's "Musical News: The Journalistic Role of Popular Music in Political Movements," was the subject of the European Association of Social Anthropology (EASA) Media Anthropology Network's E-Seminar in September. Henry Wasserman, journalist and Lecturer in Media, Communication and Cultural Studies at Newcastle University, served as the discussant.
Jisu Huh's paper titled "Presumed Influence of Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) Prescription Drug Advertising on Patients: The Physicians' Perspective," co-authored with SJMC doctoral student, Rita Langteau, was published in the Fall issue of Journal of Advertising.
Another paper titled "Do Consumers Believe Advertising is Negatively Affected When Placed Near News Perceived as Biased?," co-authored with Dr. Leonard N. Reid, will appear in the Fall issue of Journal of Current Issues and Research in Advertising which will be out later this month.
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Golden Valley police Sgt. Nate Gove was a guest in Chris Ison's Intermediate Reporting class on Sept. 27. Gove talked about open and closed police records and effective source-building on the police beat.
Tom Horner, principal of the Himle/Horner public affairs agency, spoke to the Jour 4731H Senior Honors Seminar about pro-social message strategies.
In late September and early October, Maria Verven of Dexma, and Jon Siess of Minnesota Department of Human Services, guest-lectured in David Therkelsen's class, Jour 3202, Strategic Communication.
Gayle Golden's Jour 3121 had the following guest lecturers in September: Mark Anfinson, lawyer with the Minnesota Newspaper Association; Dave Johnson, chief of police in Blaine; Emily Gurnon, courts reporter for the St. Paul Pioneer Press.
Jacqueline Mclean from FOX 9 gave a guest lecture in Brian Southwell's Jour 1001 class.
Leyla Kokmen's Magazine Writing class (Jour 3713W) welcomed several guest speakers last month. Kate Seitz, editor of St. Paul Illustrated, and Valerie Tukey, a staff writer with Metropolitan Media Group, came to talk about internship opportunities with the group's 15 community lifestyle magazines. Ethan Boatner, managing editor of Lavender magazine, also visited the class.
The SJMC is hosting visiting Korean scholar, Hwa-Young Kim. She will be here for one year to work with Assistant Professor Jisu Huh on several research projects in the interactive advertising research area. Kim is the Director of Media Planning at Carat Korea which is a part of Carat Group, the biggest media agency network in the world.
Alums: Alumni societies offer ways for you to stay active
For more information on how to become involved with the University of Minnesota Alumni Association and the School of Journalism and Mass Communication Alumni Society, contact Erica Giorgi in the CLA External Relations office at giorg003@umn.edu or 612-625-8837.
Submit items for the November issue of the Murphy Monthly
Deadline for publication is Wednesday, October 31, 2007.
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Regents of the University of Minnesota. All rights reserved.
The University of Minnesota is an equal opportunity educator and employer.
October 2007