Joe Atkins, continuing his ongoing research on labor issues, wrote the cover story, "Operation Dixie: The Battle to Unionize Nissan" for the July 18-24 edition of the Jackson Free Press in Jackson. The 3,700-word article was accompanied by a sidebar on actor Danny Glover's involvement in the issue. The article also ran in the Austin, Texas-based Progressive Populist and in Web magazines such as the Atlanta-based Like The Dew and Durham, N.C.-based Facing South. It also was translated into Portuguese and Japanese and ran in Web publications in Brazil and Japan. The story was selected as one of "Sidney's Picks" by the New York-based Sidney Hillman Foundation as one of the top five stories in the country that week on social justice issues.
Bill Rose and Eat Drink Delta author and Ole Miss journalism alumna Susan Puckett led their Depth Reporting students to produce an in-depth report on food in the Mississippi Delta. The student reporters spent their spring break combing the Delta to examine everything from the emergence of the wondrously sinful Koolaid pickles to the legendary restaurant culture of the Delta to the causes and possible solutions to rampant obesity in the region.
Dr. Kathleen Wickham, associate professor, published an article on ClarionLedger reporter Jerry Mitchell Jr. in The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, sponsored by The Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, and presented Fifty Years Later: Ole Miss Works to Open the Doors at the Media and Civil Rights conference at the University of South Carolina. In addition she was named a fellow at the Business Journalism Seminar, sponsored by the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism, Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Arizona State University. Dr. Wickham also moderated a panel held during the university’s Open Doors program that featured people who were on campus during the 1962 integration crisis. Dr. Wickham also spent a week at Washington University in St. Louis on a research grant related to her work on the press and civil rights and for a third time judged the National Headliner Journalism Awards.
FACULTY HIGHLIGHTS
Dr. Nancy Dupont is serving as president of the Mississippi Associated Press Broadcasters Board. She produced a panel on student job-searching tips for the Broadcast Education Association convention in April. She continues serving as faculty adviser to NewsWatch in the Student Media Center. She is spending the summer writing for a co-authored book on the newspapers of the occupied cities of the Confederacy. In August, she’ll moderate a panel she produced on behind-the-scenes internships in television at the AEJMC convention in Washington, D.C.
In April, Dr. Brad Schultz had his fifth book published. The NFL, Year One chronicles the 1970 season and was published by Potomac Books. He also had three research articles published during the academic year, most of them dealing with how reporters are using social media to create their own personal brands. Dr. Schultz worked with Dr. Samir Husni’s magazine class to produce videos for both editions of the Mississippi Observer, and helped produce and edit Dr. Nancy Dupont’s documentary about Togo. He also served as head of the Sports Interest Group within AEJMC.
MEEK SCHOOL
53