Faculty on the Move
By Michael Sears

Three faculty members from the Greenspun School of Journalism will spend some time working away from UNLV either this summer or next fall.

Paul Traudt has been invited for the second time to serve as a visiting professor in the Institut für Angewandte Medienforschung (Institute for Applied Media Research), at the Universität Lüneburg, in Lüneburg, Germany. Lüneburg is a university town of about 70,000 located about a half hour south of Hamburg in Northern Germany.

“I will be joining the faculty there about midway into their 2008 spring/summer semester,” Traudt said. “Three years ago I taught mostly American students enrolled in a special international program at Uni-Lüneburg, but this time I will be working exclusively with German undergraduate students enrolled in the university.”

Traudt said he will be teaching two courses to undergraduates at Uni-Lüneburg that are nearly identical to two of the courses he teaches here at UNLV: 1) Mass Media and Society; and 2) Global Media. He said German and American media studies professors are not that different in terms of graduate training and research.

“We very often share common theories and research literatures and teach many of the same kinds of courses. However, German and American professors often differ significantly in terms of approaches to teaching pedagogy,” said Traudt.

As part of a larger project designed to provide both prerecorded and real-time global media resource materials for courses here at UNLV, Traudt will also be conducting a series of videotaped interviews with German university colleagues and regional media professionals.

“This is another part of the School's efforts to network globally in terms of academic teaching and research,” he said.

Finally, Traudt said he will be presenting a paper on feature-length films portraying Chicano/Latino in the Southwestern United States at the Universität Göttingen at a conference examining international trends in transnational films that address transcultural issues. Traudt said he will be leaving just after finals here at UNLV and will return later in the summer.

Lawrence Mullen will be attending the International Association for Media and Communication Research in Stockholm at the University of Stockholm from July 20-25. According to the website, it's a symposium of world-renowned researchers and experts as well as a unique opportunity to learn and form contacts.

Mullen said he will be presenting research related to virtual communities. Using visual data and interviews with simulation developers and online players, his study attempts to tease out the thoughts, ideas, concepts and opinions about virtual communities, such as Second Life.
 
Last but not least, John Naccarato will be the visiting professor at the University of Torino in Torino, Italy. He will be teaching two 300-level courses next fall, one on advertising and the other on marketing.

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IDC President Reichmann (third from left) Former Friend of Hank Greenspun, welcomes IDC and JMS Faculties

JMS Faculty begin work on Global Democratic Dialogue Partnership

JMS faculty visit important cultural site of Jerusalem		Priest, Mullen and Sohn visit the sea of Galilee

Larry Mullen, Susanna Priest and Ardyth Sohn spent the week before classes began visiting with faculty members of the IDC Sammy Ofer School of Communication in Israel to begin work on the Global Democratic Dialogue project—a collaborative research effort between JMS and the IDC.   

“The purpose of the partnership is to explore global democratic discussions in different forums.” Sohn said. “We have a hunch, although not a lot of data to support it, that virtual worlds could stimulate debate about serious issues such as global warming. Collaborating with faculty at the Sammy Ofer School broadens our perspective and allows us to design truly global projects.”   

Among the events scheduled during the five-day visit was a daylong workshop on virtual worlds. Mullen discussed visual explorations in Second Life and Priest gave a talk on virtual environments and public debate. Other presenters included representatives from IBM Software Group, the Holon Institute of Technology and Metaverse Labs.     Priest said the trip very successful. “We developed four different project ideas that we hope to pursue with our IDC colleagues, some of which will involve other JMS faculty as well.”

Mullen and IDC professor Doron Friedman are encouraging students to interact with one another in Second Life as part of their collaborative ethnographic study of Second Life participants and are talking about purchasing a robot or ‘bot” to collect information from avatars. “This is a new form of data collection and the goal is to see if information collected by “bots” is substantially different than information collected avatar to avatar.” Sohn explains.

JMS and IDC faculty in front of new Sammy Ofer School of Communications

Other potential research projects include an examination of copyright issues and challenges in an international context and exploring Second Life as a communication medium from a social science perspective. Priest says she and Mullen are busy writing research presentation proposals involving both JMS and IDC faculty for submittal to the International Association for Media and Communication Research meeting scheduled in Stockholm later this year.   

Although the focus Democratic Dialogue Project research is on virtual worlds, Mullen said one of the most meaningful parts of the journey was getting to know the faculty at IDC. “The tour of Israel was great too. It really opened my eyes to the land and people of Israel.”  

The School plans to invite IDC faculty to UNLV in early 2009.

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KLAS-TV gives Gift to JMS

The School of Journalism and Media Studies received a $50,000 gift from KLAS-TV Channel 8 in support of the School’s civic journalism program. Director Ardyth Sohn says the funds will be used to buy video and audio equipment for student journalists.

“Our students will use this equipment to capture the thoughts, concerns and needs of local residents.” Sohn said. “The point of civic journalism is to reach out to the public, learn what people think and feel and then use this information to enrich news stories.”

Students began using the equipment in the Fall semester to explore the neighborhood immediately surrounding UNLV. Students wrote about community efforts to provide after-school activities for children, concerns about health care availability and the wealth of cultural diversity among people living in the geographic area bounded by Twain and Hacienda Avenues and Eastern and Maryland Parkway. A number of similar civic journalism projects are planned for Spring journalism classes.  
“Stories produced by these projects are in keeping with the commitment that KLAS-TV has made to the local community.” Sohn said.

The most compelling stories highlighting a community need or identifying local concerns will be featured on the KLAS TV website. 

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JMS Students Initiated to Kappa Tau Alpha

Professor Emeritus and Founding KTA advisor Barbara Cloud formally welcomed new members to Kappa Tau Alpha, a national honor society recognizing excellence in journalism and mass communication. Initiates included:  Brian Ahern, Nanelle Fellows, Thomas Foley, Kelly Todd Frost, Meghan Furtado, Nurulain Kausar, Katie Mayorga, Shannon Onstot, Derek Schoen, Justin Shearin, Natasha Shepherd, Lindsay Sheman, Sean Skottey, Elise Timothy, Brittany Warnock, Erika Bayer-Polak, Jen Shymansky, Rachel Wax, Rob Ponte, Sarah Hodges, Asmeret Asghedom, Noel Navarro and faculty members Ardyth Sohn and Anthony Ferri.

Alan Feldman, Senior Vice-President for Public Affairs, MGM Mirage, congratulated the new members and encouraged them to “honor the profession of journalism by focusing their efforts on stories that improve lives and better society.”

View a slide show of the KTA ceremony.

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Yahoo Design Manager Visits JMS Classrooms

Guy Schackman, Design Manager for Yahoo News and  JMS Alumnus, talked to journalism and media studies students last week about the challenges of designing for Yahoo and staying abreast of changing technology. Schackman discussed some of the more interesting projects he’d worked on this year, including the Democratic Candidate Mashup (http://debates.news.yahoo.com) and told students to “find something that interests you and then immerse yourself in the tools.”
When asked to predict the future of Yahoo News, Schackman said “There will always be a need for news aggregators like Yahoo and Google.”

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(l-r) Rob Curley, Charlotte-Anne Lucas, Kristin Dero, Heperi Mita, Rob Ponte, Jenna Kohler

Rob Curley Addresses JMS Students and Faculty

            Newspapers have larger newsrooms, more journalists and better resources than most television stations. But if you’re one of the millions who prefer to find news online, chances are you’re not looking at your local newspaper website.  And that’s bad news for local newspapers, according to Rob Curley, Vice-President of Product Development for the Washington Post-Newsweek Interactive. Curley challenged an audience of JMS faculty and students to rethink how news is developed for the Internet during a workshop on campus last week.   
            “Web sites created by television stations are more popular than those created by newspapers because what television stations do best is also what works best on the Internet,” Curley said. “Television stations know how to do video and they know how to do breaking news.
            According to Curley, newspapers need to move beyond web sites that just republish stories from the paper.  For web sites to be successful, Corley says they must focus on local news, develop databases of information important to the local community, incorporate video, build evergreen content, encourage dialogue and create information that can be delivered on cell phones, I-Pods or “any other device you can think of.”
            Curley says the Internet can provide information in ways and forms that traditional media cannot. To illustrate this point, Curley identified three websites that made maximum use of online tools:  one that showed Kansas Jayhawk fans the view they would have of the court from their respective seats; another that linked readers of restaurant reviews directly to the reservations desk of  the dining establishment; and a third that illustrated the shopping habits of teens by tracking the stores they visited and the purchases they made in a single day."
            Corley will present the full new media workshop this week at the annual Online News Association Conference in Toronto, Canada.  Director Arydth Sohn will also attend the conference with JMS professor Charlotte-Anne Lucas and five JMS student.

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A Topping Off at Greenspun Hall

Brian and Myra Greenspun, UNLV President David Ashley, Dean Martha Watson and a host of hardworking men and women celebrated the halfway mark in the construction of Greenspun Hall with a traditional pouring of the last foot of concrete into the building’s foundation. Greenspun thanked the construction workers for the more than 30,000 man hours put into the building since the groundbreaking.   
    “Most of you won’t be here when the building opens but rest assured that you have created a foundation for learning for the thousands of students who will pass through these doors.” Greenspun said.
     Jon  Lagarza of American Nevada Company said the topping off ceremony represented a significant milestone for everyone, including the Greenspun family and UNLV, adding,  “It won’t be long before our grand opening ceremony.”

The building is expected to be completed by Fall, 2008.

UNLV Breaks Ground on Greenspun Hall

Click here to view groundbreaking video(WMV)

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