Indiana University School of Journalism » 2008 » May

Visiting journalists discuss HIV/AIDS and journalism

Gena Asher — Tue, 27 May 2008 16:48:04 +0000

The six visiting journalists and one non-governmental organization worker from South Asia will present "HIV/AIDS and Journalism in India and Sri Lanka" at 1:30 p.m. Thursday in the Ernie Pyle Lounge. A question and answer session will follow. Everyone is welcome.

UWIRE 100 includes three IU journalists

SoJ Web Report — Wed, 21 May 2008 16:25:17 +0000

Two IU students and one alumna appear on the UWIRE 100 list of top young journalists.

Junior Michael Sanserino, senior Mark Koenig and Carrie Ritchie, B.A.J. ’08, are listed along with 97 students from various colleges and universities around the U.S. UWIRE released the list Wednesday.

UWIRE and UWIRE.com offer networking for young journalists looking to establish themselves professionally through networking with others, posting resumes and portfolios. UWIRE publishes more than 500 student articles per day, according to its Web site.

UWIRE also boasts another School of Journalism connection: Ben French, B.A.J. ’98, is general manager.

South Asian journalists here to learn about HIV/AIDS reporting

Jonathan Hiskes — Tue, 20 May 2008 21:51:04 +0000

Photo by Jon Hiskes

Associate professor Jim Kelly (seated) showed South Asian journalists around the grad lounge during their first day at Ernie Pyle Hall.

Read about Kelly's trip to India late last year.
Panel on women in news set for Monday (April 19)
Panel discusses media coverage of LGBT community (April 17)
Lehrer draws on many presidential debates to analyze political process (April 15)

Photojournalist Subhamoy Bhattacharjee has tried to shoot stories on HIV in India, but the work has proved difficult because of the social stigma and persistent myths surrounding the virus.

“There is a disconnect between the community as a whole and those who are living with HIV,” said Bhattacharjee, who lives in the northeastern state of Assam.

School of Journalism associate professor Jim Kelly and one of his former colleagues at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale found the same problems during their teaching in India. They see better journalism as part of the solution, and through a State Department grant, they arranged for Bhattacharjee and five other South Asian journalists and educators to travel to the United States for a program on reporting HIV/AIDS.

The six began their work at IU on Monday, meeting with journalism faculty and students and attending faculty-led workshops. After two weeks in Bloomington, they will complete weeklong job-shadowing internships related to their fields before returning home.

The trip is part of a three-year program Kelly and Southern Illinois associate professor Jyotika Ramaprasad are leading to encourage South Asian journalists and non-governmental organizations to work together more effectively on addressing HIV/AIDS. The two received a $275,000 grant from the State Department Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs to pursue the program, which culminates in a conference in Colombo, Sri Lanka, in 2010.

“The (South Asian) media has been slow to react to HIV because it also labors under some of the common myths out there, just as the American media was slow to react and affected by the myths in the 1980s,” Kelly said in explaining the project’s focus.

Through the grant, he hopes to encourage Indian, Sri Lankan and Pakistani journalists to improve their sourcing by learning from NGOs working on the front lines of the struggle with HIV/AIDS. Currently, news organizations might produce a story when an NGO wins a significant grant or when it holds a meeting, but the reporting too often stops there, Kelly said.

“What they don’t do enough of is using these NGOs as sources of information,” he said. “Those are people who go into villages to test for HIV and AIDS…and through the course of that they collect all kinds of detailed information about these problems.

“So if a reporter is doing a report on, say, the impact of HIV on the economy, the government has some information, but the government is usually limited to aggregate information. The NGO has local information. They actually know people who are living with HIV. They know how they are surviving, or failing to survive.”

One of the six participants, Manisha Shelat, has tried to teach her students the importance of in-depth reporting on this issue as a journalism professor at the University of Baroda in Gujarat.

“Explaining, analyzing, guiding people—those kinds of stories are missing,” she said of Indian HIV/AIDS coverage.

She will complete her weeklong “internship” at the School of Journalism, working with faculty to learn ways to use hands-on learning and to support student media.

Another participant, Surya Kanta Gosh, works at a Kolkata (Calcutta) NGO that provides HIV prevention, care and advocacy. Its staff, some of whom have HIV and some of whom do not, works to dispel myths about how the virus spreads simply by sharing things such as drinking glasses, he said.

During his time here, Gosh hopes to find ways to persuade Indian journalists to cover the widespread discrimination of individuals with HIV.

“There’s still a social taboo,” he said. “People are not willing to talk about HIV/AIDS.”

Photo by Jon Hiskes

Associate professor Jim Kelly and faculty, staff and grad students welcomed the South Asian journalists at a casual lunch in the grad lounge. The six will visit the U.S. to refine their skills covering social issues.

He will spend his internship week at week at Bloomington Hospital. Bhattacharjee will shadow photographers at the Indianapolis Star. Two journalists from Sri Lanka, Udaya Wanniarachchi and Chaminda Wariyagoda, will intern at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Nava Thakuria, a journalist from Northeastern India, will intern at the Herald-Times in Bloomington.

Kelly said some of the journalistic shortfalls he’s seen in South Asia, such as relying too heavily on press releases and treating uneventful meetings as “news,” are common everywhere.

“It’s not because they’re not doing a good job — they are,” he said. “Journalism in South Asia is very robust.”

In fact, newspaper circulation numbers there are growing at about the same rates they are shrinking in the U.S., he said. But the area provides few mid-career education opportunities for journalists, which prompted Kelly and Ramaprasad to propose the grant.

It’s the fourth journalism faculty exchange in which Kelly has participated. He’s led a program focused on NGO/journalist partnership before, but this is the first to focus on addressing HIV/AIDS, he said.

“Without proper education, awareness and simple recognition that HIV is a problem, the incident rate can explode and just overwhelm a society,” he said. “…Journalists can help with that education. They can dispel myths.”

INside wins national SPJ award

SoJ Web Report — Tue, 20 May 2008 12:39:25 +0000

IU’s INside magazine is the best college magazine in the nation, according to the Society of Professional Journalists, which announced its collegiate Mark of Excellence honors Monday.

“It’s always great to win, but especially so for the INside magazine because it is so new,” said Nancy Comiskey, IU interim director of student media. INside was launched in fall 2006 and the award honors issues published in calendar year 2007.

The issues submitted included the sex and predictions issues, both edited by Brian Janosch; and the global and seven deadly sins issues, both edited by Kelsey Peters.

Mark of Excellence is SPJ’s category for collegiate competition. This year, college journalists submitted 3,400 entries in 39 categories. The entries previously had won first place awards in regional contests. The awards will be presented formally at the organization’s national conference in Atlanta Sept. 5.

A photograph of a Little 500 bike race also won a national first place for Ashley Wilkerson (M.A. ’07), Aaron Bernstein, Geoffrey Miller and Jay Seawell.

Read the press release and complete list of winners at SPJ’s Web site.

Weaver to discuss research methods at ICA conference

SoJ Web Report — Tue, 20 May 2008 11:59:21 +0000

Roy W. Howard Research Professor David Weaver will serve on a panel discussing the future of journalism research methods at the upcoming annual conference of the International Communication
Association in Montreal May 22-26.

This panel is based on a book Weaver co-edited with Martin Loeffelholz of Ilmenau University in Germany, Global Journalism Research: Theories, Methods, Findings, Future, which was published early this year by Blackwell Publishing.

Routledge publishes The Global Journalist (May 13)
School research group launches survey (May 10)
Faculty, student work set for AEJMC presentation (May 10)

Presstime article features Dvorak research

Gena Asher — Mon, 19 May 2008 18:10:48 +0000

The May edition of Presstime magazine, published by the Newspaper Association of America, features an article about professor Jack Dvorak‘s latest research that shows strong positive links between high school students’ participation in newspaper or yearbook activities and academic performance.

Dvorak and Changhee Choi, Ph.D. Student, also have an AEJMC convention paper accepted for the Chicago convention that’s based on the same research.

Justice center names Dilts to board

SoJ Web Report — Mon, 19 May 2008 13:44:33 +0000

Professor Jon Dilts has been named to the board of directors of the Community Justice and Mediation Center. The Community Justice and Mediation Center is a not-for-profit organization in Bloomington that promotes a civil community through mediation, education and restorative justice.

Dilts, a long-time journalism professor at Indiana University, is a trained civil mediator and a lawyer. He is a member of the Washington D.C. based Association for Conflict Resolution.

Evans publishes Isuma

SoJ Web Report — Mon, 19 May 2008 13:40:06 +0000

Assistant professor Michael Evans’ new book, Isuma: Inuit Video Art, explores social, political and cultural facets of Isuma, the Inuit video organization that created The Fast Runner. The Fast Runner won the Camera d’Or Award at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival and a host of other honors.

Isuma stems from nine months of ethnographic fieldwork Evans conducted in Igloolik, a small Inuit village north of mainland Canada. Publication of the book was supported by grants from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences and the International Council for Canadian Studies, and the research was supported by a Fulbright Fellowship. The book was published by McGill-Queens University Press in Montreal.

Read more about the book.
Routledge publishes The Global Journalist (May 13)
School research group launches survey (May 10)
Faculty, student work set for AEJMC presentation (May 10)

Carol Polsgrove

SoJ Web Report — Thu, 15 May 2008 13:16:07 +0000

Associate professor S. Holly Stocking wrote this biography about professor Carol Polsgrove. It was published by the Dean of Faculties office in honor of retiring faculty and presented in a booklet at a ceremony April 16.

As the daughter of American missionaries to Nigeria, Carol Polsgrove grew up knowing what it was like to be on the outside looking in. Home-schooled, she early on made books her constant companions, finding in the words of others a refuge for her sense of isolation and an outlet for her increasingly curious and restless mind. Books swept her into the very center of unknown realities, and years later, a stranger in the United States, she grew convinced that those with the capacity to cross social barriers and see what others have not seen can, and indeed should, work to illuminate those unseen worlds.

Writers, she came to believe, can matter, not just to individuals, but also to entire communities and cultures. It is a conviction that drove her work as a journalist covering hidden social injustices and the often slow degradation of the environment. It is a conviction that later motivated much of her academic work on politically and culturally significant writers and editors, and one that she passed on to generations of aspiring journalists and academics in her classes.

An affinity for crossing and recrossing boundaries, particularly those often erected between the academy and the more freewheeling worlds of politics and journalism, revealed itself in the late 1960s as Carol worked on her doctorate in English literature from the University of Louisville. At the same time she began her teaching life, she worked for the Associated Press and the Lexington Herald-Leader and freelanced for magazines and newspapers.

Four years later, promoted to associate professor at Eastern Kentucky University, she took a year’s leave of absence to freelance, mostly for the political magazine, The Progressive, from a rented apartment in the shadow of an oil refinery in Point Richmond, Calif. For the next dozen years, she devised ways to work as an editor and writer and a lecturer in journalism, based largely in the San Francisco Bay area, a region she embraced for its diversity and political verve and came to call “home.” She wrote reviews and articles for a variety of magazines during this time and later, including The Progressive, Sierra, The Nation, The Atlantic Monthly, and the American Prospect, and she served as an editor for both Mother Jones and The Progressive.

Finally, in 1989, pressed to find secure employment to support herself and her young daughter, Cora, Carol found a permanent academic home in Indiana University’s School of Journalism. It was here that she knit together the richly textured threads of her professional life, finding a strong academic focus writing histories of communities of editors and writers living through and contributing, in ways large and sometimes disappointingly small, to momentous periods of political and cultural change. Uninterested in traditional academic prose, she applied her considerable gifts as a writer and editor to fashion artful historical narratives derived from extensive archival research and in-depth interviews.

Carol’s first book, It Wasn’t Pretty, Folks, But Didn’t We Have Fun?: Esquire in the Sixties (W. W. Norton, 1995) told the riveting story of the community of journalists who, under the creative leadership of editor Harold Hayes, produced a magazine that revealed the currents and undercurrents of the profound cultural shifts that marked the 1960s in this country. The book was reissued in paperback by RDR Books (2001) under the title, It Wasn’t Pretty, Folks, But Didn’t We have Fun?: Surviving the ’60s with Esquire’s Harold Hayes.

A second book, Divided Minds: Intellectuals and the Civil Rights Movement (W. W. Norton 2005), explored the boundary-crossing work of public intellectuals during the civil rights era, revealing the important gatekeeping roles of book and magazine editors and the often disquieting influence of the Cold War on intellectuals’ public discourse. The book led to work on the advisory committee for Reporting Civil Rights, a two-volume anthology published by the Library of America.

A third book, nearing completion, returns Carol to her African roots. Tentatively titled Writers in a Common Cause: Ending British Rule in Africa, this book explores the work of West Indian and African writers who engaged in a publishing campaign against British rule in Africa from a base in London.

As a teacher, Carol was twice awarded the school’s Gretchen Kemp Award for outstanding teaching. She created many new courses, including the Partisan Press, Journalism for Social Change, Magazines in the Sixties, the Media and the Civil Rights Movement, and Literary Journalism, which became a permanent course in the curriculum and a student favorite. Always interested in expanding her students’ horizons (they have “insufficient primary reality,” she once told a colleague), she took students on field trips to jails, courtrooms, city council meetings, the French Lick casino and other places off the manicured campus path. She even took one group of graduate students to the Gulf, to cover the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in Mississippi and Louisiana.

As a university citizen, Carol served on a variety of school and university committees where she could raise her voice for diversity and work to ensure that the voices of others were heard. She chaired the Bloomington Faculty Council mediation committee and served as a member of both the Commission on Recruitment and Retention of Non-White and Women Faculty and the statewide advisory committee of the Division of Labor Studies. Many younger faculty members, especially women, found in her a mentor who encouraged them without glossing over the challenges of academic life.

Now, on the verge of retirement, Carol describes herself as an Unreconstructed Californian who has somehow managed to find happiness in this slow-moving college town in the Midwest. But though she has found a hard-won personal contentment here, it is doubtful that she will shut her eyes to the discontents of the world around her. There are too many stories to be told, even in the heartland, and if Carol holds true to pattern, she will write some of these stories, proving once again that writers can matter.

S. Holly Stocking
Associate Professor
School of Journalism

Christine Ogan

SoJ Web Report — Thu, 15 May 2008 13:09:24 +0000

Roy W. Howard Professor David Weaver wrote this biography about professor Christine L. Ogan. It was published by the Dean of Faculties office in honor of retiring faculty and presented in a booklet at a ceremony April 16.

Christine Ogan retires this spring as professor of journalism and professor of informatics after a long and distinguished career at Indiana University that began in 1976 with her appointment as a lecturer in the Department of Speech and Drama at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis and a part-time assistant professor in the School of Journalism at IU-Bloomington after completion of her Ph.D. in mass communication research from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

In the 32 years that she has served Indiana University, her appointments have included assistant, associate and full professor of journalism as well as a joint appointment as professor of the new School of Informatics launched in 2000.

Before then, she completed bachelors and masters degrees at Bowling Green State University and taught in the English department at John Hay High School in Cleveland, in the Speech and Drama department at Ithaca College in New York, in the English department at Ankara Koleji in Turkey, in the English department at Hacettepe University in Ankara, Turkey, and in the English department at North Carolina Central University in Durham.

In the School of Journalism here at IU, she has taught a wide range of courses, including beginning news writing, international communication, communication and development, and information technology issues.

In addition to significant and innovative research that includes three books and numerous articles and chapters concerning communication and national development, women in media management, and the use of media by Turkish migrants in Amsterdam, she has served in a number of administrative positions that include Director of Graduate Studies and Director of the Bureau of Media Research in the School of Journalism, and Associate Dean for Graduate Studies and Research in the School of Informatics.

She has also served as a Fulbright Senior Lecturer and Researcher at the Middle East University in Ankara, Turkey, as the Park Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and as a Visiting Professor at Hong Kong Baptist University. She was the Interim Director of the Rob Kling Center for Social Informatics at IU in the spring of 2007 and a co-director of a National Science Foundation-funded workshop on gender equitable outcomes in IT higher education in September of 2007.

Her work has been recognized and honored by the Office for Women’s Affairs Distinguished Scholar Award in March 2002 for outstanding scholarship and efforts to enhance women’s lives through research, as well as the Gannett Center for Media Studies at Columbia University in New York where she was a Research Fellow in the fall of 1986. She also received a mid-career faculty fellowship from IU in 1990-91.

Over the past 32 years, she has worked tirelessly to advance the cause of communication research and to enhance the role of women in this research and in higher education more generally. She has earned a reputation as a tough but caring teacher who sets high expectations for her students, but never higher than those she sets for herself.

I have worked with her on several studies, and I know firsthand from these experiences of her integrity, high standards and incredible capacity for hard work. She simply will not give up in the face of many obstacles that would stop most scholars. Ever since coming to Bloomington in 1974, she has met and overcome numerous barriers to her own professional advancement, rising to become the second woman to attain the rank of full professor in the School of Journalism in 1994 after being hired as a fulltime faculty member in 1981. She has supervised more theses and dissertations than almost any other faculty member in the School of Journalism during this time and has given generously to her students while holding them to very high standards.

Her research on Turkish migrants in Amsterdam has required not only Turkish language skills, but also extraordinary perseverance in completing in-depth interviews with total strangers living in a highly concentrated and complex urban environment. Years of research went into her book, Communication and Identity in the Diaspora, which is a landmark study of the uses and impact of mass media and will be cited for years to come in studies of media and cultural identity.

In her years at Indiana University, professor Ogan has been a model of the ideal teacher-scholar-administrator. She has held herself and her students to the highest standards and has striven mightily to be the complete academic citizen, participating outside her home unit on the faculties of African Studies, West European Studies, Middle Eastern Studies and Central Eurasian Studies as well as on a variety of important university committees such as the Board of Review, Grievance, Affirmative Action, and Faculty Affairs. Some have found her to be a tough critic, but they know that she is as tough on herself as on others, and that she is, at heart, someone who wants the best for her students, her field, and her university.

She will be sorely missed and very difficult to replace, but we know that she will not stop studying and writing and teaching about communication in her retirement. We won’t be able to really replace her, but we will try to carry on her outstanding work and high standards in the years to come.

David Weaver
Roy W. Howard Professor
School of Journalism

Indiana University School of Journalism » 2008 » May

Visiting journalists discuss HIV/AIDS and journalism

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Carol Polsgrove

Christine Ogan