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The SJMC Alumni Board will host the Twin Cities Media Stars Quiz Bowl on Tuesday, January 31, at 6:30 p.m. in the Johnson Great Room in the McNamara Alumni Center. The Quiz Bowl will feature teams from the Pioneer Press, the Star Tribune, Campbell Mithun, Carmichael Lynch, KARE-TV, and WCCO-TV. The event will be hosted by Jeanette Trompeter, WCCO-TV’s news anchor, and the competition’s moderator will be Mary Lahammer of TPT-TV’s “Almanac.” All SJMC alumni and students are invited; the suggested donation of $5 will help support the alumni board’s activities. Space is limited and reservations are encouraged. For more information or to RSVP, email aberger@umn.edu.
The University of Minnesota will host the Twin Cities premiere of “Pathways to Understanding: Raising Children with FASD (Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder)--A Seminar with John Hays” at 4 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 2, in the Mississippi Room of Coffman Union, 300 Washington Ave. S.E. Minneapolis. The event is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served at 4 p.m., followed by the film at 4:15 p.m. and a question and answer session.
On Friday, February 3, the SJMC chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) will sponsor “The Source Course,” a workshop for students on how young journalists can develop and maintain ethical relationships with their sources. Funding for the conference came from a “ethics” grant competition created by SJMC director Albert Tims, who challenged the School’s student organizations to submit proposals for student-created ethics programming. SPJ was the winner of this year’s $1300 grant. For more information, visit http://www.tc.umn.edu/~spj/ or email umn.spj@gmail.com.
The next Emerging Digerati event, sponsored by the Institute for New Media Studies, will take place on Monday, February 6 in the Weisman Art Museum auditorium at 6:00 p.m. Emerging Digerati events showcase new media work at the University and provide a forum for members of the new media community to network and discuss issues in the field. Light refreshments will be served. For more information, visit http://www.inms.umn.edu/digerati/index.html.
Charles Fishman, author, journalist and senior editor of Fast Company magazine, will discuss his new book The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World’s Most Powerful Company Really Works—And How Its Transforming the American Economy at 2 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 7 at the U of M Bookstore located in Coffman Memorial Union, 300 Washington Ave. S.E,. Minneapolis.
On February 16-17, the Minnesota Journalism Center will sponsor “The Pop Music Critic as Cultural Critic,” a workshop for music journalists and arts critics. Participants will explore the cultural contexts in which they work and will learn helpful models for their writing. To register, visit http://www.mjc.umn.edu/popmusic/index.htm or contact mnjrnctr@umn.edu.
The 29th Annual Frank Premack Memorial Lecture will be held on Monday, April 17, 7:30 p.m., in the Coffman Memorial Union Theater. The featured speaker this year is National Public Radio’s Michele Norris, an award-winning journalist and the nationally renowned host of All Things Considered, public radio’s longest-running national program. Norris’s lecture is free and open to the public. Visit www.mjc.umn.edu for more information or call 612-626-1723.
The SJMC’s annual Spring Celebration, honoring scholarship winners, scholarship donors, and graduating seniors, will be held on Wednesday, May 3, 5:30 p.m., in the Great Hall at Coffman Memorial Union. All SJMC alumni who are members of the UMAA are invited to attend. Formal invitations will be sent in March. Contact aberger@umn.edu for more information.
Join the University of Minnesota Alumni Association for the 2006 Annual Celebration featuring Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor as our special keynote speaker on Tuesday, May 23, 2006. The event will begin at 5:30 p.m. with a reception on Northrop Mall. Dinner will be served at 6:00 p.m., and Justice O’Connor’s talk will begin at 8:00 p.m. in Northrup Auditorium. Tickets go on sale February 15, with an Early Bird Discount on tables of 10. For more information, see www.alumni.umn.edu/OConnor.
Assistant professor Gary Schwitzer’s research and development of a website to analyze U.S. health news coverage was mentioned in a U.S. News & World Report article on December 26. Schwitzer was also quoted in a December 26 story in the Charleston (SC) Regional Business Journal.
Professor Jane Kirtley was quoted in a number of media outlets commenting on several top news stories. The Baltimore Sun, Florida Times-Union, and Hotline all quoted Kirtley in stories about the media’s erroneous reporting in the Sago mine. On January 5, Kirtley was quoted in the Pioneer Press, the Star Tribune, on the KSTP website, and in an AP story about a Republican blogger being served with a libel lawsuit. She commented on recent developments in the case against I. Lewis Libby in the Valerie Plame leak case in the Chattanooga Times Free Press and the San Francisco Chronicle on January 20.
Assistant professors Kathy Forde and Marco Yzer have both been selected to receive University of Minnesota Faculty Summer Research Fellowships (FSR) for the summer of 2006. Forde’s fellowship will support her project “The ‘Wayward Press’ and the Public Sphere: Toward a Theory of Press Criticism”; Yzer’s fellowship will support his project “A multi-construct, multi-behavior analysis of health control perceptions.”
Selections from Dona Schwartz's photographic project “In the Kitchen” are included in the current exhibition, “Aus Amerika” at the Galerie Lichtblick in Cologne, Germany. Information about the show can be found on the gallery's website at http://www.lichtblicknet.com/aktuell/index.html
Professor Ken Doyle has accepted an invitation to work on the Association for Consumer Research’s Transformative Consumer Research initiative. Along with ACR president David Mick, Doyle will be co-editing the project's portion of the ACR website.
Assistant professor Gary Schwitzer’s paper, “A web-based systematic review and feedback mechanism analyzing U.S. health news coverage,” has been accepted for presentation at the 2006 Kentucky Conference on Health Communication, April 20-22, 2006, in Lexington, Kentucky.
Professor Jane Kirtley gave a lecture on media ethics at the Minneapolis Uptown Rotary club on January 5.
Assistant professors Brian Southwell and Marco Yzer have been selected to contribute a paper entitled “The Role of Conversation in Mass Media Campaigns” for Communication Yearbook.
Professor Jane Kirtley flew to Denver on January 9 to hear oral arguments in the case against Thomas Mink, a University of Northern Colorado student accused of criminal libel. Mink's case began in January 2004 after police confiscated his computer and threatened him with arrest after he posted a doctored photo of a prominent university professor on his satirical online newsletter, The Howling Pig. Last April, the Silha Center joined the Student Press Law Center in filing an amicus — or "friend-of-the-court" — brief in support of Mink's case arguing that criminal libel laws could never withstand First Amendment scrutiny.
Graduate instructor Kate Roberts Edenborg welcomed six guest speakers to her Jour 3155 Publications Editing class this fall. St. Paul Pioneer Press entertainment editor Heidi Rashke talked about how to work well with writers and reporters and St. Paul Pioneer Press photography editor Randy Johnson discussed aspects of the photo selection process. Rex Sorgatz of Internet Broadcasting talked about news online and how the presentation of information is rapidly changing and John Ullmann executive director of the World Press Institute discussed how law and ethics influence editing processes. The Star Tribune’s Lee Dean, Taste section editor, and Rhonda Prast, features editor, explained how designers and editors can effectively work together.
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January 2006