Back to the Forge: How the Roy H. Park Fellowship is Recasting a New Media Legacy

Back to the Forge How the Roy H. Park Fellowship is Recasting a New Media Legacy

by lorr aine ahearn

2012 | Published by the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication

“Judgment doesn’t wait at the end of the line.

In our generation, in these days and times, every day is judgment day.”

Roy H. Park, Jr.

Tempus Fugit

Contents A World-Changing Idea

11

Pr elu de

The Esteemed Park Fellows

13

C h a p t er On e

The Park Fellowship: From Media Empire to Meeting of Minds

19

From Scratch Without a Recipe

25

C h a p t er Two

Leaps of Faith High-altitude Ascent

29

Grunts at the Four Corners

33

Good Morning, Beijing

36

Second Half Comeback

39

The Gray Lady.com

43

C h a p t er Thr ee

Behind the Blue Wall “Wasn’t This Fun?”

47

The Next Edition

49

The Peer Review Method

52

Straddling the Divide

56

The Depth of Field

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C h a p t er Four

Tools for a New Machine The Game Changer

63

High in the Sky at King5

67

Dead Reckonings

68

The Human Factor

69

Creating Change

70

Stepping Stones

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A World Audience

72

Fuel for Tomorrow

73

Shape Shifting

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“Everything Fell into Place�

Advance Guard

75 77

ch a p t er fi v e

The View from the Summit The Strongest Link

82

The Fixer

86

The Gauntlet

87

Final Exam

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Coda

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Appe n di x A

The Park Fellows

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Appe n di x B

Roy H. Park Distinguished Visiting Professorship

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Appe n di x C

The Park Lecture Series

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The Park family in Chapel Hill at Roy H. Park Jr.’s induction into the North Carolina Advertising Hall of Fame. Left to right are Elizabeth Park Fowler, Tetlow Park, Roy H. Park Jr., Trip Park and Laura Park

A W O R LD - C H A N G I N G I DEA In 1997, the Triad Foundation of Ithaca, N.Y., made a commitment to UNC that was to transform not only the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, but to make a deep imprint on the field itself.

Thanks to the Roy H. Park Fellowships, some 350 professionals have completed their doctoral and master’s degrees in the 15 years between the time Dean Richard Cole announced the program and Dean Susan King presided over the 2012 commencement. The fellows, assuming research, teaching and professional posts in news, technology, advertising, web design and public relations, paths traced in this publication, are having, as Cole once predicted, “a domino effect.”

Their restless energy and world-changing ideas are reminiscent of the fellowship’s namesake. Roy H. Park, a Dobson, North Carolina, native who rose from Depression-era farm boy to media titan, reinvented himself through several careers. He wrote for newspapers, worked as a publicist, hatched a lucrative branding campaign with Duncan Hines using outdoor advertising and then embarked on a meteoric rise as CEO of Park Communications, estimated to reach one in four U.S. households at its zenith.

Park’s final career turn, that of philanthropist, achieved a different reach.

The impulse to leave the world better, more connected, more comprehensible than one found it, is the essence of the fellowship.

Through it, Roy H. Park’s legacy continues.

Prelude The Esteemed Park Fellows

O

do players get to start over, or collect $200 when they pass GO. For grown ups, there is no Golden Ticket to the chocolate factory. So when a media professional in mid-career is offered a Roy H. Park Fellowship, it takes time for the mind to adjust. Let’s review.

I am required to quit my day job. I get free tuition to Carolina. I get paid to go back to school and work as an assistant for a professor I admire. I can research a field I am passionate about, and help remake a vital industry. I will leave with a Ph.D. or master’s degree from the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication, and if I work hard, begin a new career.

Really.

For the approximately 350 Roy H. Park Fellows who have come and gone from UNC ’s Carroll Hall since 1997, a sample of whose footsteps are retraced in these pages, all of the above does not necessarily sink in immediately.

In some cases, it took a student sitting down for the first time to do the math.

How much would a Ph.D. cost, exactly, were the student footing the bill? For others, it was rounding a corner on the third floor of Carroll Hall and being asked by a professor with suspenders and a pipe, “Want to go to lunch with us?” His name was Don Shaw, a journalism school legend. The full import sometimes did not hit home until a student enrolled in the right class or internship at the right time, working hard, experiencing a “eureka” alignment of talent, purpose and opportunity. Some called this destiny.

Or luck. One used the word God. My personal Park moment was more modest. It was the first time I saw the wall of hardbound blue books. They are Carolina blue, or the closest shade available at n l y in b o a r d g a m e s

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the bindery where the school sends theses and dissertations completed by graduate students from the J-school. A copy of each volume is filed in the stacks behind the counter at Park Library. Every year the collection grows.

My assignment in spring 2011, as a first-year doctoral student in a qualitative methods class, was to find a dissertation, read the “meat” of it, as Dr. Lucila Vargas put it, and offer my critique. I checked out this hefty book, swearing upon my first-born to bring it back.

“What kind of a book is that?” my daughter asked.

I turned to the acknowledgements page, on which a long-gone Ph.D. student, Calvin Hall, thanked his committee and reflected on the honor of having been selected one of the “esteemed” Park Fellows.

“This is a dissertation,” I said. “A Park Fellow wrote it.”

That was when the weight of the Park Fellowship tradition settled on my shoulders.

It was not only Hall’s volume, but the cumulative, neck-craning effect of beholding all those other titles on the shelf. They ranged from the slender, self-explanatory quantitative study to a cinder block-sized law treatise that had to be printed in two volumes. There were titles that beckoned me to spend the afternoon. American Culture Goes Abroad: J. Walter Thompson and the General Motors Export Account 1927-1933.

They were ingenious: What a Book Can Do: Silent Spring and Media-Borne Public Debate.

They were tantalizing: Images of Scandal. They were daunting: Medea in the Media: Narrative and Myth in Print Media Coverage of Women Who Kill Their Children.

Most daunting, amid this array, was the missing title on the shelf. That was my dissertation, still to be written.

But this is only half the responsibility of a Park Fellowship, and we are often reminded it is the lesser half. This message was constant, beginning with the network of grad students who called with encouragement during the recruiting process.

It continued with the people who bought the beers during the interview weekend.

It was echoed by the more experienced student “buddy” who promised that there was life, at some distant point, after Media Law class.

A Park Fellowship, they said, does not primarily consist of courses a student takes, or papers a student writes. It is what a Park Fellow becomes. Advisers tell students that the pristine blue volume that stays behind on the shelf, t’s crossed and i’s dotted, does not represent the voyage, only the point of embarkation. I wondered, therefore, what became of the names on the blue books.

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It appeared that Dean Susan King had the same question, among others, when she arrived in January 2012. Coming to Chapel Hill from the Carnegie Corp. of New York, the former broadcast journalist did a double-take.

Usually, philanthropists memorializing a loved one put their names on classroom buildings, stadiums or hospital wings. True, there was the $1 million Park Library, the Visiting Park Professorship, and the annual Park Lecture series. Yet the major commitment to the school bearing Roy H. Park’s name at UNC was essentially the authors of those blue books, the careers of the fellows themselves.

So late one afternoon in the spring 2012, Dean King gathered the doctoral students in the Halls of Fame Room and one by one went around the semi-circle. Twenty or so Park Fellows described their topics of research, from video gaming effects to health and political communication, public opinion, news leadership and media history.

We described our backgrounds and laid out career plans after graduation. King wanted to know more.

Where were the rest of the Park Fellows and what were they doing now? Some of the answers, which are detailed in these pages, cover a range of professional and academic career trajectories, and suggest much about the direction of journalism and mass communication.

Combined, the past doctoral fellows authored hundreds of books and monographs, on topics ranging from media coverage of the first moon landing, to literary journalism on trial, to “dataveillance,” a term that had not been coined when the fellowship program began. The fellows presented conference papers, traveled the globe and all told, trained tens of thousands of students.

The master’s fellows, meanwhile, had professional internships across the country and around the world, produced award-winning journalism at UNC , and then went to work. In some cases, they went straight from graduate school to the top employers in their chosen professions. They are employed in multimedia news organizations, ad agencies, health, political and financial institutions, and start-ups of their own design.

The consensus from those surveyed was that most of this would not have been possible without the Park Fellowship. Being accepted into the program enabled them to take career-changing risks, brought them into collaborations that yielded astonishing results and after graduation, continued to open professional doors.

Prelude

17

From a broader view, what occurred at Carroll Hall altered not only their lives, but the study and practice of journalism and mass communications. Both faculty and students considered it a stroke of good timing that the first 15 years of the fellowships coincided with a period of radical media transformation.

At least one Park Fellow came away from Chapel Hill convinced that more than serendipity had a hand. Something more powerful than luck, the scholar posited, wove so many strands of human creativity together in one place at one time.

But that was off the record. There was no hard data to back it up.

Lorraine Ahearn Doctoral student, Park Fellow September 2012

Chapter One t h e pa r k f e l l o w s h i p From Media Empire to Meeting of Minds could have gone another way, applying conventional wisdom.

On crucial matters, in business as in life, tried is sometimes mistaken for true.

Chris Saunders was in his early thirties. He and his wife were expecting a baby, their first. It was 2008, not a banner financial year, not an optimum time for a midlife do-over. Saunders is the son of a tool-and-die maker. He knew the value of a dollar.

By his father’s ledger, his life looked solid and secure.

With a master’s degree in English, he had a well-paying job with benefits teaching writing in the North Carolina community college system. In a few more years, he would be vested in the state retirement plan. The wise thing, certainly the prudent thing, would be to stay put. There was one problem.

He hated it. It was not so much the teaching. It was not so much the grading.

It was spending most of his working life patrolling student assignments for plagiarism.

What he longed to be was a journalist. He wanted to go out and interview people, plan packages, tell stories.

At that moment, a chance presented itself, and it was a big chance. Saunders learned that UNC’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication offered the Roy H. Park Fellowship, named for the late newspaper, broadcast and advertising titan, a native of Dobson, North Carolina.

This c o n v e rs a t i o n

Here was the deal: If Saunders were selected and was willing to work extraordinarily hard, maintain good grades and serve as a research assistant, the fellowship would pay tuition for a master’s degree, health insurance, a salary, and a research and

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travel stipend. When UNC made Saunders the offer, all that remained was for him to quit his job at the community college.

His father was opposed. But Saunders’ wife was in favor, no question. This said a lot about her. It was another reason for him to fall head over heels. You see, graduate school would be no Sunday picnic for her. Saturdays were out, too. Saunders would be unavailable to take his wife to doctor appointments. He would be gone all day during the week and would not be home for dinner on weeknights. He worked evenings at The Daily Tar Heel, waiting to be edited by 19-year-old undergrads who knew more about news writing than he did.

This went on for two years, and when at last Saunders graduated, there was no pot of gold, no magical job offer waiting. So he found a position teaching at another community college campus, and began covering Friday night high school football out in the counties as a stringer for the News & Record in Greensboro. At this point, he had to be kicking himself.

Or was he?

“That was the happiest I’d ever been,” Saunders said. “It was never about getting another job. It was never about the money.”

As it turned out, Saunders, one of more than 350 master’s and Ph.D. Park Fellows to have graduated UNC since the fellowships began in 1997, neither taught community college nor remained on the high school sidelines for long. As these pages will detail, the UNC grapevine, and Saunders’ own merits and drive, landed him in a larger arena coincidentally close to where Roy H. Park, the fellowships’ namesake, began writing his own ticket during the Great Depression.

But there is further reason for beginning our trek with Chris Saunders, as he stood on the fifty yard line that November, too focused on running down halftime interviews to fret about his next play.

In different variations, the threads that fasten his story together stitch in and out of the experiences of one Park Fellow to the next. To a noticeable degree, their lives and careers repeat patterns that shaped Park’s own trajectory in an era of high-tech media innovation in the previous century. They are lives defined by initiative, drive, collaboration, risk-taking and the impulse to pass knowledge along to another generation.

In Park’s era of media disruption, as in the current day, some observers stood back from the edge of the tectonic shifts and waited for a new bridge to be built. Others threw themselves into the effort, with trial and error, to get to the other side.

The Park Fellowship: From Media Empire to Meeting of Minds

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Park and his son, Roy H. Park, Jr., were in the second category. With the fellowships in their fifteenth year, the body of evidence suggests that they have enlarged the field of communications research and strategic planning in the industry by a quantum leap. The examples are as diverse as the field.

To mention a few: •

The fellowship enabled a mid-career California newspaper columnist who

thought he missed his chance to become a tenured university professor. From there, he traveled to Okinawa to teach. He advises students to throw caution to the wind, and experiment with forms beyond nut graphs and formulas to compose narratives in new ways.

• Through the Park Fellowship, a third-tier sports announcer entering Carolina exited to become a top-tier social media analyst. He told journalists who asked for his take not to throw caution to the wind in what Wall Street dubbed the “valuation of the century,” the public offering of Facebook. With the closing bell, it appeared he was right.

• The Park Fellow pipeline is where a senior account executive at Edelman in New York City, only a few years out of Carolina, works late into the evening to place a business call to a client in Singapore, where the workday is starting.

• A former history student, whose father was born on a sharecropper farm in Jim Crow-era Mississippi, retooled her research skills to reach the goal of working as an investigative reporter. At ProPublica, her grounding in civil rights literature and her own sense of the past has now come to bear on an investigation of housing discrimination patterns in New York City.

Park Fellow Ph.D. alums include full and tenured associate professors at researchintensive universities, among their ranks an associate dean at the University of Kansas, a research director at the Medill School at Northwestern, department chairs, directors and assistant chairs. Some have gone into research and development, or started their own firms. All told, doctoral fellows have gone on to publish hundreds of books and peer-reviewed research articles.

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. . . numbers of students are not the full story;

From the professional master’s track, the fellows have found jobs at Google, MSNBC , CNN, the World Bank, The New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Guardian-US and are quoted as industry experts in publications including the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times and USA Today.

Individually and taken together, their career paths could be considered an end in themselves. Yet the larger objective of the Park Fellowship, the “domino effect” Dean Richard Cole envisioned when he proposed the program, is more ambitious, complex and difficult to gauge.

For example, we could look down the list of the first incoming class of Park doctoral fellows, in alpha order, and consider their impact after leaving UNC in 2000: Alwood, Edward. Ankney, Raymond. Boynton, Lois… We could visualize the number of students in a large lecture class on, say, public relations, in Room 111, Carroll Hall’s 425-seat auditorium. It would not be uncommon for professors to teach hundreds of students per year. Multiplying that by a decade or more, we could consider Alwood’s, Ankney’s and Boynton’s peers in the Park Fellowship program, in various stages of teaching careers across the country.

So far, this is a straight-ahead arithmetic. But here is where Cole’s domino effect becomes an exponential brain-teaser, hard to squeeze into an Excel spreadsheet.

How does one measure the impact of these scholars’ students? And depending on how long they have been teaching, there is a generational effect: How do we measure the impact of the students taught by these scholars’ graduate students, now scholars with academic appointments themselves?

The sum is no longer calculated by adding up lecture hall rosters on the order of Room 111. Imagine a Carolina-Duke football game at Kenan Memorial Stadium, which has about 62,000 seats, and this is a closer representation. But the point here is that even numbers of students are not the full story; the significance is what those students become, and what they go on to do.

The panoramic view is when we begin to consider the impact of research and teaching, and to trace the career paths into social media and advertising, entrepreneurial journalism, visual communication and web design, law, health and political communications. These are job descriptions, and research streams, that break down old silos,

The Park Fellowship: From Media Empire to Meeting of Minds

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the significance is what those students become, and what they go on to do.

and could hardly have been foreseen 15 years ago when the first fellows were being issued their office keys.

To see where some of the original Park Fellows are now, and how many have come along behind them, is to glimpse the incremental changes that add up to critical mass.

And in media history, this is often the case, when tracing change back to the source.

Few big developments took shape by accident. What determines the course of events is in reality a series of strategic choices.

Ironically, the embattled states of both the industry and of higher education funding made it possible to put this multimedia alloy back in the forge near the end of the twentieth century. Longtime professor Margaret “Peggy” Blanchard, among others, urged a solution.

“We have lost at least 25 percent of our first-choice Ph.D. students this recruiting year due to low assistantship funding and inability to promise a complete waiver of out-of-state tuition,” the late professor wrote in a memo. “Ohio, Indiana and the University of Florida are our key rivals for the best students.”

The fellowships, by positioning the journalism school to draw top graduate students and adapt its program to changes in the field, had a corollary effect. They helped the school’s faculty searches, because professors would be guaranteed top graduate students and research assistants. The growing prestige of the school augmented its success, in academe and in the eyes of the UNC administration.

“It’s all wrapped up together,” Cole said. “We got the best applicants because we paid the best, but also because of the quality of the faculty and the quality of the school.

It allowed us to recruit the strong academics who wanted to be professors, and also the professionals who wanted to go out and change the world.”

The ability of the school to encourage graduate students to present their research at national conferences, and to back that emphasis with Park travel stipends, put the fellows on the map in important ways. Dr. Anne Johnston, the longtime faculty member who has directed the Ph.D. program and the graduate program, gave the students practice at the 15-minute research talk, an essential job skill, as well as exposure to the latest work in their fields. For master’s students, the travel money also meant training opportunities not available at some schools.

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“Why do our students do so well professionally?” Johnston said. “Well, they have great faculty, they take wonderful courses, but they also get to go to wonderful workshops that most master’s students can’t afford to go to.”

As the industry entered a period of change, the fellowships became a powerful draw for mid-career professionals seeking to retool. These professionals, in turn, brought their recent industry experience, and research questions to the Ph.D. and master’s programs, and also helped the school evaluate its curriculum against industry trends.

The graduate students coming into the journalism school, particularly as doctoral students, brought different qualities than graduate students of the past.

“They weren’t the 23-year-olds. They were people who had already made their mark,” said Dr. Rhonda Gibson, associate dean for graduate studies, and a former Ph.D. program director. “I don’t think there is any way to measure it. Those people make better college professors. Those people train better professionals. It’s a question of magnitude.”

Roy H. Park, whose several careers spanned public relations, advertising and media, is an example of such reinvention. The trajectory of his career is a virtual case study in initiative, drive, collaboration, the effort of trial and error, and the impulse to pass this knowledge on. These are basic themes of risk and reinvention echoed repeatedly in the experiences of the Park Fellows interviewed.

The stories end in countless places, but as they did with Roy H. Park, they always begin with a door. It is the one labeled, “Push.”

The Park Fellowship: From Media Empire to Meeting of Minds

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From Scratch Without a Recipe Th e f a rm c o mmuni t y o f D o bs o n , it seems, was a good place for Park to be from

– far away from. Roy H. Park, Jr. wrote in the memoir Sons in the Shadow that his father, born in 1910, so “detested” farm life that he read the Bible, delivered newspapers, wrote for county seat weeklies and left for N.C. State at age 15 to escape it.

Park worked his way through college and used his campus newspaper and Associated Press credentials, and his wits, to land a public relations job in the hardly bullish graduation year of 1931. He was undeterred by the low pay of an apprentice-level job with the Cotton Exchange, because it was opportunity to learn the business. At one point, he offered to bring his own typewriter, if he could only have a place to put it down. This led to a decade’s success, but more important to our story, another chance for Park to step out on a limb.

A business friend offered him surplus packaged food products if Park could find a way to sell them. He parlayed his contacts into a meeting with a famous restaurant reviewer, a meeting at the Waldorf Towers that was to go exceedingly poorly, followed by a breakfast meeting that went worse. But it is a lesson in not giving up. From those meetings, and Park’s pitch for a signature brand, came his partnership with Duncan Hines, essentially the first experiment in franchising.

This was a textbook campaign before there was a textbook, demonstrating the early power of TV advertising, and a new medium of “outdoor TV,” the billboard.

Nor was this the most dramatic example in his career of what might, in a later era, been referred to as “platform convergence.”

After selling his interest to Procter & Gamble, he acquired one low-watt countrywestern radio station and small market TV station after another, and became the first broadcast owner to reach the FCC limit. He meanwhile acquired newspapers in small to mid-sized markets, and the combined reach of Park Communications, a “multimedia” concern, reached a quarter of U.S. households. After Media General purchased a chunk of Park properties, the company boasted of its “convergence.”

Along the way, however, much of Park’s reach had been acquired, in Roy H. Park, Jr.’s words, “the slow, hard way.”

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By 1955, surrounded by the fruits of his collaboration with partner Duncan Hines, Roy H. Park was a front-page success story at the campus where he was once editor of the student newspaper.

The Park Fellowship: From Media Empire to Meeting of Minds

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As Park himself showed, the secret was in the mix. Success depended on a combination of people, a cross-pollination of ideas and innovation produced by the make-do exigencies of opportunities, deals and deadlines. There was an element of luck involved.

But in Park’s case, the harder the work, the more luck seemed to materialize.

This is perhaps a different way of apprehending the life of the “workaholic,” as Park was sometimes described. In a 1980s newspaper profile, a former Landmark executive who worked for Park scoffed at that label as something of a misnomer. The exec said that the CEO of Park Communications loved to work so much that Park “never worked a day in his life.”

It was a blithe turn of phrase, but contained some truth. Park’s son recalled his father’s incessant newspaper-reading, even on family road trips and boating trips.

Park’s habit of consuming and throwing the used papers over his shoulder, his son wryly noted, drew more than one littering citation from local troopers. But the image of Park restlessly poring over every page of the twenty-two newspapers he owned, even on vacation, suggests something more than discipline or duty. Roy Park, Jr. wrote that his father worked “for the sheer joy of it,” and probably would have paid to work if that had been the only way to do it.

To a degree, Park Fellows interviewed described their work the same way.

They anticipated going to their jobs in the morning, for the challenge, for the importance of it. They make money, some are secure, but money and security are not what drives them. The motivation is, as Chris Saunders underlined, the curiosity and the joy of the work.

This mindset perhaps makes the Park Fellowship a particularly creative tribute.

The epilogue of Park’s biography, his family’s repurposing of a media empire into a philanthropic foundation, is the final primer. It is the essence of the fellowships, the concept of becoming, and creating a place in the world.

The term “legacy media” has come to connote the end of an era. But in Park’s case, it is legacy media in metamorphosis. This is the opposite of the end. It is a media empire recreating itself, this time without bricks and mortar.

The legacy the Triad Foundation created through UNC is, instead, one built by scholars and twenty-first century media professionals. It has brought a meeting of minds, and allowed deep, sustained focus on the sea change taking place around us.

One measure of that change is the distance these fellows have logged, far beyond the Carolina horizon.

Chapter Two l e a p s o f fa i t h Look for opportunity more than security or stability.

Consider the breadth of opportunity and do your best.”

Roy H. Park

High-altitude Ascent of a 24-bedroom castle in the northern highlands of Scotland, one strategy is to not look down.

A few weeks prior, Park Fellow Rebecca Folmar Clendenin (M.A., ‘05) had reported for a summer advertising internship with the parent company of Smirnoff Vodka and Guinness Extra Stout. The 21-year-old master’s student was interning, unpaid, to find out whether she belonged in the corporate ad agency world. She had not been there long when her boss at Diageo North America pitched a research assignment.

Clendenin’s mission was to learn how other brands oriented new marketing employees. She was then to draft a document proposing an experiential training program. After a year in the master’s track at UNC , with methods and public relations courses under her belt, this sounded doable for the Vanderbilt grad. She had already interned with a statewide Tennessee agency as an undergraduate. That line on her C.V. had helped Clendenin become one of the younger Park Fellows to cross the threshold between the broad stone pillars of Carroll Hall.

She had survived the first fall semester in the program, the weeding-out process students call the hazing. Her undergrad years at Vandy had been challenging. UNC was W h e n r a pp e l l ing o ff t h e si d e

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relentless. Clendenin had never worked as hard in her life, before or since. There were constant simultaneous deadlines for papers, conferences, thesis proposals, internship applications, comprehensive exams. After this, the thinking appeared to be, a student would be ready for anything.

So newly arrived at her first internship at a top-ten marketing company that first summer, Clendenin felt prepared. She assumed the Diageo manager’s “research” assignment meant taking the elevator up to the Smirnoff floor, or down to the Guinness floor in the Stanford, Connecticut headquarters. Perhaps she wanted Clendenin to open some file cabinets, pull out some files on the Johnnie Walker account, do a few interviews and write up a prospectus. This was not the case.

“She actually meant, go to Ireland. ‘Why don’t you go to Scotland? Do this research,’” Clendenin said. “So that was really cool. Honestly, that was such a coup. This unpaid intern flying business flights, staying in amazing accommodations.”

Clendenin flew from New York to Edinborough, then traveled north to the Johnnie Walker Brand Home. Apart from rappelling, she learned the labels in order by age: Red, Black, Green, Gold, Blue. From the highlands, it was down to Dublin.

The next stop was the Guinness Storehouse, another branding Holy Grail, maybe as good as it gets.

So it is hard to pinpoint when all this began to sit uneasily, and when Clendenin did look down from the high altitude of her first international research assignment.

It might have been on the business flight back to New York City at 35,000 feet.

She began to tally up how much this trip had cost: nine, ten, $11,000.

Granted, her proposal for marketing orientation would be fabulous, but what gave her pause was the end game, the question. It was how to sell a better grade of Scotch whiskey. This was not a bad thing, but she wondered if it was enough.

“It really boiled down to the fact that I questioned whether the nature of the work had meaning, and whether I was personally fulfilled by it,” she said. “And also, it didn’t sit well with me that there was a lot of money that was going toward something that I felt was not changing the world.”

But it was too soon to check the corporate climb off her to-do list. Clendenin signed on for a second unpaid internship the following summer, in London. At the strategic communications firm Peppercom, she worked with a list of clients including World Poker Tour. This time, she made a check mark in permanent ink.

“I kind of questioned whether my help was something I even ethically agreed with,” she said. “It kind of sat negatively with me. Check.”

Leaps of Faith

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The Park Fellowship allowed Clendenin to explore a potential career within the time-bound constraints of an internship, and to reach an insight that otherwise might have taken years to act upon once she began ascending the career ladder.

Such is the value, she now tells younger students, of trial and error, of life experience. The Park Fellowship allowed Clendenin to explore a potential career within the time-bound constraints of an internship, and to reach an insight that otherwise might have taken years to act upon once she began ascending the career ladder.

At the same time, the footing she gained at the internships gave her first-rate work experience that led to the job she did want.

The summer after graduation, while working for the poker tour, among other clients, Clendenin had a series of inquiries from North Carolina Child Advocacy Institute, which later became Action for Children. Without so much as a handshake, interviewing Clendenin only via Skype and a red London phone booth, the organization hired her as communications director, sight unseen. They gambled on her. She, in turn, took a leap of faith from the plush prestige of the ad agency world to work at a nonprofit.

Clendenin’s first assignment was the nonprofit’s name change, to be accomplished on a shoestring budget. The initial reflex might be to imagine what could have been done with the resources available back at the agencies. But in a sense, she was more nimble and creative without them.

“There was no nine, ten, $11,000 budget. That actually allowed me, and to a degree forced me, to be a better problem solver. Those were awesome skills to develop in a first job,” Clendenin said.

“I do that still today. I have to be good at figuring things out, envisioning a final product and doing that with limited resources. There’s nothing better than getting thrown in the deep end where people have expectations of you.”

As of 2012, Clendenin’s “dream job” was to direct statewide communications for North Carolina’s Communities in Schools. This is a collaborative program that surrounds students at risk for dropping out of high school with services to enrich their lives and help them and their families succeed. Although the program is not new, the CIS website used video stories, blogs, social media and non-profit marketing and

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fundraising principles Clendenin gained in cross-training with the School of Social Work and the Kenan-Flagler Business School.

Clendenin hired a UNC photojournalism grad, Justin Cook, to produce a yearlong documentary project. Among the stories: A girl was sneaking school cafeteria food home in her backpack for her family to eat that night. A mother in a rural county made the case for eliminating child hunger to a local businessman. A young AfricanAmerican male living in the city resolved to do something about the tragedy that was claiming young lives around him.

They were portraits of people prevailing over hardship, etched in what the photojournalist called a “rugged” beauty. For Clendenin, this was the terrain the Park Fellowship opened up.

To gain this vantage point, and see the paths available to her, she said, propelled her years ahead of where she might otherwise have been. Even though she had just had her second child in June 2012, with photojournalist Nathan Clendenin (MA, ‘05), also a Park Fellow, Clendenin said she felt no conflict between work and home. As she spoke on the back porch of her house outside Durham, her toddler son played with his toys and his week-old brother napped.

Clendenin said there would be no tug of anxiety about maternity leave ending, no sense of being torn between two lives. Both were fulfilling.

“I’ve never had a pit in my stomach come Sunday afternoon. I’ve never not wanted to go to work,” she said. “I love that.”

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Grunts at the Four Corners H e f e l t a s if

he had just cured cancer.

On a fall afternoon, a group of students walked together from Carroll Hall toward Franklin, straight from the closed-book media law exam. Chris Higginbotham (M.A., ‘11) felt the adrenaline surge of mastery. Every legal precedent, every point of law, he had nailed several times over. It was Happy Hour at Four Corners Grille.

Two Thursdays later, same time, same location, they were back at the Four Corners after class. The mood was past happy. They had their graded law exams back.

“I got a P-minus. I was like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’” Higginbotham said.

“It reminded me of my first month of boot camp in Iraq. You put people through a shared misery so they can go back to their bunks and bond over it. ‘Why do we need to know this?’ It was a shared ordeal.”

In other words, he felt at home. Coming out of four years in the Army, spent mostly in Europe, trying now to reintegrate into civilian life, this was the aspect of the Park Fellowship that Higginbotham needed most. It was the ability to fit in.

When Higginbotham had not been able to make the interview during the application process, the graduate school, then led by Dr. Anne Johnston, was accommodating.

Professors Ruth Walden and Frank Fee came in at an odd hour to Skype him at the Tactical Operations Center in Belgium. The rest of the incoming cohort was simply told there was an additional recruit.

Higginbotham arrived for school feeling intimidated and out of place. His worries were short-lived. He watched each student go up to the others and ask, “So. Are you the Army person? Are you the Army person?” The only one they didn’t ask was him.

Higginbotham concluded that he looked like a civilian. The friendships he was to make would be as important as the education.

“As hard as that semester was, I really look back on it as the best semester of graduate school,” Higginbotham said. “I’ve never been challenged like that intellectually.”

In a sense he had been in school and in training for much of his adult life, but Higginbotham needed a civilian knowledge base. His training was to be a public affairs officer in the Army. Historically, that was the polar opposite use of strategic

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In bonding with his peer group, the first semester of grad school was not unlike Chris Higginbotham’s first month of Army boot camp.

communication or public information from the concepts taught either in P.R. or First Amendment theory. Military information, Higginbotham observed, is an authoritarian model.

“It’s so biased against the press, against transparency,” Higginbotham said, “much more so than any organization than I’ve ever been a part of.”

Collaborating on research with J-school Assistant Professor Dave Cupp and Dr. Ann Udderback, the voice dictionist, Higginbotham found the school a congenial place for starting over. Even his sense of being overwhelmed, of wanting to hide in the back in methods class, sometimes worked in his favor. Hubris, he saw, was not encouraged.

“You would hear somebody say, ‘Well, when I was at Ogilvy & Mather…’”

Higginbotham said, “and Anne Johnston would always kind of shake her head.”

Higginbotham, in 2012 wearing civilian clothes one year out from UNC, achieved the transformation he sought. He now performs a public relations job that helps the Army with one of its most sensitive and potentially lethal assignments on U.S. soil.

This is the disposal of stockpiles of nerve and blister agents, including pre-World War II mustard gas. The weapons, stockpiled since the 1940s, are so old that there are no longer projectiles made for firing them.

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Located in central Kentucky, the site is in the midst of a multi-billion-dollar construction of a fully automated facility. Once this is finished, the weapons can be removed from the igloo-shaped containers now housing them and mixed with a Drano-type chemical neutralizer to remove the threat.

In the past, countries disposed of the weapons simply by dumping them into the ocean, a violation of international treaty. Now it is Higginbotham’s job to answer to the public, including knowledgeable environmental advocates in central Kentucky who have kept a watchful eye on the permit process. This is a perilous mission for the Army, but in Higginbotham’s view, it has the potential to remove a historic menace. Essentially, these will be the last chemical weapons in the U.S. arsenal.

“To take what has been a threat to people, and make it something of a benefit with this project,” he said, “it’s kind of an interesting place to be.”

It is not the cure for cancer. But it gives Higginbotham a chance to try out a model of public information transparency on the Army. And stranger things have happened.

There could come a day when he will need what he learned in media law.

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Good Morning, Beijing T o b e hir e d o u t o f sch o o l

by the largest independent P.R. firm in the world

is like winning the broad jump. To be promoted within two and a half years to senior account executive, on the verge of a promotion to account supervisor, is a pole vault.

At a company like Edelman, it does not happen without effort.

So it might come as a surprise to learn that this was not the goal Courtney Woo (M.A., ‘09) had in her sights when she applied to Carolina. To put her sure-footed ascent in its full context might require rewinding a few frames.

Having done her undergraduate work in Asian Studies at Bowdoin, an interest linked to the fact that her father is Chinese, Woo became increasingly focused on the growing importance of China. From college, planning to be a journalist, the logical move was to Shanghai and Beijing, where she lived as an expatriate and freelanced for a string of publications including Newsweek Select, Vogue, Fodor’s and City Weekend, an English-language entertainment magazine. But Woo wanted formal journalism training to go along with her writing skills and fluency in Mandarin, and applied to eight graduate schools in the U.S. including Carolina.

In addition to the Park Fellowship, which she found generous, UNC’s program offered more than other schools . The school not only had a health communications track, which was a developing area of focus for Woo. Most important, in her mind, was that UNC combined journalism and mass communication.

“I really enjoyed journalism, but public relations offered more options,” said Woo, who chose UNC over Northwestern, Berkeley and Boston University. “UNC offered the only balance between the two (journalism and mass communications). If you are going into P.R., you have to be able to understand how a journalist thinks.”

What Woo did not realize, entering the program, was the degree to which public relations was changing and becoming oriented toward digital content, social media and video, all curriculum that was in full swing as she arrived at UNC .

“It was just coming into its own,” she said, “and at the time, I did not have the foresight to realize it.”

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“UNC offered the only balance between the two (journalism and mass communications).

If you are going into P.R., you have to be able to understand how a journalist thinks.”

But apart from skills, the mainstay was research. Her thesis project gave her the chance to work with Dr. Carol Ford, a professor of child and maternal health in the UNC School of Medicine, and Dr. Jane Brown, renowned social science researcher from the JOMC . At the same time, Woo assisted Dr. Heidi Hennink-Kaminski with the research component of the Period of Purple Crying, a shaken-baby public information campaign.

As luck would have it, there was another element of timing in her enrollment at UNC she did not consider, which dovetailed with her interest in China. That was the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. During the summer between her first and second years in the master’s program, Woo joined a six-week trip Dr. Charlie Tuggle organized and led for a group of UNC students to volunteer at the Olympics. Woo freelanced a daily blog for the Huffington Post, beginning with a self-deprecating piece on the assignment, billed in the contract as “broadcast coordination,” which turned out to be standing at a desk without a phone, looking for “suspicious activity.”

Despite the initial lack of action at the Ling Long Pagoda, Woo’s blog was humorous and observant, drawing on her journalism experience and her knowledge of Chinese language and society. From there, the behind-the-scenes dispatches grew in interest and insight, ranging from Beijing’s air pollution, to a comparison between American

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and Chinese concession foods, to ticket-scalping, “green-messaging� and how the average Beijing resident perceived the games and the hoopla surrounding them.

The following summer, UNC helped Woo add another line to her C.V. She worked on the multimedia project Powering a Nation and devised a marketing plan for News21.

Given the back story, the fact that she found herself working at Edelman and living in New York City by the December after graduation is less of a leap. She is assigned to clients in aerospace, works on a public health campaign for Dannon, an exhibition space for the Discovery Channel, and works with a client in Singapore. For Woo, working at an agency was by far, hands down, the right way to go.

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Second Half Comeback Th e r e a r e n o sm a l l g a m e s

in Friday night high school football, only small

sportswriters.

Forget the Tar Pit. Forget Carter-Finley Stadium. The arena does not get bigger, the stakes do not get higher, than the Mid Piedmont Class 3A Playoffs. There are no other games. This is the game where a player gets a first chance to do something large. Or it is a last chance, depending on which way the three-point kick sails, end over end in the November night, toward the goalposts.

Hanging on that breeze are not just berths in conferences or championships for the school trophy case. This is a stop-action moment between past and future, a legend in the making, a story one day for the grandkids, somebody’s grandkids. It is a whole world, buried in a one-sentence highlight on the local 10 o’clock news. And elsewhere in high school preps results…

As he stood on the sidelines of Southern Alamance High School in Graham, North Carolina, home of the Patriots, Chris Saunders (M.A., ‘10) drank it all in. He saw the puffed-up confidence of the undefeated, 10-0, Smith High School Golden Eagles.

The city team was cruising through the first half without a care. Saunders meanwhile saw the hunger of the underdog, the rural home team. Suddenly, the home team’s running game came out of nowhere in the second half. If there is a zone for sportswriters, Saunders was in it. This had the makings of an upset.

Saunders had been covering these Friday night games all fall after graduation.

He had gotten a call from Eddie Wooten, the sports editor of the Greensboro paper.

Full-timers at the paper joked that Wooten exuded the warmth of a porcupine disturbed from sleep. But to Saunders, he was more than a good luck charm. Preps or not, Saunders brought his A-game to the sports assignments. Those measly 300-word game stories saved him.

Two years earlier, Saunders had decided to give up the stability of his community college teaching job to accept a Park Fellowship. The fact that his wife was expecting a baby at the time was not the only aspect of the decision that put Saunders out on a limb. What was also risky was the career he wanted to enter, circa-2008. He wanted to go into journalism. He didn’t mean multimedia journalism, or video storytelling.

He meant writing long-form stories in print. This was not exactly a growth industry.

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“It was kind of a nutty decision for me to go back to school,” said Saunders, who had gotten his first journalism experience in radio. “I remember my father saying, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ To him, a career meant a good-paying job, benefits, retirement.”

At Carolina, he worked hard, and he also found a culture devoid of fear. The school encouraged risk. He worked with professors Laura Ruel and Jan Yopp. They taught reporters how to write and fashion a story, how to explore on their own and conceive of a package.

At News21, Ruel and Assistant Professor Don Wittekind gave Saunders his first publication experience, and then the UNC network began to kick in. Yopp and former Dean Richard Cole began to call on their contacts to help Saunders on his way. After working in what he thought was the real world, UNC professors such as Cole and Associate Dean Louise Spieler’s confidence in his abilities, and willingness to actively help him, was part of a culture he did not forget.

“They turned me on to internships and opportunities at every corner,” Saunders recalled. “And it was easy for them because that’s just part of their makeup, to care for the students.”

Because the fellowship was funding his education, Saunders was able to make up for his lack of journalism experience with unpaid internships, first at the DTH, then at the Chapel Hill Herald and finally a yearlong stint at the Carolina Alumni Review, a connection he made through Spieler.

After graduation, he had to return to teaching to support his family. At the time, he did not know this would be a short-term arrangement, but he still had faith he made the right decision.

“It was never about getting a job for me. It was about something much deeper to me. Knowing how to do something,” Saunders said. “With the Park Fellowship, I could dream and take a shot. It was the chance to be passionate about something for the first time in a long, long time.”

So there he was, teaching community college again, running down high school coaches for quotes on Friday nights, when out of the blue a phone call came. Regina Oliver, editor of Carolina Alumni Review, had given his name to the managing editor at NC State Magazine. There was a job open for an associate editor, a premier position, and Saunders went through a lengthy interview process. With no full-time work experience, Saunders thought he would never have gotten in the door without the UNC connection.

In fact, he landed the job.

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“With the Park Fellowship, I could dream and take a shot. It was the chance to be passionate about something for the first time in a long, long time.”

His magazine assignments, and an accompanying blog, let Saunders cover a range of subjects as broad as the campus. For the summer 2012 issue, the fifth edition of the quarterly Saunders had worked on, he traveled to the North Carolina coast for a cover story and package he pitched about the seafood industry. With a photographer, Saunders spent time in Beaufort and Morehead City at N.C. State’s Center for Marine Science and Technology.

Saunders got out on the water, learned about life cycles of marine animals and emerging aquaculture harvesting techniques with the potential to create new fields of employment. One is called “cage culture,” in which huge aquapods containing fish are submerged in the ocean, and can actually be steered.

“Telling somebody something new about an institution they thought they knew everything about, that is what is so amazing to me. I get to do anything I want to do,” Saunders said. “Basically, I get to write a bunch of cool stories.”

Where Saunders landed after UNC is an ironic nod to the Roy H. Park Fellowship’s namesake. Park, a 1930 N.C. State graduate who was editor of the campus Technician, studied business at the university but according to his college yearbook was destined to be a “lord of the fourth estate.”

And speaking of cross-division rivalries and second-half comebacks, Chris Saunders ended up witnessing a storybook upset, right on deadline, there in the bleachers in Graham, North Carolina.

That fall season, Saunders had seen games that were good, bad and ugly. He watched Johnny King of the Reidsville Rams score after catching a 50-yard pass. He covered the painful 30-0 shutout of the Graham Red Devils. And there was that Eastern-Western Alamance slobber-knocker, full of fumbles and interceptions.

But that Friday night in early November, the story wrote itself. Early on, it looked like one more easy victory for Smith’s Golden Eagles, 7-0 in the first half. Then it happened. The underdog Patriots came out of the locker room and sprang to life, tying it 17–17. With 36 seconds left on the clock, the Patriots kicked a 31-yard field goal to fell the Eagles.

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The fans went wild. The quotes flowed like wine, players and coaches speaking in whole paragraphs. Sometimes life is the best teacher, they said. Sometimes, you need to be hungry. As the clock ran out on deadline back in Greensboro, and Eddie Wooten’s night desk was waiting, the keys on Saunders’ laptop flew up and down.

“Top-ranked Smith learned a cruel lesson Friday,” Saunders’ story began. “The toughest thing about history is making it.”

It was a measly 300-word game story, but this was the story. There were no other stories. Sometimes, life is the best teacher. Sometimes, you need to be hungry.

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43

The Gray Lady.com On e w a y t o l o o k

at this is that Gabriel Dance (M.A., ‘06) simply came to Carolina

in the right year, and graduated from Carolina in the right year.

That was not long before the New York Times launched the Interactive Technologies Group. They were the “cybergeeks,” as a New York magazine writer once called them, the interactive team, including Dance, that worked two blocks up from the Times Square headquarters. The team would add new life to the Gray Lady, and as if to cement the integration of online and print, the paper soon after made its historic move two blocks over.

Just like that, boom, Dance went straight from grad school to the perfect job at the greatest newspaper in the greatest city in the world. He wouldn’t have to do time in “Podunk,” as he once put it, earning his journalism chops. Dance was over the moon.

Another way to look at this is that he was born in the right year, 1981, the same year that IBM introduced the personal computer. From the bulky CPUs with the monochrome screens and floppy discs onward, computers were like wallpaper. He never knew life without them. The so-called transition in journalism to online was not an issue for Dance.

When he went to Colorado State, he majored in computer science, but didn’t want to spend his life as a programmer. Computers were a means to an end. Working at the Rocky Mountain Collegian, writing editorials and covering the music beat, was more interesting. So he began looking into journalism schools, beginning with Medill, because his father and brother had gone to Northwestern. But when he priced it out, it was brutal. Grad school was thirty to $40,000 per year for tuition alone, plus living expenses. Being offered a Park Fellowship was not only an honor. It was a relief.

He arrived with the plan to pursue a news/editorial track, which was what attracted him to journalism as an undergrad at Colorado State. The faculty had other ideas.

“They said, ‘Are you familiar with multimedia journalism?’ I said, ‘No,’” Dance recalled. “Flash was just starting. It was exactly the kind of marriage of computers and the news I was looking for, given my background.”

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Simulating what a project might be like in a newsroom, or at least an ideal newsroom, professors including Laura Ruel and then multimedia professor Rich Beckman had the students work on month-long projects. They did not lack for adventure.

One package, “Chasing Crusoe,” took the students 100 miles off the coast of Santiago, Chile, to Robinson Crusoe Island. There, the UNC team and a group of Chilean journalism students spent ten days documenting in photos and audio the lives of the residents of San Juan Bautista, a small coastal settlement. Another project, “The Ancient Way,” took the students to Santiago de Compostela , a remote, centuries-old religious pilgrimage route in Galicia, Spain . They were all expected to work together, photographers, videographers, infographics artists.

“Everybody had their job to do, but everybody was expected to work collaboratively,” Dance said. “Plus, we were in Spain.”

Whatever the journalism lacked, in retrospect, the technical quality of the storytelling was becoming more robust, the technology getting faster and the language coming together with tools such as ActionScript 3. Dance had enough of a portfolio to apply for a Times internship; in the meantime, during that slow process, a bona fide multimedia production job opened, and he was hired at the newspaper.

Over the next five years, Dance worked on some of the most innovative projects the Times’ interactive group produced. Notable among them was “Faces of the Dead,” which the newspaper rolled out on the last day of 2006, when the U.S. soldiers’ death toll in Iraq reached 3,000.

The project was part art, part journalism, driven by raw data. The home image was a black and white photo of a soldier’s face, made up of tiny, clickable pixels, each yielding an individual hometown soldier’s story. There was unfiltered audio, and on other tabs, documents, maps, timelines. There were less overwhelming moments, including Dance ‘s work on the well-received interactive reader feature, “Election Day Word Train,” plus an inaugural rich-media timeline of Barack Obama’s life, and as a change of pace, a first-person sidebar to executive editor Jill Abramson’s excerpted book, Puppy Diaries.

So, surely, getting hired at the Times at age 24, being promoted to chief multimedia producer by December 2010, Dance’s career was set. Most people went to work for the Times and never left. But Dance did not see it that way, and in early 2011, decided to gamble on a new venture, The Daily, an iPad-only publication launched by Rupert Murdoch. Dance was art director for news at The Daily for five months, but journalistically,

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the gamble was a mistake. He left Murdoch’s employ without another job. Then he heard about something new, the Guardian U.S. – the scrappy British newspaper’s effort to solidify and build on an american readership.

This time, dance negotiated. If he were to be interactive editor, there would be no one above him in the department, and he would hire his own staff, and the salaries would have to be raised to his terms. The Guardian agreed to nearly all his demands, and so far, he has had editorial freedom, not hemmed in by layers of decision-making and meetings.

The team did an explainer on the Republican primaries, and why Romney was winning by the numbers. They mapped out the country by gay marriage amendments, a state-by-state graphic they timed for a controversial vote in North Carolina, a news peg that caused their page views to soar. Next up would be olympics, then the conventions, then the presidential election.

Things were starting to get interesting.

Chapter Three beh i n d t h e blu e wa l l

“Wasn’t This Fun?” Th e y h a d M icr o s o f t W o r d a t t h e ir fing e r t ip s,

they were well aware of

Track Changes.

But when Don Shaw took apart a dissertation, he preferred to do it old school. And why not? It was Shaw, who as a grad student at Carolina, with professor Max McCombs, began brainstorming a theory of media effects. Their study of these back-of-the envelope brainstorms became the most cited theory in mass communication scholarship history: the agenda-setting function of the media.

There would be no argument from Juanita Darling (Ph.D., ‘06). Shaw had reminded her of the old, pre-computer newsroom trick of printing out and taping all the pages of a long project to the wall, to re-order and cut superfluous material. Yet well before her dissertation year, Darling learned to take suggestions at Carroll Hall, regardless of the source.

Coming to UNC on a Park Fellowship from the Los Angeles Times, Darling had been an international correspondent in Latin America for 10 years in two different posts.

Her focus was media and revolution, and one day, a UNC classmate handed her a book.

It was so on-topic for Darling that the student had checked it out of the library for her.

The book became a key element for the theoretical base for Darling’s dissertation.

After discussing it with a second classmate, that student told Darling about a course being offered in the Geography Department, exploring and developing some of the same theories. The professor in the course became a valued committee member.

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It was, as Darling put it, “the serendipity of collaboration.” These were the fortunate intellectual overlaps that occurred by chance, and for Darling, they were part of the rarified atmosphere of the three-year fellowship. Her committee made accommodations so that she could do feasibility study and field work on the project that became her first book, Latin America, Media and Revolution.

Darling remembers her chair working on the grant application with her, debating the merits of the methodology, arguing various theoretical approaches.

“When we were satisfied with the draft, I suggested we ‘do something fun’ on the weekend. She answered, ‘Wasn’t this fun?’” recalled Darling, in 2012 a professor of International Relations at San Francisco State.

“She was right, of course. A graduate program is a rare opportunity for intellectual fun that we can sometimes appreciate best in retrospect.”

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The Next Edition H e w a n t e d t im e t o t hin k .

A few years, even a few weeks would be more than

he had gotten in 28 years at the Charlotte Observer.

In a manufacturing operation that runs 24 hours a day, holidays included, 28 years represents a lot of paper and a lot of people. Dan Shaver (Ph.D., ‘01) had started out as a proofreader’s assistant in 1970, when they were still casting lead and stereotyping, and worked his way up through the ranks to assistant general manager. He had an M.B.A., but as an undergrad, majored in philosophy, a path he briefly pursued in graduate school until the funds ran out. So he chose the next best profession.

“Truth,” Shaver said. “If not philosophy, then the newspaper business.”

Still, to come up at a Knight Ridder paper, and at the paper where the company’s future CEO James Batten began as a reporter in 1957 and was later executive editor, was no second-rate matter. Charlotte became a big-city paper in that era, winning two Pulitzers for public service in the 1980s, and seemed to take the town with it. It was a news organization that attempted to lift the civic life of the city and the state. In the Observer’s wake, competing news organizations gave chase.

But by 1997, the wind had shifted dramatically. And although there was no predicting the force of the cuts that were to come in newsrooms including Charlotte, Miami and San Jose, Shaver decided to exit as publisher Rolfe Neill retired.

For a newspaperman who had never lived outside North Carolina for his first 52 years, the Park Fellowship was akin to a second lifetime. He and his wife, an advertising professor, spent the decade after graduation as teachers and researchers in Michigan, Florida, and finally Sweden. There, he ultimately became director at the Media Management and Transformation Centre in Jőnkőping .

But there is a thing about newspaper ink, once it is on a person’s hands. No matter how far Shaver traveled from the pressroom at the heart of the plant where he spent 28 years on South Tryon – and that was many miles – the question was the same.

It was a great newspaper, a great company, a great industry pumping out the oxygen of democracy.

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How could it be profitable again?

In the academic world, it was sometimes clear which researchers had no industry experience by the conclusions they drew. Sometimes, those with just a few years in the business had perspectives even more distorted, based on a tiny window of experience.

Shaver recalled a management seminar in which the answer to newspaper profitability problems had been written on the board: just-in-time delivery of newsprint.

“I got up and said, ‘No! That’s wrong!’” Shaver said. “What happens if the paper suppliers go on strike?”

Most of the M.B.A.s didn’t stick around long in the news industry. This was not the standard regression analysis. Profits could be squeezed, demographics targeted, but there was more to news than sales and marketing.

“We have said since the founding of the country, we’re not just informing people,” Shaver said, “but also providing people information that they might not necessarily want, but they needed to be exposed to.”

It was an issue of trust, and he feels it receding into audience fragmentation.

Increasingly, he found in an early study he did of TV networks, news organizations were marketing themselves based on political orientation. That meant audiences were only being exposed to viewpoints consonant with their own.

In the early days of the Internet, a constant metaphor for the sudden gush of information coming at users was to compare surfing the web to taking a drink from a fire hose. Shaver recalls with some amusement the 1990 EyeTrack research at Poynter to measure where readers’ eyeballs landed on a newspaper page. He remembers Dr. Sharon Polansky’s complaint: “You guys put too much information in the newspaper!”

It was a fair question. Which was preferable? Was it to buy a newspaper for the sports scores, or the food section, and get a nutritious serving of civic journalism as a byproduct? Or was it picking only those specific menu items and screening out the rest like spam?

“Now, people have options for getting news. They can get it from their friends on their Facebook page, they can set up news filters,” Shaver said. “It becomes more and more fragmented and polarized. That may be good for marketing, but is it good for democracy?”

Watching stories such as the health care debate from Europe had been an odd experience for Shaver. There was so much ideology, so little information. All along, the question he had sought to answer with his research was the relationship between

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Increasingly, he found in an early study he did of TV networks, news organizations were marketing themselves based on political orientation. That meant audiences were only being exposed to viewpoints consonant with their own.

how profitable a newspaper was, and how closely the practice of journalism matched the audience expectations. During his dissertation defense, one of his committee members had cut to the conclusion.

“So what you’re saying is,” the professor summarized, “newspapers can make more money by being ethical.”

It might not have been quite so simple, and in July 2012, Shaver was still working on the question, close to where he began. Back from Sweden, he and his wife had moved into a condo near Chapel Hill, and he was working on a book on nonprofit news models. There was something to be said for rebuilding. He recalled talking to a newspaper GM in Savannah whose publisher had pushed for a 50 percent profit margin.

Even the good old days were never half so good. An academic colleague once asked Shaver if he ever missed the business that had bitten him in 1970.

The truth? He missed the action, missed being that close to the heart of it when a big breaking story happened. But to read about the layoffs and the newspaper closings, that part he didn’t miss. It was time for a new business plan, and he got out just in time.

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The Peer Review Method I t h a d b e e n f o ur y e a rs

since she stood up to talk at Carroll Hall about the

libel case of Masson v. New Yorker Magazine, Inc . The last time, the grad student was so wound up for her dissertation defense that the committee member sitting next to her, Dr . Cathy Packer, joked that the whole room shook.

This time, when Kathy Roberts Forde (Ph.D., ‘05) returned to UNC’s Freedom Forum as a professor visiting from the University of Minnesota to deliver the Mary Junck Research Colloquium, Packer commented on the transformation. What struck the senior law professor was more than confidence or poise in the scholar’s lecture to the UNC faculty and graduate students. It was Forde’s thinking.

The study that launched Forde’s academic career, winning the prestigious Nafziger -White Dissertation Award at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, and later two best history book awards when it was published, had an inauspicious start. Forde was a first-semester grad student in media law class. Nor was she a law student, but had accepted a Park Fellowship to study literary journalism.

Needing a law paper topic, and with a background in literature and a decade of experience teaching school, Forde became interested in Masson v. New Yorker. At issue were the techniques of so-called “literary journalism,” and the parameters of how conversations are quoted.

But at that point, it was merely a good story, a historical case of “a couple of nuts,” as Packer put it. The case centered on the famed Czech-born writer Janet Malcolm and her colorful subject, ousted Freud Archives director Jeffrey Masson, who claimed defamation by misquotation in a large, highly publicized lawsuit.

In its initial treatment in Forde’s law paper, the case was not yet the conceptual battleground Forde would ultimately see represented. The case, in her final analysis, crystallized the conflict between journalistic traditions of objectivity and post-modern notions of truth.

Packer, who wrote the handbook on libel for North Carolina media, was impressed.

“It’s interesting to know that you stick with something and it evolves in that way,” Packer pointed out, for the benefit of the assembled grad students. “It didn’t all happen on the third floor.”

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Yet Forde traced the foundations to the third floor of Carroll, to her training as a scholar and the preparation her mentors emphasized.

“I knew that the community was deeply special to me at the time. I had no idea what it was going to become for me,” Forde said. “I had no idea what that degree was going to do for me personally and professionally.”

Grad students were encouraged to take a pedagogy class in order to prepare a teaching portfolio and job application packet. Meanwhile, under the Park funding, students were funded to travel to academic conferences to hear research presented, and to present papers themselves, after being put through practice sessions at UNC . Forde, for example, traveled to six conferences to present research while she was a Park Fellow.

The conferences helped grad students gain lines on their C.V.’s, and also make contact with potential search committee members. This was not the typical grad school experience, as graduate school director Dr. Rhonda Gibson recalled it.

Gibson, who received her Ph.D. at the University of Alabama, said the exposure gave Park Fellows an advantage: “I never traveled. I had no money as a graduate student. I went to one conference, because it was the Southeast Colloquium and it was in Tuscaloosa.”

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The deeper benefit of the paper submission process, peer review, is to raise the level of knowledge and research. Forde’s advisor, the law professor Dr. Ruth Walden, joked that Forde was a law student merely “masquerading” as a historian.

Yet Forde’s enthusiasm for research with primary materials was emblematic of her chosen field, history. She later described the sense of discovery when making trips to the New York Public Library.

“This is the moment as a grad student when I felt like a real scholar, when I felt like I’d arrived,” Forde said later at UNC. “Going up to the third floor, going to that back room, going through the boxes and spending days and days and days on three different research visits.”

Those research forays, funded by the fellowship, formed some of the basis for her 2009 book Literary Journalism on Trial: Masson v. New Yorker and the First Amendment by giving Forde access to the institutional files of the New Yorker. There, she not only found the case files from Masson. Forde also found sufficient documents to reconstruct a half-century history of libel claims being fended off by magazine on the advance guard of book-length narrative.

The magazine’s storied fact-checking department, which extended to every crevice of poetry and cartoon captions, was a defense mechanism. Accordingly, Forde demonstrated, the magazine had a three-part profile of Hitler fact-checked for potential libel, “being uncertain as to whether or not it is possible to libel Hitler.” This caution did not equate with timidity, Forde found.

She quoted from correspondence between a New Yorker editor and libel attorney Morris Ernst. The editor conceded of an article, “We don’t doubt that it’s full of libel.

But we would like to print as much of it as we can get away with.”

Masson, in addition to its colliding notions of journalism playing out in the court, was inarguably a good story. It had psychoanalysis, a broken source-reporter romance, a broken tape recorder, and perhaps strangest of all, an eleventh-hour discovery by a reporter’s toddler granddaughter of a little red notebook forgotten on a summer home bookshelf.

Forde, after four years in the snows of St. Paul, would migrate south again to teach at the University of South Carolina. Among her advisees at Columbia is Sid Bedingfield, the former CNN producer, with whom she has designed a media history and civil rights course, one of her focal areas along with the First Amendment. Forde’s forthcoming book will look at the historical impact James Baldwin’s book, The Fire Next Time, had

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Unlike the scholarly convention of the research methods section, in which the author is required to describe the means of data collection, journalists are not so transparent to readers. Were there more consensus about “methods,” a kind of peer review for journalists, she suggests, there might be more trust.

on civil rights discourse in the early 1960s, a project reflecting Forde’s interest in the intersection of journalism history and the history of the book.

In the communities of history and journalism, Forde detects parallel intersections of meaning, the same contested terrain over what is fact and what constitutes truth telling. Unlike the scholarly convention of the research methods section, in which the author is required to describe the means of data collection, journalists are not so transparent to readers. Were there more consensus about “methods,” a kind of peer review for journalists, she suggests, there might be more trust.

In 2011, Forde became associate editor at the quarterly American Journalism.

There, an editing trademark is the exceptionally detailed feedback she writes to authors submitting manuscripts, even to those rejected.

It was, after all, the peer review process that helped transform a nervous grad student defending a dissertation into a polished professor presenting a lecture on an award-winning history book.

“I took a lot of notes,” Forde said of her defense, and of the critiques she took away. “Every one of them mattered, in the end. They made it stronger, and they made me smarter.”

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Straddling the Divide I n e v e r y c l a ss sh e t o o k , she sat in the front row. This was by design.

Melita Garza (Ph.D., ‘12) grew up hearing stories about her mother’s school days in San Antonio. Mexican-American children could go to school with everyone else, but they had to sit in the back.

Most of her working life, Garza has been out front, but in most cases, not by design.

She was the first Mexican-American woman hired on the metro desk of the Chicago Tribune. She was one of the few Mexican-American students in her class at Harvard, and the only one in her Ph.D. cohort at UNC. Her most important mission, now, is to not be the last.

In July 2012, Garza was unpacking box after box of books at her new home in Fort Worth, where she had taken a teaching job at Texas Christian University. By fall, she was to teach a proseminar course for master’s students, and an introduction to journalism, familiar ground after 15 years at the Trib, along with stints at Bloomberg News, the Milwaukee Journal and the Los Angeles Times.

But the teaching post also puts her in close proximity with the focus of her ongoing research. Little documented in Anglo media or history books, it was the forced repatriation of thousands of Mexican-American citizens back to Mexico. It occurred during the Great Depression, but the incident, and the associated media coverage Garza is unearthing in Spanish and English language papers, bears uncanny resonance to current headlines.

“I considered myself relatively knowledgeable about Mexican-American history, but I had never heard of this,” Garza said. “I became fascinated with the story, and how little was done with it from a media perspective.”

When Garza arrived at UNC on a Park Fellowship, media history was not the plan.

With an M.B.A. and a heavy economics thrust from having worked in London and covered financial scandals, she assumed she would teach business journalism. But enrolling in the core requirement of media history, and the social construction theories presented by Dr . Barbara Friedman, caused Garza to change course.

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In her newsroom career, Garza more and more dreamed of going back to school once she found a way, and imagined life as a public intellectual.

This was a way to incorporate her journalist’s narrative abilities, the reporting abilities she was turning to research skills, and her years in the profession. Now, all she needed was a story.

In some sense, unearthing newspaper coverage of the little-known episode from the 1930s was the refined research extension of skills and instincts Garza honed over an earlier life spent in newsrooms. An idea she pitched in Milwaukee in the 1980s, years before it received wider attention, was the plight of Mexican children crossing the border alone while their mothers were detained. The Journal sent Garza, who is bilingual, to cover the story from Mexico.

At the Tribune beginning in 1989, covering courts and general assignment, working on the urban affairs team and carving out a new ethnic affairs beat, Garza brought the capacity to seek and find stories from sources other than the official and the institutional.

Competitors in the Chicago news business lacked this skill at their peril. For example, a TV news station ignored a telephone tip from an outraged caller who had also called the Trib and spoken to Garza.

The next morning, Garza’s byline appeared headline, “Bus Driver Abandons Kids At Empty School,” her first big story at the paper. On a freezing December afternoon, Garza wrote, the driver had gotten lost and returned the children to their locked school. “You’re gifted,” the driver reportedly told the children. “You figure out how to get home.”

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The approach to reporting, which was including the voices and stories of those traditionally ignored, is also a way to approach history. It is not only in the subject matter, but the perspective and interpretation.

The sometimes opposite ways that newspapers framed the Mexican-American repatriation, depending upon whether they were Spanish or English language, calls to mind for Garza images from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. People were occupying the same time and space, yet their perceptions of reality were reverse images, like the “Jabberwocky” poem that is only legible when Alice holds it up to a mirror.

The Park Fellowship not only gave Garza the opportunity to work with Dr. Anne Johnston, and former Dean Jean Folkerts, who had returned to teaching. Garza also was at UNC when Dr. Betty Houchin Winfield, the noted Missouri scholar, was a Visiting Park Professor, and agreed to serve on Garza’s dissertation committee. Part of the interdisciplinary strength of the program, as demonstrated in the courses Garza took, is the freedom to branch out from the journalism school.

Accordingly, Garza studied oral history with renowned historian Dr . Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, an important thinker in the literature of the Long Civil Rights Movement.

Garza meanwhile studied with an array of other prominent scholars in the History Department and following graduation, was contacted by two university presses interested in publishing her dissertation as a book.

In 20 years in newsrooms, Garza was in many ways working with the rough drafts of some of the same deeper questions she is trying to answer now, with the benefit of the theory she learned at UNC. In her newsroom career, Garza more and more dreamed of going back to school once she found a way, and imagined life as a public intellectual.

“I view academic research as an extended part of my continuing quest as a reporter,” Garza said. “I wanted to be the person reporters called to ask questions.”

Moreover, she will have a hand in training reporters as well.

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The Depth of Field I n a b a s e m e n t r e p o si t o r y

at UNC’s Wilson Library in mid-summer 2012, photo

archive specialists have been chipping away at their version of the Hope Diamond.

It is a collection of some 250,000 negatives from a Mississippi Delta commercial photo studio that was in business from 1915 to the 1980s, training its lens on everything from Mother’s Day portraits to Jim Crow lynchings, traveling freak shows to river baptisms.

How the priceless Pruitt -Shanks Collection, purchased for about $6,500 by a Park Fellow and his boyhood friends, came to reside at Wilson, where it will soon be digitized, searchable and available to the public, is part luck and part fate.

It is a story deeply rooted in the hometown of Berkley Hudson (Ph.D., 2003).

Yet as the “photobiography” of a town, as Hudson interpreted it, the collection had global importance for the visual communication field in how the meaning of photographs changes over time. And if a picture is worth a thousand words anywhere else, chances are, it is worth a bit more in the Delta. And like rolls of bulk-loaded 35mm film, it is a tale that takes time to unwind.

O.N. Pruitt was the “picture man” in Columbus, Mississippi and surrounding Lowndes County along the Alabama state line, and his work lined the halls of homes like Hudson’s childhood residence. Columbus was, in Hudson’s and Faulkner’s words, a “postage stamp of soil,” but as Wilson Library photo archivist Patrick Cullom found, Pruitt used top-of-the-line equipment at every stage, the negatives spanning every level of 20th century technology, from 8-by-10 glass plates to acetate to nitrate. Some of it was deteriorating, all of it “smelled to high heaven,” in Hudson’s description, when he and a group of friends dubbed the Possum Town Boys first beheld the collection.

The negatives were housed at a studio in a rickety walkup on Main Street in the county seat, where the late Pruitt’s last photographic assistant, Calvin Shanks, had taken over the business. In those negatives, Hudson and his friends realized, were images of their childhoods, friends and neighbors. Years went by before Hudson, who became a magazine writer for several newspapers including the Los Angeles Times, made the purchase for what now seems a song.

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Depression-era Mississippi farmer Sylvester Harris made national news when he telephoned FDR with a personal appeal to the President that he help save Harris’s farm from foreclosure. The incident became a linchpin in Dr. Berkley Hudson’s research into the O.N. Pruitt-Shanks Collection, a vast and deep visual slice of otherwise unrecorded American history. (Courtesy, North Carolina Collection)

That Hudson not only purchased the negatives, but ultimately based a dissertation on a sampling of them, was an unlikely series of events. The project, carrying out a dream Hudson had harbored most of his adult life, gained impetus in Chicago in 1997, when four college professors urged the journalist to pursue his Ph.D. When Hudson was offered a Park Fellowship, he brought some of the Pruitt images to UNC. “It was an amazing constellation of things that happened,” recalled Hudson, who was teaching as a visiting professor in London in the summer of 2012. “They all appreciated these Pruitt pictures I showed them. UNC was the perfect place to be.”

Hudson availed himself not only of the journalism and mass communication school, but of an array of scholars in history, folklore, literature and music at UNC’s

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Center for the Study of the American South, at Duke University and other institutions.

He drew from the history of photography, the literature of lynching and race relations, ethnography, and oral history methods for a close reading of the photographs in a sweeping cultural critique that is broad and deep.

What drew Hudson to the collection were the different gazes at life captured through a single lens, not only in the posed portraits that were Pruitt’s bread and butter, but also spontaneous, quotidian shots documenting an unwritten part of history. Hudson’s own family portrait is part of what became his dissertation, and he brings to the black-and-white work a full palette of colors that could be gained only from having grown up in Mississippi.

As Hudson wrote, “…I have tasted the well water in a sharecropper shack. Once or twice, I picked cotton from its thorny husk. I baled hay a time or two. I cut Johnson’s grass with (a) swing blade and leveled tiny sweet gums with a Kaiser black on the side of a back road as I worked alongside of a convict chain gang crew from the Lowndes County prison farm. I have felt the touch of both black and white callused hands that did these kinds of work. I have heard their voices and their stories.”

In Pruitt’s images, Hudson saw encapsulated the innate contradiction of heaven and hell, beauty and ugliness, of a Delta community of two-lane blacktops and languid cypress swamps, catfish fries on gravel roads and juke joints in no-name alleys. It is a paradox that is coiled like a spring at the heart of William Faulkner or Tennessee Williams, a Columbus native who makes more than one walk-on in the Pruitt collection.

The photos take on new significance under the scrutiny of the scholar’s magnifying glass. The tools have literally changed as well. Because the negatives were so large, computer scanning technology allows researchers to “enter the negative,” as Hudson wrote, zooming in on clues such as license plates, belt buckles, items for sale on a counter.

In one reading, the photographs present a moment frozen in time never to be retrieved. In another sense, the images take on a life of their own and a new interpretation. Hudson had written that his dissertation became part of the meanings of the photos. And nearly a century after Pruitt first opened his studio, the digitized images were about to gain yet another afterlife, and find new meanings, connecting them to a world far beyond the Mississippi Delta.

Chapter Four tools for a new m achine The Game Changer at UNC , he bopped his head into Penny Muse Abernathy’s office to ask about taking news leadership, the capstone course.

Abernathy, newly appointed as Knight Chair to research business models for news, shook her head. Digital media economics, she told the student, ought to come first.

Leadership concepts were impractical, “airy fairy,” Abernathy liked to say, without the numbers to back them up.

Jed Williams (M.A., 2010) was dubious.

“I’m really not very good with numbers,” he said.

So he said. Less than four years later, Williams would be BIA /Kelsey’s go-to consultant on a digital media economics story with numbers as big as they come.

It was the $104 billion valuation of Facebook, the second largest IPO in U.S. history.

In the week leading up to the public offering, as much a watershed cultural event as it was a financial story, Williams was quoted in the Wall Street Journal, Advertising Age, Bloomberg , Investors Business Journal, Financial Times, USA Today, Fox Business, the BBC. At the height of the story, the former drive-time sports announcer gave multiple interviews in the course of an hour from his office in Northern Virginia.

The reporters’ angles varied. Their key question did not. How did Facebook Inc. founder Mark Zuckerberg arrive at a value exceeded only by the public offering of Visa? This astronomical number, for something as squishy and amorphous as Facebook, came at a time when General Motors had grown so skeptical of the site’s sales power that it was pulling ads from Facebook.

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Williams’ answer to the question, relying on an analysis he had done months earlier, was that the value was too high. To approach the $100 billion mark, he concluded, Facebook needed to invent ways to harness its power, to quantify it, to monetize it.

Such caution, as many investors learned when the stock prices slid the first day and continued to jackknife in the ensuing week, was justified.

Sitting back in her office at Carroll Hall and reading Jed Williams quoted, Penny Abernathy beamed. Williams had been paying attention. This was the classic, back-ofthe-envelope media economics she stressed, to look at the numbers but not get lost in the numbers. This just happened to be a large envelope.

“That’s what his analyst’s report focused on. What were the key drivers, and what did they have to do?” Abernathy said.

“Jed was one of the first analysts to take a good hard look at what was behind the numbers. And to throw notes of caution up there as to what they had to do to justify the valuation.”

For the J-school’s Business and Media track, Williams represents more than a colorful anecdote. In what evolved into a mini-M.B.A. tailored to media management since Abernathy arrived in 2008, Williams was the “test pilot,” in Abernathy’s phrase.

He was the initial student around whom the new concentration was built, and later formalized.

Like Williams, most were media professionals who did not arrive as Park Fellows with a crystal clear idea of where the transition would lead. Williams had enjoyed the chase of the play-by-play sports announcer, but began to sense talents he was not tapping into. The very product innovation teams and committees that most reporters tried to shirk, those related to the business side of media, were what energized him most.

“I got restless,” he said. “I felt there was a much bigger game to be played than the next job, the next bigger market. It was about the industry itself, the strategic side.”

Williams entered Carolina at a pivotal point not only for the news industry, but for the school. The combination of the renewed Knight initiative and the Park commitment meant that UNC could create a media management track, taking advantage of courses from the Kenan-Flagler Business School. A comparable degree program at Columbia and Northwestern would cost a student an estimated $110,000 in tuition.

The combination of innovation and funding allowed the school to recruit students with journalism experience. For Abernathy, who worked in news before she completed her M.B.A., the dual perspective was a distinct advantage to the Park Fellows.

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Williams entered Carolina at a pivotal point not only for the news industry, but for the school. The combination of the renewed Knight initiative and the Park commitment meant that UNC could create a media management track, taking advantage of courses from the Kenan-Flagler Business School.

“It’s helping them take those journalistic principles and figure out how to solve the real riddle right now, which is how to make money in news,” Abernathy said.

“There was just a real call for it. Journalism was in disarray. The business models that had supported us for 200 years were disintegrating. So it was really a matter of saying, ‘What could we provide that was uniquely of value?’”

By 2012, a half-dozen master’s students had completed the track, all with professional goals. Sometimes, the students have leap-frogged ahead, prompting a task force to study the possibility of an accelerated program.

For example, Nick Weidenmiller did well enough in a 2011 summer internship after his first year in the master’s program that ESPN hired him away that August as NBA programming director.

“It’s a wonderful curse,” said Dr. Anne Johnston. “We don’t want them to do that.

But on the other hand, I have to appreciate that they’re getting these wonderful opportunities.” The ideal is for students to come away with a strong conceptual foundation, in addition to professional skills. Johnston uses as a model a study by graduate student,

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Carla Babb, since hired by Voice of America, from the 2008 presidential campaign.

The study used content analysis of political ads, not only demonstrating the reporter’s broadcasting skills gained from Carolina Week, but also a sophisticated grasp of audience and political communication theory.

For Jed Williams, who also studied with Ryan Thornburg, Jim Hefner and Heidi Hennink-Kaminski, the program allowed him to delve deeper into questions and methods that interested him. His thesis on the use of Associated Press stories in a North Carolina newspaper market was published as a case study at Yale.

Walking into a consultant’s job from UNC was what Abernathy told the students was “finishing school.” There was no break-in period, any given assignment usually lasted no longer than three months. That meant the new hire was expected to hit the ground running with clients, analyze problems on the fly and move on them.

So when it came time for Jed Williams to rise at 5 a.m. at his apartment in northwest D.C., commute west to BIA/Kelsey’s office in Chantilly , Virginia, and be on his toes for all-day questions about the “valuation of the century,” he needed numbers. But he needed more than numbers.

“Generally, the press did a pretty good job. Still, when you see that many people rushing to the same idea,” Williams said of the Facebook stock debacle, “you have to be able to step back and say, ‘This is not a fully baked-out company.’ I feel good about the analysis we did.”

In the $104 billion question, how to make money from Facebook’s unprecedented repository of personal data, is the paradox of the golden goose. Facebook created a “sanctuary” for users, Williams observed, but too blunt a “monetizing” instrument might not only backfire for advertisers. It could destroy what attracts users to the format in the first place.

“If you have too many oversized, pulsating ads,” Williams noted, “they not only turn off the channel, they turn away from you.”

It was the classic media effects recipe, with a dash of social marketing, seasoned with drive-time lessons from his radio days. And for a student who was not very good with numbers, Williams caught on.

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High in the Sky at King5 There

when

wa s

no

new

Mark Briggs

medi a

(M.A.,

user

‘00)

guide

got

to

Carolina in 1998. Newspapers such as the VirginianPilot began launching websites in 1993, followed by the New York Times, which had a strong online presence by 1996. The first major news story broken online, the Lewinsky scandal, was in 1998, but by 2000, the dot.com boom had gone bust.

“It was just getting started when I was in the program,” Briggs recalled. “We were wondering if it was going to last.”

At Carolina, Briggs was influenced by Dr . Deb Aikat, the media futurist who expanded his thinking into revenue strategies rather than cookie-cutter “models.”

Briggs went on to write a manual for the newsroom, Journalism 2.0, downloaded some 200,000 times as of 2012, and he led workshops at the Poynter Institute.

But ultimately, he felt his calling was in carrying out the back-of-the-napkin projections and start-ups that he and his cohort had talked about in grad school. He liked being able to turn on a dime, rather than the slow process of academe, and felt that fast adaptation was what had been lacking in the industry.

He started Serra Media, a Seattle company that gives software support to hyperlocal websites, and was involved in Mud City News, Pegasus News in Dallas and GeekWire in Seattle, which was a compendium of technology beats where Briggs and a partner saw an opportunity.

As of 2011, he took a job as digital news director at the Belo-owned Seattle station King5-TV, where he can remain close to the newsroom action, but also be involved in long term business strategy. Briggs believes this era of turbulence is the “messy” part of the evolution process, the part without a how-to guide.

“When we look at it 10 years from now, it’s going to be a lot more clear,” he said. “For a long time, media companies didn’t have to innovate. Now, they’re trying to relearn, to see if those muscles still exist.”

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Dead Reckonings Th e 1 8 –t o – 3 4 a u d i e nc e :

As far back as the 1980s, it was the demographic mantra

of the news industry, the big drop-off, especially among women. Solving this sales quagmire was marketing Job One. One of the problems, as Rachel Mersey (Ph.D., ‘07) observed as a reporter for the Arizona Republic in Phoenix, and where she also worked for the NBC affiliate, was that news organizations were coming at the problem blind.

“We tried many things with limited market data and even less user/reader testing,” recalled Mersey, who decided to pursue a Ph.D. in order to master the research tools necessary to understand audiences.

When she arrived at Carolina, Professor Phil Meyer was just finishing The Vanishing Newspaper, and gave Mersey the proofs of two chapters to read. The book, Mersey wrote, came to frame her new thinking as an academic. She eventually published, Can Journalism Be Saved? The book, reexamining some of the assumptions underlying the debate over the future of news, implied a question also posed by a colleague at Northwestern, where Mersey is a tenured professor in 2012: “Should journalism be saved?”

Mersey spent her time at Carolina focused on studying audiences. Working primarily with Dr. Rhonda Gibson, she researched why people use the news products that they do, and how products can be created or redesigned to better serve them.

After a stint at the University of Minnesota, Mersey was recruited by Northwestern.

In 2012, she was in the early stages of a project examining international news audiences through the lens of Al Jazeera, a study that will connect Medill with Northwestern’s campus in Doha, Qatar. The study, Mersey anticipated, had potential to expand understanding of Arab identity and the role of media in the Middle East.

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The Human Factor W h e n t h e P a r k F e l l o wship

was

announced in the late 1990s, Calvin Hall (Ph.D., ‘04) was skeptical.

“Why would anyone need a doctorate in journalism? You just do journalism,” he remembered thinking. “But I hadn’t thought about the idea that journalism has a value beyond the button-pushing and knob-twisting that it sometimes gets reduced to.”

Hall was a non-tenure track assistant professor and the director of student publications at St. Augustine’s College in Raleigh, North Carolina, and had been a high school teacher. Initially, his focus was law, but he became interested in the function of mass communication in society, mass media history, issues of diversity in newsrooms, and the ways in which journalism is experienced.

Noting that much of journalism scholarship had been a quantitative, social science approach, Hall took a more humanistic approach in looking at the people involved in creating journalism. He looked at the relationship between class, race and journalism, and how newsroom practices historically worked against true diversity to fully inform readers.

The Park Fellowship led Hall to a career as an associate professor and assistant chair in the Department of Communication at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina.

“My job is meaningful because I’m doing something I want to do at the kind of institution where I wanted to be employed,” Hall said. “I like the department. I like the kinds of students we tend to get here at Appalachian. And I like to think that I’ve had some small impact on the students I get to teach.”

Hall in many ways went where the degree took him. And no longer did he doubt the value either in a doctorate in journalism, or in the study of the field.

“There is truth,” as Hall put it, “in the beauty of attempting to understand journalism and mass communication through its history, its theory, its literature, its ethics.”

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“What has been meaningful?

Meeting so many different people and being able to tell their stories and create change.”

Creating Change and knew the music scene, so when Amy Kingsley (M.A., ‘06) moved to Las Vegas to work for the alt weekly CityLife, she assumed she would be drafted for the arts beat and writing film reviews. After all, as a Park Fellow at UNC, she had split her studies between journalism and arts electives.

But the headlines dictated otherwise. For example, there was the foreclosure crisis, in which an estimated 80 percent of mortgages in the Las Vegas Valley were underwater. Writing for CityLife, Kingsley observed in 2011 how southern Nevada subdivisions all looked alike: “That makes it difficult to achieve what I’ve set out to do: Find the most underwater home in the valley,” Kingsley wrote. “Unlike Lake Mead, these houses don’t come with watermarks or bathtub rings to show how they’ve fared in the turbulent housing market. Underwater or paid off – they all look the same.”

So instead of covering clubs or going to opening nights, Kingsley wrote about bank robbers, graft and people who picked up scrap metal for a living. She is a news reporter.

Kingsley credits the Park experience with getting her the job, and said the skills she learned in journalism courses were put to use during the last six years of her career.

S h e h a d w o r k e d f o r t h e a t e rs

“I’ve loved it,” wrote Kingsley, who covered redevelopment spending in downtown Las Vegas, and discovered great gaps in spending in the historically black neighborhood.

“What has been meaningful? Meeting so many different people and being able to tell their stories and create change.”

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Stepping Stones Lif e is a ri v e r cr o ssing , and his goal is to get across.

Some stones take one closer to the riverbank, others are lateral moves, Anton Zuiker (M.A., ‘04) once wrote. His parents taught him to make the best of either situation.

But in his case, a straight crossing would be much less interesting. Zuiker once told his wife that he wanted to be a national magazine editor within ten years.

They were sitting on a boulder near a grove of mango trees, having lost their way outside a village in Vanuatu in the South Pacific. Zuiker was working for the Peace Corps, about to make his way around the world, work for a newspaper, publish a book and get a close look at malaria, dengue, Hansen’s disease, filariasis and other diseases.

When Zuiker began his Park Fellowship in the medical journalism track to study infectious diseases, he happened to be working with an expert on coronaviruses when Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS ) struck. This led to his thesis project, a New Yorker-style narrative on HIV infection in North Carolina. Zuiker meanwhile organized the Narratives of HIV series.

“So, my course of study,” Zuiker wrote, “informed me, connected me, inspired me.”

At Duke University, Zuiker became communications director for the Department of Medicine, using his journalism background, UNC science writing training, and social media expertise. But his day job represents only one side of what Zuiker is involved in.

He founded an international science community, ScienceOnline, which has monthly meetings across North America. He has also organized narrative storytelling events in his home city of Durham.

In 2011, Zuiker was appointed to the advisory board of the same program where he earned his master’s degree. This had not been on the list of goals he outlined for his wife years before in the mango grove in the South Pacific.

But it was enough of a crossing over that Anton Zuiker sat down and penned a handwritten note to the person he felt had made it possible, Roy H. Park, Jr. “… (S)ince I graduated in 2004, I’ve enjoyed an exciting, challenging and rewarding career that owes much to the opportunity afforded me by the fellowship,” Zuiker wrote.

“I can’t thank you and the foundation enough!”

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A World Audience N o t a d a y g o e s b y in N e w Y o r k C i t y

that Lauren Frohne (M.A., ‘10) does not

contemplate how lucky this all was.

She was a writer working at a small PR and marketing firm in Chapel Hill, had dabbled in the J-school a bit as an undergrad in English, and decided to apply for the Park Fellowship. Seeking some marketable skills and a more defined path, she had taken two of Laura Ruel’s multimedia classes and Jock Lauterer’s “Exploring the Visual World.” Frohne saw what they created, and wanted in.

Focusing on multimedia, she spent her first summer in the Galapagos Islands programming “Living Galapagos” and creating a short documentary video, and also traveled to London to produce a website for Kenan-Flagler Business School.

The experiences guided her toward video storytelling, with her photojournalism classes culminating in the award-winning Powering a Nation in the summer of 2010.

The project opened doors on the job market before Frohne had left school, and after an internship at the Roanoke Times, she worked for almost two years at the Boston Globe as a video producer.

Frohne went on assignment in Haiti and in Spain. She covered Occupy Boston, and staffed the Boston Marathon packing only an iPhone, which was part of the challenge, and shot the Red Bull Cliff Diving event, and got to work with the writer Billy Baker.

After 18 months with the paper, Frohne was offered a job at the international human rights nonprofit Open Society Foundations, to produce multimedia content.

Leaving the Globe was difficult, but the chance was too important to pass up.

“The most fulfilling part of the past two years since I’ve graduated is having the opportunity to tell people’s stories to a much bigger audience than I could have imagined while still in school,” Frohne wrote. “Because of my Park Fellowship I am where I am now, which is exactly where I wanted to be.”

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Fuel for Tomorrow S a r a P e a ch

(m.a., ‘09) has disproved conventional thinking

about the shrinking prospects for public service journalism.

She covers the environment, and makes money doing it.

Peach came to UNC from a non-profit public relations job in Ohio at Rural Action.

With an environmental studies degree, she enrolled in multimedia courses, a choice that paid dividends even before she left the program. Peach became News21’s first student editor-in-chief for the project Powering a Nation, demonstrating her organizational abilities. She meanwhile had an opportunity to co-author an article with Dr. Barbara Friedman and Dr. Anne Johnston, presenting the research at an academic conference.

After graduation, the school tapped Peach to help lead and teach in the Reese Felts Digital Newsroom, and she meanwhile began a successful freelance business, making contacts with the help of faculty including Ryan Thornburg. She filmed the arrest of a NASA scientist at a protest of mountaintop removal in West Virginia, covered the United Nations climate change conference in Copenhagen and documented citizen efforts to stop construction of a coal-fired power plant in Ohio.

The Park Fellowship enabled Peach to travel to the Florida Keys for her thesis on the threat to the coral reefs.

“It was terrific to have a few months to focus on a topic that I cared about – and that I still report on today,” said Peach, who once described the focus of her environmental video storytelling as “things that worry me.”

As of 2012, Peach will continue to train new journalists not only in the digital tools, but in her area of expertise. She designed and teaches a course in environmental reporting, and writes for the Associated Press, Chemical Engineering & News and other national publications.

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Shape Shifting Th e d a y t h e y s t e pp e d o ff t h e p l a n e

in Cuba with

Dean Richard Cole’s delegation, the U.S. Senate had just passed the Helms Burton Act, co-sponsored by North Carolina’s U.S. Senator Jesse Helms, to tighten the embargo on Cuba. It was the first chance Jon Elliston (M.A., ‘00) had to travel to Cuba.

Elliston was a beginning journalist and amateur historian who had applied for a Park Fellowship after a try at Communication Studies had proven unsatisfying.

The fellowship was perfectly suited to Elliston’s needs; not only was he being paid to further his research, but as Cole’s assistant, he would have the chance to travel.

“So here we were, from North Carolina, Jesse Helms’ home state,” Elliston said, expecting hostility from the Cuban hosts. “They couldn’t have been nicer. They were fascinated with us. That forged friendships that have lasted…good Lord, 16 years.”

Elliston, who had written a history on psychological operations used by the CIA in 1954 Guatemala, was attempting to carve out a career in alternative media. He later worked at the Mountain Xpress in Asheville and the Independent in Durham, and it was the exposure to seasoned professionals that raised the level of his journalism.

“The most useful thing for me was seeing and interacting with professionals, seeing their methods, people who had made this their life’s work,” Elliston said. “I was kind of self-taught.”

The online era, he said, has created opportunity but uncertainty. For example, in summer 2012 at Carolina Public Press, the nonprofit news site in Asheville where Elliston works, he was involved in a public records request undertaken by five news organizations against the City of Asheville and the Police Department over missing evidence. Elliston found the joint endeavor exciting; but by the same token, he recognized that the story had been broken by the Gannett newspaper, the Asheville Citizen-Times, and shuddered at the notion of a city without a newspaper.

“It is just taking a lot of collaboration and shape-shifting,” Elliston said. “I would hate to see the dailies go.”

His current passion is a historical book about an integrated children’s summer camp near Brevard that was attacked by locals in 1963. The working title comes from a series he wrote for the Mountain Xpress, “Cruel Summer.”

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Phil Daquila takes a quick break from shooting in Newtok, Alaska, in July 2009 for the News21 project, Powering a Nation.

“Everything Fell into Place” E nr o l l ing in t h e v isu a l c o mmunic a t i o n t r a c k a s

a master’s student,

Phil Daquila (M.A., ‘09) was warned that there were no guarantees as to projects he would be involved in. A year later, he found himself shooting video of the president’s inauguration for the Washington Post.

“Everything fell into place for me and my colleagues,” said Daquila, who between 2007 and 2009 as a Park Fellow traveled to Chile, Thailand, Alaska, Dominican Republic and around the U.S. to produce stories, including working on a team covering the Special Olympics Winter Games in Boise, Idaho.

“These were remarkable offers to learn on the job – and to do so while seeing the world a bit.”

Daquila came to UNC from Baseball America, a Durham magazine and book publisher where he was design director. He was enthralled by the emerging use of multimedia, and particularly struck by the documentary projects that were winning awards for UNC journalism students. Daquila at first wanted to learn it all.

Ultimately, he chose documentary film, preferring to have a depth of knowledge about one platform.

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“I see myself as a burgeoning film producer and editor with a real passion for documentary storytelling,” he said. “And that view and those real skills would undoubtedly be foundering if left to my own devices.”

His new skills opened doors he had never considered. After teaching at Elon University, Daquila returned to UNC to work as a digital producer for the Center for European Studies. There, he designs web sites and develops video and social media outreach, and he also freelances for news organizations including the Wall Street Journal.

Daquila now looks back at the Park Fellowship, and his experience with News21, as the most important developmental moment in his life.

“I see myself as a burgeoning film producer and editor with a real passion for documentary storytelling,” he said. “And that view and those real skills would undoubtedly be foundering if left to my own devices.”

His next goal is to develop an international reporting project, by seeking to gain a grant for a documentary film on the political changes taking place in Croatia as it seeks to join the EU. “For me, my chosen path feels like both a tall and noble challenge,” Daquila said, “and I cannot imagine a career better than that.”

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Advance Guard I n t h e fin a l a n a l y sis ,

the storytell-

ing tools improve and the media platforms evolve, but a key challenge is to preserve the function of journalism to protect and serve the public. A Park Fellow on the front line in that effort is Nikole HannahJones (M.A., ‘03), an investigative reporter for ProPublica. Hannah-Jones was a history major, and applied for a fellowship to gain formal journalism training, retooling her scholarly knowledge and research skills for reporting.

With her mentors, professors Harry Amana and Chuck Stone, she gained that and more. Through their network of contacts, she launched a journalism career, first covering the predominantly black Durham Public Schools for the Raleigh News & Observer, and then writing about race and class for the Oregonian.

She brought not only broad perspective to her work, from having worked across the United States and in Barbados, Ghana and Cuba, but also personal insight: Her father was born on a Mississippi farm in the era of sharecropping and Jim Crow.

The list of awards in her first decade as a journalist attests to UNC’s combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods. Hannah-Jones’ resume suggests she not only learned to crunch numbers on deadline and get the answers right. She also appeared to ask important questions, identifying the fissures in society.

Among the results were her role on a team investigating Portland’s failure to enforce fair housing violations, and a cover-up of that decision, leading lawmakers to force the city action against landlords. Hannah-Jones also exposed incorrect statistics that had led to Portland being reported as a sex trafficking hub. Her tools include computer-assisted database reporting, and her platforms, video, multimedia and on-air reporting. But Hannah-Jones’ investigative reporting model is from the history books: That is the anti-lynching muckraker Ida B. Wells, who died in 1931 and who once wrote: “The people must know before they can act, and there is no educator to compare with the press.”

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“The stories of marginalized people were not being told, and I felt like I could do something about that.”

Yet in the digitization of for-profit news, Hannah-Jones experienced the doubleedge sword. Increasingly, she observed quantity trumping quality, with reporters under pressure to post items that had limited impact, value or context. In that climate, there was even less focus on the disenfranchised, a key constituency for the investigative reporter.

“The stories of marginalized people were not being told, and I felt like I could do something about that,” said Hannah-Jones, who joined ProPublica in late 2011, and now works on projects about waste and discrimination in federal housing.

After watching most of her cohort go into jobs in public relations and health communications, Hannah-Jones said landing an investigative reporting job was a “blessing.”

“This is the first time in my career I’ve been able to spend months working on a project,” she said. “I would never have gotten here without the fellowship,” she said.

“I know that hard work pays off, but everyone works hard. They also had connections, and a pipeline.”

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Chapter Five the v iew from the summit

“A better world begins with me.”

– Anonymous quote, from the desk of Roy H. Park

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The Strongest Link Th e r e is a s a y ing t h a t a ch a in

is only as strong as its weakest link. This is one

way to look at it.

Yet when climbing mid-way up a sheer rock face, another way to look at a ruptured chain is the short list of available options. One is to turn around. The other is to attach a stronger link to the section that held fast, give it a hard tug or two, and resume climbing.

It was midnight in Okinawa, summer 2012, and Glenn Scott (Ph.D., ‘06) was finishing up a Fulbright teaching year. The June darkness was rainy, typhoony, windy, muggy, moldy, not like home back at Elon University in North Carolina. With the Internet connection in and out, Scott was typing emails on an old laptop the size of a toaster oven, big enough to cook a pizza, the keyboard in Japanese.

Traveling with his wife and son, he had spent the year teaching Media English and American Culture & Society. The students listened to the BBC and Voice of America broadcasts to practice their English, very basic stuff. That was a surprise to a tenured professor. And whether it was going back to basics again, or living this far from home, or sitting up alone in the late night hour, the winding trail that led here was on Scott’s mind.

Looking back on it, he had left the beaten path not far from here. The other reporters in the newsroom in Honolulu thought he was bonkers, at his age, to leave that kind of salary on the table and go back to school, again.

Scott, whose family was from Hawaii, was covering a business beat for the Honolulu Advertiser and teaching mornings at the University of Hawaii. He had hit the big 5-0 and behind him was a long stint as metro columnist in California at the Modesto Bee. There, he had always been one in the newsroom to coach reporters and lead workshops and brown bags on writing. It was the only time the staff really talked about the way to spot stories, investigate them, structure them.

In Poynter’s heyday in the early ‘90s, the institute once sponsored National Writing Day workshops by region, before long-form narrative writing was a trend in the big leagues. Scott did a talk on “The Breaking News Narrative.” The wash of elation and fright that he experienced has since come over him many times walking into

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a classroom. But the memory of that particular time stands out like an actor’s first opening night.

Expecting a cozy audience, Scott had made handouts for about 25 people. That was mistake number one. More than 200 people showed up. The room was large, but still packed to the gills, people sitting along the front walls, sitting on the floor behind Scott as he spoke. Poynter was taping every presentation, and attached to Scott’s shirt collar was a microphone on a short cord, jerking him back like a tether each time he tried to move too far or turn around.

Meanwhile, the air conditioning had failed in the close, stuffy room. Scott, his shirt soaked with perspiration, realized that he was surrounded by people waiting for him to say, well, something. It was terrifying. He began to talk. Only later did he find out how it went.

“When I started at the Advertiser,” Scott recalled, “one of the reporters walked up and said, ‘I remember seeing you talk at the conference. I really loved what you said, and I went back to my editor and told him that you argued for writing without nut grafs.’ Which made me wonder what terrible damage I had done.”

But he already knew teaching was for him. With a new wife and a two-year-old son, the question was how, and ultimately after years of having looked into Ph.D. programs and thinking he had missed his chance, Scott was offered the Park Fellowship.

He became part of an exceptionally tight-knit Ph.D. cohort, a fact that helped him through a bumpy transition. Scott’s wife, who was from Japan and spoke limited English at that time, was home with their toddler son while Scott was mostly gone. Scott’s adviser and chair was in failing health while Scott was working on his

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dissertation. With no summer income, Scott worked for $10 per hour doing data entry on a research project, and cashed in some of his McClatchy stock from the Bee to make ends meet. Even during the paid winter months, the family sometimes squeaked by with $5 left in the bank at the end of the month.

Winning a top student honor at the International Communication Association was therefore a lift. When Scott’s name was called and he went up to pick up the award, however, the presenter scoffed.

“The man who presented the award looked at me, and said, ‘Oh, well. You’re not really a grad student,’” Scott recalled. “I wanted to say, ‘I dare you to live my life for a month and tell me I am not a grad student.’”

Scott was the oldest in the cohort, but only one of five mid-career doctoral students in his group returning to school. Coming in at the Park Fellowships’ five-year mark, the incoming doctoral students reflected the belief that seasoned journalists would add skill and practical insight to the research agenda, and to their teaching careers.

Scott’s classmates included Johanna Cleary, a veteran producer at Alabama Public Television hired to teach at University of Florida; Juanita Darling, the former Los Angeles Times international correspondent who landed on the faculty of San Francisco State University; Calvin Hall, a longtime teacher and student publications director at St. Augustine’s College, by 2012 assistant chair at Appalachian State; and Glen Feighery, a career reporter and copy editor for Gannett, who became a tenured professor at the University of Utah.

The students were bringing their life experiences to grad school; but at the same time, grad school was a life experience as well. At the same time that some of Scott’s classmates were helping to take care of a Ph.D. student from a previous class, Jim D’Aleo, who was dying of cancer, Scott’s adviser’s health deteriorated. Ultimately, the professor, Robert Stevenson , died of a heart attack. Scott, the scholar’s last grad student, helped box up the professor’s papers, go through his files, clear out his office.

“After all those experiences, it took me years to stop waking at 4 a.m. in a panic,” recalled Scott, who finished his dissertation on digital news after being hired at Elon.

“Don’t let anyone say that academia is not the ‘real world.’”

It’s hard to isolate, exactly, what makes a good teacher, and what each person brings. At Elon, Scott tended to take on everything. Every new course sounded like one he wanted to teach, and in eight years, he taught a dozen different courses. Scott’s job description as student newspaper adviser at The Pendulum suggested he brought the same light touch to teaching that he brought to writing.

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“I tell them that, flat out, that I’m a messenger from those who came before,” wrote Scott, who imagines his students as journalists, public servants and teachers in their own right. “I needed the Park funding to complete this link in the chain.”

“Provide signatures and account numbers, occasional donuts, scattered criticism, professional hints, emotional support, dubious grimaces,” Scott wrote of his duties at the time, “and small but necessary injections of reality.”

Teaching, for Scott, is a product of who he is and all that he has done. He approached it with the same sense of obligation that he once approached journalism. It is partly an obligation to the people who taught him and inspired him 40 years ago, then followed his career for decades. It is Scott’s turn now, he tells students.

“I tell them that, flat out, that I’m a messenger from those who came before,” wrote Scott, who imagines his students as journalists, public servants and teachers in their own right. “I needed the Park funding to complete this link in the chain.”

On the last day of his Media English class in Okinawa, one of Scott’s students took a group photo of the class, and Scott posted it online. Sanders LaMont, a good guy, his old executive editor from Modesto and later ombudsman at the Sac Bee, spotted the photo on Facebook and posted a comment.

“You always were a great teacher, Glenn.”

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The Fixer H av ing chi l d r e n ch a ng e s y o u , t h a t ’ s t ru e .

But Nathan Clendenin was

already changed. Africa changed him.

He’d been waiting tables in Chapel Hill, working as a cook to support himself before he joined the program at UNC. When it came time to choose a master’s thesis in photojournalism and multimedia, he met this man visiting Chapel Hill from a black township in South Africa, a pastor named Vincent. Vincent said, come to Africa.

With the stipend from the Park Fellowship, Clendenin did.

“He was my fixer,” Clendenin said. “He found all the stories.”

The project was on AIDS, poverty and faith, and how faith sustains people.

In photos and audio, Clendenin documented the story of the township gravedigger, standing by row after row of neatly dug graves. There were so many funerals that at times the singing from one threatened to drown out another, and they would pause and sing together. Vincent found the photographer a labor and delivery nurse who quit the maternity ward to work where she was need more, in a hospice. And there was a group of orphans.

For Clendenin, it was more than an assignment. He began to experience life in a different way, feeling that a prayer had been answered. He returned to Africa a second time, deciding that this was the work he wanted to do. Not only had his Park Fellowship helped him find his calling, he also found his wife: In the program, he met Rebecca “Janie” Folmar, and they were married. Back in Durham, where his wife went to work for a nonprofit, he started a commercial studio business, doing videos for Duke Medical Center, shooting weddings, whatever he needed to do to pay for the nonprofit side of his photography business.

On the last day of his last trip to the township in South Africa, he took the grandmother of the family he was visiting shopping for groceries, and he loaded them down.

It wouldn’t last long, maybe a few days. That was something, more than nothing.

The family had a new baby in the home, born just like Clendenin’s newborn son, innocent and unmarked. But there would be little chance for him. How can these two babies be living in the same world? There are simply no words. Clendenin has sounds and photographs. That is something, much more than nothing.

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The Gauntlet Th e y h a d a n a w a r d - winning n e wsp a p e r ,

and every year for the past five

years, they took top honors in their journalism divisions. That wasn’t enough. They wanted to raise the bar, to revolutionize and develop a format that could keep up with breaking news, gather up-to-the-minute polls, and use video, audio, slideshows and hyperlinks to enhance their reportage and storytelling.

So on Feb. 1, 2012, after months of planning and preparation, the staff of the Gauntlet in Bradenton, Florida, made an announcement to the readership. They were making the transition from paper copy to online news source. That day, they rolled out a web-only publication for the 9th through 12th graders at Saint Stephen’s Episcopal School’s Upper School.

To lead the first live edition, journalism teacher Nadia Watts (M.A., ‘02) shot a picture of the Gauntlet student staff, holding their donated, school-issued iPads aloft.

The move from paper to online had been suggested to the students by Watts, a Park Fellow who had been a reporter in Washington, D.C. and taught at Elon University before moving to Florida.

“This will change our class in every way,” Watts had told the students. “We’re opening ourselves up to the entire world here; for the first time, anyone anywhere will be able to read our stories.”

But much like predicting the impact one teacher can have, there was no crystal ball that revealed where this foray into the wider world was about to lead one of Watts’ brightest students.

In an article in the first e-edition of the Gauntlet, the eight-person staff made a cogent case for what was to be gained with the platform shift. Editor Amber Falkner, a senior, spoke of the ability to do constant updates, write stories “truly of-the-moment,” and expand the audience beyond the school campus into the community.

Managing Editor Monique Chicvak pointed out that the students would improve their journalism, because they would now publish more. Not only would students be able to practice mobile journalism from the field, but they would be able to represent more voices and viewpoints, tell more stories, cover more sports and entertainment, reflect a wider world.

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There were no more page limits, no more word limits. Everyone would be a photographer, and they would file two stories a day but still be professional, Falkner said.

In a sense, they appeared completely prepared for careers in the media, and had not even left high school.

Watts’ own career seemed preparation for the venture. She became interested in teaching journalism while working as a publications editor for the Freedom Forum, then won a Park Fellowship.

She focused her research on pedagogy, knowing she wanted to teach young people, and was at UNC in time to assist in the massive teen media research project run by Professor Jane Brown and Dr. Carol Pardun. T heir five-year, $2.6 million project funded by the National Institutes of Health investigated the impact of the media on adolescents’ sexual attitudes and behavior.

For Watts, theory and pedagogy came into practice when she and her husband moved to Bradenton to take jobs at an independent prep school. She teaches journalism and AP English at the school, where her two young sons are also students, and in 2005 helped students launch the Gauntlet.

“Everything I learned as a student and a graduate adjunct has influenced the teacher I am today, from the lessons I teach in basic reporting to our work on mass communication theory and content analysis,” Watts observed. “My graduate studies at Chapel Hill were my inspiration to work with students who would soon become active media consumers.”

During Watts’ tenure, the Saint Stephen’s Gauntlet staff won awards from the Columbia Scholastic Press Association and the Florida Scholastic Press Association.

But where things really started to get interesting is when one of Watts’ students, class of 2012 graduate Aiste Zalepuga, Florida Student Journalist of the Year, was runner-up for the Journalism Education Association’s Student Journalist of the Year.

This was no garden-variety high school journalism entry, not the sort of essay that gets a pat on the head for clean grammar and good intentions. It was serious, passionate, global. Zalepuga not only possessed the core writing abilities, she also understood how to use the new tools to augment them for a historical purpose.

First, some pertinent background on Zalepuga, who was bound for Yale. Apart from being an Honor Society student who played piano since age 4 and took up yoga at 9, she is of Lithuanian descent. She speaks and writes fluently in Lithuanian, partly from having spent summers in Lithuania.

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“My graduate studies at Chapel Hill were my inspiration to work with students who would soon become active media consumers.”

The student became fascinated by the recent history of Lithuania, a 50-year agony that began with Nazi Germany’s extermination of some 200,000 Lithuanians.

This was followed by the Soviet Union’s post-war annexation of the Baltic state, and deportation of some 350,000 to Siberia. The country did not regain independence until 1991, and was not rid of a Russian military presence until 1993.

Zalepuga’s entry dealt with this recent history and her own heritage. The judges found it “impressive,” the “best” self-analysis they had read, and said the coverage was so sophisticated, including interviews with diplomats and policymakers, that they wanted to read “every word” in the packet.

In February, the student had also emailed the editor of Gen Dobry! an e-zine of Polish ancestry. She was looking for prospective interview subjects on a digital oral history archive she had begun, to preserve Lithuanian history. The email contained links to interviews the teen had already collected, and the editor found the email so compelling that it was reprinted. In part, Zalepuga explained the purpose.

She said she was shocked that teens like her, living abroad, knew so little of the “incredible moment” in Lithuanian history that had happened relatively recently.

She wanted to collect the stories, in people’s own words, before they were lost forever.

“We’ve never lived in a Lithuania that wasn’t ‘free’ or felt the tensions of the Cold War,” Zalepuga wrote. “If individuals with a Lithuanian heritage of my generation, or future generations, are to understand what happened just a few decades ago, then those stories must be captured now.”

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The student, who had already interviewed a Lithuanian president, bishop and TV broadcaster, wrote that she wanted to preserve the histories digitally so that they

would be available for coming generations, “no matter their location.”

Zalepuga’s journalism teacher had spoken about the “legacy” the school’s newspaper staff would be leaving to Saint Stephen’s, and how the school would become a resource and a part of a wider community.

Aiste Zalepuga had already picked up the gauntlet and run with it. In this case, the pebble tossed in the water was making rings not only across the surface of time zones. It was circling wider and wider through time itself, connecting the legacy of the past to the future. For Zalepuga, it had begun within the walls of a small upper school building on the Gulf Coast, where her journalism teacher, a Park Fellow from UNC , decided the students ought to put out a cutting-edge newspaper. And so Nadia Watts’ students did.

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Final Exam “ I t I S a s t upi d qu e s t i o n , ”

the man at the homeless campsite agreed. “But you

seem like a nice person, so I’ll tell you.”

They were standing near a downtown soup kitchen in Tucson, Arizona. Deborah Kaplan (Ph.D., ‘05) had just explained to the 6-foot-5 stranger that she was a graduate student conducting a study of the homeless, the basis of what later became Dispatches from the Street. After hesitantly sizing Kaplan up, the stranger, and the fellow residents who lived in a hidden, make-do campsite in the desert outskirts, gradually showed her the answers to a central question that yielded 500 pages of notes and interview transcripts.

The question was, how do you get by?

“It’s horrible,” the man told Kaplan. “Between the drugs, the alcohol and the violence. Really, the only way to find out what it’s like out here is to do what we do, live like we live.”

Whether her interview subjects knew it or not, the intense, chain-smoking researcher in the beat-up car was no stranger to the jagged edge of town. She may have been more at home in the trenches than she initially felt in the halls of academe. Hers is a story of metamorphosis, and of how other lives can be affected in the process.

Before accepting a Park Fellowship at age 48, Kaplan had worked as a crime reporter at the Detroit Free Press, running down arrest warrants on gang slayings and fire bombings for the final edition.

But taking to heart the Society of Professional Journalists prescription to give “voice to the voiceless,” the Chicago native also covered people on the margins.

The topics ranged from strippers to migrant workers, from patriot groups to people with disabilities. In 1989 at the Metro Times, the alt weekly where Kaplan later worked as a news editor after leaving the Free Press, she wrote the cover story “Prophets of Rage.” It was an early chronicle of Detroit’s fledgling rap scene as it gained attention from major record labels, and was an example of cutting-edge reporting.

But Kaplan’s central issue as a journalist was the struggle of the homeless. In a signature method she would later draw upon as an academic, she used immersion-style reporting, to the point of camping out with the homeless. The thinking was that only

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by drawing close could she present an accurate picture. And only an accurate picture could effect change.

The engaged approach to reporting equated with engaged teaching. In Detroit, she launched the youth-run, mass circulation tabloid Motown Teen while enrolled in an accelerated undergrad program at Cincinnati’s Union Institute, an early “university without walls.” The hands-on experience with Detroit youth shaped the reporter’s emerging teaching philosophy, which she would one day put into practice at the University of Washington.

Moving from the gritty backstreets of Detroit to the leafy Carolina campus was not a seamless transition. Kaplan agonized with colleagues over how to integrate her sociological focus with journalism. At happy hours with the cohort, she endlessly debated the merits of the “done” dissertation versus the perfect dissertation. Characteristically, she attempted the second.

“I am a non-traditional student, having toughed my way into newspapers without the benefit of a college degree,” Kaplan wrote in a job application to the University of Washington, where she began teaching in 2003, before completing her dissertation two years later. “I returned to college at age 40, when I was at mid career and increasingly frustrated by the routines of reporting.”

Flattening the conventional top-down teacher-student dynamic, Kaplan’s approach was to build on the knowledge students already possess through their lived experiences. She revived the literary journalism models of the 1960s, by then renamed narrative writing, and began a website to publish UW students’ journalism.

The reserved, chilly air of academe was not Kaplan’s natural habitat. But several years into her University of Washington post, with the success of her teaching and two book contracts in hand, she became more confident in her new identity as a professor, and the impact she could have with her research. Just as she was hitting her stride, came the unexpected. Kaplan was found dead of a heart attack in the apartment where she lived alone.

A few days after friends gathered for a memorial, Kaplan’s students picked up their exam questions. One wrote to Kaplan’s friend and fellow professor, David Silver, of the fear of never knowing the answer to the question.

“However, I take heart that during our meetings Deb let me know in the only way Deb could that I was heading down the right path,” the student added. “My scholarship and my life have been influenced tremendously by her.”

The View from the Summit

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“They will be the students of a Roy H. Park Fellow’s students. . . all bound together like pages in a book, still being written.”

Meanwhile, at the National Communication Association conference in San Antonio, one of Kaplan’s grad students had won the award for best paper for a communications study of the zoo. Kaplan had been a key member of Tema Milstein’s committee, and in her communications seminar had introduced her to theories on social resistance and power.

The following year, Milstein received her Ph.D., and began teaching at the University of New Mexico. In 2011, she received the university’s Outstanding New Teacher of the Year Award. In 2012, she traveled to New Zealand as a Fulbright Scholar to continue her study of communication and wildlife tourism. Milstein’s teaching philosophy is to engage students in “transformative learning.”

Her hope, Milstein wrote, is for students to “apply what they learn to their work and their lives.”

They will be the students of a Roy H. Park Fellow’s students. They are twice removed, but all bound together like pages in a book, still being written.

Coda

H

where we began.

Where are the Park Fellows now, and what has become of them? It appears, in the end, that the sum may be more than the individual parts. The significance of the answer, as Dean Cole predicted, lies not in a quantitative ‘x’ number of assistant professors who trained ‘y’ advertising executives or web designers. It is rather qualitative, a change that is interdisciplinary and goes to theory, thought and practice, imprinted like a heat map on the face of journalism and mass communications.

The blue books on the shelves are not the epilogue but the preface. They demonstrate doors that have been unlocked, windows that have been thrown open, in preparation to go forward and teach others, to put these theories and methods into practice. This was the domino effect of the Park Fellowship, affecting both the research agenda of mass communication and the mastery of the craft. Technology and business are balanced with ethics, law and history, like the stout concrete pillars at the entrance to Carroll Hall.

After Roy H. Park died, his widow found a quotation from an unsigned author on his desk, “A better world begins with me.” With the fellowships, through the fellows’ lives and careers, there is a second, unwritten part of that thought.

A better world begins with me, but does not end with me. I pass my tools along. e r e w e a rri v e b a c k a t t h e r e s e a rch qu e s t i o n

Appendix A The Park Fellows as of 2012*

1999 Stephanie Lyn Beck, M.A., is a news producer at WRAL-TV, Raleigh.

Scott Gregory Cantrell, M.A., is employed in marketing.

Amy Marie Fulk, M.A., is the president and owner of 30 Public Relations. Fulk also served as the Chief of Staff in the Office of the N.C.. Senate President Pro Tempore for five years.

Amy Kathleen Griswold, M.A, is ELA content specialist at Measurement, Inc. in Durham, North Carolina.

Christopher Pattison Hammond, M.A. Jason Emerson Hartke, M.A., is the vice president of national policy at the U.S. Green Building Council. Hartke received his Ph.D. in pubic policy at George Mason University.

Patricia Marie Kinneer, Ph.D. Margaret Little Martin, M.A. Jane Gibson Natt, M.A., is employed by the American Association of School Administrators in Washington, D.C. Jennifer Jan Schaming-Ronan, M.A., is a legislative management officer for the Department of State Bureau of Legislative Affairs.

*Information on Park alumni obtained from UNC records and web searches.

Alumni are encouraged to update their records by emailing jomc@unc.edu.

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Shannon Thorn, M.A., writes and edits educational materials for health professionals.

She also holds an M.S. in speech-language pathology from UNC and is a practicing speechlanguage pathologist.

Jason David Sugar, M.A., is lead copywriter for Staples.

Jon Paul Tkach, M.A., is a reporter for Voice of America in Washington, D.C. Amy Lynn Whelan, M.A., is in public relations and communications in the San Francisco Bay area.

Ericka Nicole Wilcher, M.A., is senior marketing specialist at SAS, a software ventures firm in Washington, D.C.

2000 “The Park Fellowship meant everything to me; it gave me a great education and time to dream of possibilities. It helped me to see a part of the world I had never seen and encouraged me to imagine bigger accomplishments for myself.”

Krista Bremer | Associate Publisher, The Sun

“UNC offered a strong mentoring education, enabling me to work in tandem with learned professors and gain an appreciation of academic culture… Without the Park Fellowship, I wouldn’t be happily applying my professional experience and my graduate education to the next generation of aspiring practitioners and scholars in journalism.”

Scott Maier | Associate Professor, University of Oregon

Edward McQueen Alwood, Ph.D., is a full professor at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. As a Fulbright Scholar, he traveled to Bulgaria and taught journalism to students from 23 countries.

Krista Bremer, M.A., an associate publisher for The Sun, is an American essayist whose work has appeared in national and international magazines and news outlets including O, The Oprah Magazine, MORE, Utne Reader, The Sunday Times (London), Aquila Asia (Indonesia), CNN and MSN. Her writing has won a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a Pushcart Prize, and a North Carolina Arts Fellowship. Her essay “My Accidental Jihad” was also cited in the Best American Spiritual Writing series. She is currently working on a memoir.

Appendix A: The Park Fellows

Mark Briggs, M.A., is the director of digital media for King5 Television in Seattle and a Ford Fellow in Entrepreneurial Journalism at the Poynter Institute. Briggs, the co-founder of Serra Media, a Seattle-based technology company, has also written several books, including Entrepreneurial Journalism: How to Build What’s Next for News and Journalism 2.0: How to Survive and Thrive in the Digital Age. Crystal Dale Carson, M.A., is in marketing and communications.

Jonathan Bruce Elliston, M.A., is a reporter for Carolina Public Press in Asheville and is currently working on his third book.

Ryan Daniel Gilsenan, M.A., is an attorney practicing in Charleston, South Carolina.

Cynthia Renee Greenlee-Donnell, M.A., is a doctoral student at Duke University in African-American studies.

Dorothy R. Hardee, M.A., is editor of the Street.com, New York City.

Carrie James, M.A. Scott Maier, Ph.D., is an associate professor at the University of Oregon, where he is journalism coordinator, administering the undergraduate journalism curriculum. His research on news accuracy and credibility has garnered national awards and international attention, and he has partnered with major research initiatives in Europe.

Kevin A. McCormack, M.A., is a web specialist for the Atlanta Thrashers.

Kathy Olson, Ph.D., is an associate professor at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania.

Olson is an expert on the conflicts that arise between First Amendment values and other important constitutional principles Melanie Ann Renken, M.A., graduated from law school and practices employment law for a corporate defense firm in St. Louis.

Anne Rundell, M.A., is a business analyst for Targetbase in Irving, Texas.

Janel Susanne Schuh, M.A., is a doctoral student studying communication at the University of Southern California.

Susannah Stern, Ph.D., is an associate professor in communication studies at the University of San Diego. Stern, who also taught at Boston College, is an expert on electronic media and youth culture. Her research encompasses a range of work investigating how children and teens use and make sense of media, how young people are targeted as media consumers, and how they use and are affected by mass media.

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2001 “It’s good to be among fellow Park scholars as a faculty member at UNC. I understand the rigor required of graduate students to complete their degree in three years, and I enjoy tremendously getting the opportunity to work with them as co-workers, as I got to do with faculty mentors when I was a grad student.”

Lois Boynton | Associate Professor, UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication

Jill Rosemarie Davis Aitoro, M.A., is a senior Reporter at Washington Business Journal.

Robin Bisha, M.A., returned to Indiana University for her Ph.D. and is an associate professor at Texas Lutheran University.

Lois A. Boynton, Ph.D., is an associate professor at UNC, where she has been on the faculty for 10 years. Her area of expertise is ethical decision-making in public relations.

Ann S. Claycombe, M.A. Alexander Clay Dale, M.A., is a litigator at Ward and Smith, P.A. in Wilmington, North Carolina.

Casey Ferrell, M.A., is a senior market research consultant for The Futures Co. Brian R. Frederick, M.A., is the executive director of Sports Fans Coalition in Washington, D.C. Jo Ann Rebecca Gravely, M.A., is the online editor at Wilmington Star News.

Stacie L. Greene, M.A. Scott A. Griffin, M.A., is managing editor at School Family Media.

Joseph R. Haynes, M.A., is the DSIRE Project Manager at N.C. State University, a renewable energy initiative.

Lani Harac Obermayer, M.A., is managing editor at School Family Media.

Andrew Rainie Opel, Ph.D., is an associate professor at Florida State University.

Diana Knott Martinelli, Ph.D., is interim Associate Dean at P. I. Reed School of Journalism, West Virginia University.

Rebecca Greene Morphis, M.A., is associate director of communications at Duke University.

Nelson Mumma Jr., M.A., is group director for external affairs at The Coca-Cola Company.

Karl Schmid, M.A., is an attorney at Degan, Blanchard & Nash in New Orleans.

Daniel Link Shaver, Ph.D., was recently director of the Media Management and Transformation Centre, a research center within the Jőnkőping, Sweden International Business School.

He has also taught at University of Michigan and University of Central Florida.

Sheree Vodicka, M.A., is a health communications and social marketing consultant.

Appendix A: The Park Fellows

2002 “I remember telling people who asked about what things were like at UNC that the intensity of the emphasis on academic and professional excellence was so great that I often had the sense of breathing pure oxygen during my time there.”

Robert Kerr | Professor, University of Oklahoma

“Being able to be a student again, after eight years in corporate America, was a breath of fresh air, and I have no doubt that where I am today is a direct result of the Park Fellowship. The balance that I now enjoy in my personal and professional lives was achieved in part through the Park Fellowship.”

Susan Alessandri | Associate Professor, Suffolk University

James D’Aleo, Ph.D., deceased. The school presents an annual award to outstanding graduate students in his memory.

Susan Westcott Alessandri, Ph.D., is an associate professor at Suffolk University in Boston, and formerly taught at Syracuse. Her research focuses on visual identity.

Raymond Newell Ankney, Ph.D., is the chair of journalism and mass communication at Samford University. He created cultural catalysis theory, a mass communication alternative to social capital theory.

Timothy E. Bajkiewicz, Ph.D., is an associate professor of broadcast journalism in the School of Mass Communications at Virginia Commonwealth University, and previously was on the faculty of the University of South Florida. He teaches advanced TV newsgathering, and also teaches in the university’s graduate program in multimedia journalism.

Steven Christopher Baragona, M.A., is the food, agriculture and nutrition correspondent at Voice of America.

Daniel Ben Childs, M.A., is health editor at ABCNews.com.

Stacey Cone, Ph.D., is a retired professor from the University of Iowa and CNN documentary film producer. She is co-director of a summer Chinese Culture Camp at the University of Texas School of Social Work. The camp’s goal is to strengthen ethnic identity for Chinese-American children.

Bill Freehling, M.A., is a business writer and editor of Fredericksburg Business Insider, an e-newsletter at The Free Lance-Star.

Robert Lynn Kerr, Ph.D., is a full professor in the University of Oklahoma’s College of Journalism and Mass Communication. His research agenda has been focused on First Amendment law, and he primarily teaches mass communications law.

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Timothy A. Lawson, M.A. David Orison Loomis, Ph.D., is a professor at Indiana University of Pennsylvania where he teaches writing-intensive reporting courses, which reflect his research interest in civic engagement and civic journalism.

Harlen Eugene Makemson, Ph.D., is an associate professor at Elon University. His teaching areas include mass communication history, Internet newsgathering and publishing, and newspaper and magazine design.

Charles McKenzie, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at Ithaca College.

Cyndi Verell Soter O’Neil, M.A., is a strategic communications consultant in the Triangle.

Joshua Daniel Myerov, M.A., is director of government affairs for Arc of Massachussets.

Kristin E. Morgan, M.A. Mark James Pescatore, Ph.D., is Vice President at Pipeline Communications in West Palm Beach, Florida.

Eric James Rhodenbaugh, Ph.D. Dana Scott Rosengard, Ph.D., is a tenure-track faculty member in the Department of Communication and Journalism at Suffolk University. His focus in on broadcast journalism pedagogy.

Elizabeth Erwin Spainhour, M.A., is an attorney with Brooks Pierce, practicing media law.

She represents clients in buying and selling properties and negotiating a variety of regulatory and business matters.

Nadia Renee Watts, M.A., teaches journalism and AP English at Saint Stephen’s Episcopal School in Bradenton, Florida. She formerly taught at Elon University.

2003 “Because of my Park Fellowship, I came into academics prepared. I knew the stereotype of the ‘easy’ academic life wasn’t true. UNC has a rigorous program, it’s well-respected, and I believe that when prospective employers saw ‘UNC’ on my CV, that opened a lot of doors. UNC emphasized the need to be a good teacher and researcher, and that has been important in my academic career.”

Barbara Barnett | Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies, University of Kansas Terry Adams Bloom, Ph.D., is Associate Professor and Program Director for Electronic Media at University of Miami School of Communication.

Appendix A: The Park Fellows

Kirstin Barbara Alvanitakis, M.A., is an online communications specialist for the Association of Pennsylvania State College & University Faculties.

Barbara Ann Barnett, Ph.D., is associate dean for undergraduate studies at the University of Kansas. Her research is in gender and the media.

Julian L. Bibb, M.A., launched a web design business, JLB, in Franklin, Tennessee.

Joy Danielle Buchanan, M.A., is managing editor at Millmark Education, a publisher of science textbooks.

Brian Daniel Carroll, Ph.D., is an associate professor and director of the Honors Program at Berry College.

Kristina Casto, M.A., is a program coordinator at Duke University Medical Center.

James Frank Carstens, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at University of South Alabama.

Gretchen Marie Decker, M.A., edited the Journal of Health and Social Behavior.

Nathaniel J. DeGraff, M.A., is a media relations specialist at N.C. State University College of Engineering.

Rodrigo Dorfman, M.A., is a documentary filmmaker in Durham.

Victoria Smith Ekstrand, Ph.D., is an associate professor at UNC, teaching media law.

She previously was on the faculty of Bowling Green State University.

Cindy Joyce Elmore, Ph.D., is an associate professor at East Carolina University. She teaches feature writing and investigative reporting, and her research focuses on gender differences in journalism.

Michael L. Flynn, M.A., is an adjunct instructor at UNC-Asheville.

Richard Daniel Fowler, M.A., is a staff writer for the Carrboro Citizen.

Nikole S. Hannah-Jones, M.A., is an investigative reporter at ProPublica.

Fraser Berkley Hudson, Ph.D., is an associate professor at the University of Missouri.

A former magazine writer, his research focuses on American media history and visual representation of racial conflict.

Frances Ward Johnson, Ph.D., is associate department chair at Elon University, and teaches strategic communications. Johnson is a former journalist and was public relations manager for the international Center for Creative Leadership.

Scott M. LaPierre, M.A., is a video journalist for the Boston Globe.

Kimberly Moore, Ph.D., is director of marketing and external relations at North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company in Raleigh.

Richard Barry Newhouse, M.A., is the Asia coverage editor for Voice of America.

Lisa Ramsay, M.A., is internal communications manager at SAS Institute.

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Christopher W. Sims, M.A., teaches photography and audio at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.

John D. Stawarz, M.A. Carol Wilcox Stiff, Ph.D., is an associate professor at Virginia State University.

2004 “In addition to being exposed to top-quality faculty, I was surrounded by interesting and motivated colleagues. The full three years were a wonderful experience. The Park Fellowship experience gave me the opportunity to make a career shift that has proven very rewarding. The academic credentials were vital to being able to do this and the Park Fellowship made it possible.”

Johanna Cleary | Associate Professor, University of Florida

Anne (Milmoe) Avellana, M.A., is Director of Operations at Worldwide Fistula Fund, a non-profit organization, providing free maternal health services to women in sub-Saharan Africa and other developing areas.

Johanna Lynn Cleary, Ph.D., is an associate professor in the University of Florida’s College of Journalism and Communications.

Mims Rowe Copeland, M.A., is a features editor at The Oregonian.

Juanita Josefina Covert, M.A., is a copy editor at TIPS technical publishing in Carrboro.

Amanda Jane Crowe, M.A., is founder and president of IMPACT Health Communications in Connecticut.

Meaghan Hannan Davant, M.A., is an attorney in Washington, D.C., for Wilmer Cutler.

Thomas Kenneth Gaither, Ph.D., is an associate dean at Elon University.

Frederick Henry Gautschi, M.A., is creative director at New BLK in Omaha.

Calvin L. Hall, Ph.D., is assistant chair at Appalachian State University.

Cassandra J. Imfeld Jeyaram, Ph.D., is CEO of Liquid Media Consulting in Atlanta.

Stephanie Bradshaw Johnes, M.A., is an independent filmmaker in New York City.

John P. Kondis, M.A., is a senior producer at National Geographic.

John R. Kuka, M.A., is a major gifts officer at Depauw University.

Appendix A: The Park Fellows

Jonathan James Lillie, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at Loyola University, specializing in digital media.

Kara Dawn Loftin, M.A., works in the Office of University Development at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Melody Ko, M.A., is an international photojournalist based in Boston.

Pamela Carol Laucella, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Kinesiology Department at Indiana University.

Guy Rutherford Mossman, M.A., is a documentary film producer in New York City.

Suzanne M. Presto, M.A., is a general assignment reporter for Voice of America.

LaHoma Smith Romocki, Ph.D., is the Cameroon Country Director for the U.S. Peace Corps.

Patrick O’Neil, Ph.D., is vice president of communications at Rail Inc. in Cary, North Carolina.

Jessalynn Rosalia Strauss, M.A., is an assistant professor at Xavier University.

Biniam Tesfaldet Tecle, M.A. Paige West, M.A., is creative director, MSNBC. Anton Joseph Zuiker, M.A., is director of communications for the Department of Medicine at Duke University.

2005 “For me, the entire graduate school experience at UNC was simply wonderful.

The graduate school atmosphere, coursework and camaraderie with the Park Fellows provided an enriching and well-rounded educational opportunity.”

G. Chaise Nunnally | Senior Proposal Writer, Construction Management Consulting

“Without the generous support of the Park Fellowship and the patient training of the faculty and staff of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, I would not have the privilege of teaching and conducting research in a university environment today.“ Jimmy Ivory | Associate Professor, Virginia Tech

Jeremy David Ashton, M.A., is public information coordinator for the South Florida Water Management District in Palm Beach.

Rebecca Folmar Clendenin, M.A., is communications and media specialist for the statewide Communities in Schools of North Carolina.

Chad S. Danford, M.A., is a freelance film and video professional in Raleigh, North Carolina.

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Eric M. David, M.A., is an attorney with Brooks Pierce in Raleigh.

Dale Leon Edwards, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at Northern Colorado.

J. Drew Elliot III, M.A., is communications director at South University in Savannah, Georgia.

Kathryn Roberts Forde, Ph.D., is an associate professor at University of South Carolina.

Joan Elizabeth Gandy, M.A. Daniel Marshall Haygood, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at Elon University.

Tricia-Anne Aishia Horatio, M.A., is an attorney in Dallas, Texas.

Stacey Jolene Hust, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at Washington State University.

James Ivory, Ph.D., is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at Virginia Tech. He researches the social role of new interactive media technology.

Christine Jensen, M.A. Richard Landesberg, Ph.D., is an associate professor at Elon University.

Marti Anne Maguire, M.A., is a freelance writer in Raleigh and taught at N.C. State.

Reaz Mahmood, Ph.D., is publications advisor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington.

Jason Moldoff, Ph.D., is an instructor at Durham Tech and UNC. Gregory Chaise Nunnally, M.A., is a senior proposal writer for a construction management consulting firm in Southern California, and a public policy blogger.

Deborah Procopio, Ph.D., is founder of HomeSpotHQ.com, a web application for homeowners to manage their home information, including maintenance tips, reminders and services used.

Anne R. Rundell, M.A., is a business analyst for Targetbase in Irving, Texas.

Charlene Noelle Simmons, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga.

Sonya Foster Sutton, M.A., is project director TFS/Quitline of the UNC Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention.

Erica Gregory Taylor, M.A., is a communications consultant with Taylor Made Communications.

Matthew P. Taylor, M.A., director of communications at Durham Academy.

Steve Sherwood Thompson, M.A., is a reporter for the Dallas City Hall blog and bureau.

Elizabeth Laurey Villeponteaux, M.A., is editorial coordinator at PPD.

Appendix A: The Park Fellows

David A. Weaver, M.A., is an instructor of Political Science and Communication at Boise State University.

Kirsten Weeks, M.A., works in community and media relations at Cisco in the Research Triangle.

2006 William James Alexander, M.A., is a writer and editor on health subjects at Duke University, and a co-author for a college textbook on women’s health.

Kelly Ann Anderson, M.A. Jonathan M. Bloom, M.A., is a journalist, author and expert on the topic of food waste and the food supply.

Joanna Worrell Cardwell, M.A., is a public communications specialist at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Floride H. Carpenter, M.A., is principal at Booz and Company in New York.

Kyung Bok Cho, Ph.D., works for Bloomberg LP in Seoul, South Korea.

Nathan Clendenin, M.A., has a commercial photography and multimedia studio in Durham.

Gabriel Joseph Dance, M.A., is interactive editor at the Guardian, US. Juanita Marie Darling, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at San Francisco State University.

Glen Martin Feighery, Ph.D., is an associate professor at the University of Utah.

Caroline Kristin Hauser, M.A. Theodore Robert Helm, M.A. Mary Ellen Hill, Ph.D. Suzanne Horsley, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at the University of Alabama.

Deborah Kaplan, Ph.D., deceased.

Amy L. Kingsley, M.A., is reporter for CityLife in Las Vegas.

Sarah Harwood Konwiser, M.A., is sales operations/strategy director at Nortel in New York City.

Daniel Vincent Kozlowski, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at St. Louis University.

Martin George Kuhn Jr., Ph.D., intelligence analyst for the FBI in Washington, D.C. Julie C. Lellis, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at Elon University.

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Brooke Fisher Liu, Ph.D., is an associate professor at the University of Maryland, focusing on public relations and crisis communication. She is currently primary investigator on a Department of Homeland Security training project.

Robert G. Magee, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at Virginia Tech.

Barbara M. Miller, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at Elon University.

Karen Elizabeth Mishra, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at University of Miami.

Babatola O. Oguntoyinbo, M.A., is the co-founder and CEO of Sonecast in Raleigh.

Courtney Kuhl Rose, M.A., is head of government and associations at Google.

Lynn Corney Owens, Ph.D., is an associate professor at Peace College.

Robin S. Roger, M.A., is a web writer for the University of Tampa.

Glenn W. Scott, Ph.D., is an associate professor at Elon University.

Hela Narendra Sheth, M.A., is vice president of LaunchSquad in New York City.

Mike Sutton, Ph.D. Shaheen Rafiq Syal, M.A., is director of communications for the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation in Winston-Salem.

Anne J. Tate, M.A., is senior publicist at Simon and Schuster.

Mary Hill-Wagner, Ph.D., is an assistant research professor at the University of Southern California. Her research interests are ethics, media law, history and urban journalism.

2007 “I’ve enjoyed applying the theories I learned as a Park Fellow to my everyday work.

This has helped me develop more robust and effective campaigns on behalf of my clients… I didn’t realize how much fun I would have in the program. The culture of the J-school, which is built by its best-of-class faculty and broad mix of passionate students, is truly amazing. It’s a family. I still keep in touch with many people from the program today!”

Helen Allrich McClenahan | Director, Weber Shandwick

Kirsten M. Beattie, M.A., is a development associate at State Employment Credit Union Family House at UNC Hospitals.

Jean Clare Beier, M.A., is a senior research consultant at Sachs Insights in Chicago.

Appendix A: The Park Fellows

Jillian Clair Canada, M.A., is a principal at The Canada Co. in Suffolk, Virginia.

Kyle Antar Coward, M.A., is a writer, editor and producer at Within Our Means Productions in Chicago.

Sophia Dengo, M.A., is a news desk designer at CNN.com.

Julia Fernandez, M.A. Cary Frith, A.B.D., is an assistant professor and co-director of Scripps Survey Research Center at University of Ohio.

Claire Lenore Hermann, M.A., is director of communications at Rural Advancement Foundation International in Pittsboro.

Anne Alice Hillman, M.A., is a freelance writer in Alaska.

Helen Allrich McClenahan, M.A., is a director at Weber Shandwick in Seattle.

Steven Christopher Kulp, M.A., is art director at W5 Marketing Research in Durham.

Adam Michael Linker, M.A., is a health policy analyst and writer for the Health Access Coalition at N.C. Justice Center in Raleigh.

Rachel Davis Mersey, Ph.D., is an associate professor at Northwestern University.

Matthew James Moorlag, M.A., is a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Coast Guard.

Kate Lily Schoen, M.A., is senior public information officer at University of California at San Francisco.

Tom Terry, M.A., is an associate professor at Idaho State University.

Wilson Osbourne Weldon III, M.A., works in marketing and communications at the Salem Evening News.

2008 Carla Noel Babb, M.A., is a reporter for Voice of America in Washington, D.C. Terri Ann Bailey, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at Florida Gulf Coast University.

Peter Casella, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at University of Florida in Jacksonville.

Kelly Rae Chi, M.A., writes for a Cary-based science and technology journal focused on topics including genes, autism, sleep and fear.

Lisa Paulin Cid, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at N.C. Central University.

Daniel William Cloud, M.A., is a web developer at Sunlight Foundation in Washington, D.C.

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Rita Faye Colistra, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at the University of West Virginia.

Julia Connors, M.A., is an international nature photographer and owns Calm Cradle Photo & Design in the Triangle area.

Gregory George Efthimiou, M.A., is communications manager at Duke Energy.

Rebecca Blatt Hovell, M.A., is senior news editor for special projects at WAMU in Washington, D.C. Tara M. Kachgal, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin.

Kelly Michele Marks, M.A., is an exhibit developer at the North Carolina Museum of Life and Science.

Ann Elizabeth McGinnis, M.A., is eastern region program assistant at the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture.

Joshua David Meyer, M.A., is a coordinator of marketing and strategic communications at Virginia Western Community College in Roanoke, Va. Kristin Margaret Simonetti, M.A., is assistant director of University communications at Elon University.

Jeffrey Soplop, M.A., is director of Solutions Development at Phoenix Energy Technologies in Raleigh.

Nicole Elise Smith, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at Louisiana State University.

Julia Allen Vail, M.A., is deputy director of communications at the N.C. Department of State Treasurer.

Sarah Elizabeth Whitmarsh, M.A., is a communications specialist at University Research Co. Center for Human Services in Bethesda, Maryland.

2009 Cheryl Bishop, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut.

John Chris Carmichael, M.A., is a freelance multimedia professional and has been an adjunct instructor at UNC. Julia Christina Crouse, M.A., is a Ph.D. student at Michigan State University.

Phillip Daquila, M.A., is a digital producer for the Center for European Studies at UNC. Vanessa Graber, Ph.D., is community radio director, Prometheus Radio Project, Philadelphia.

Chris Higginbotham, M.A., is a community outreach manager at IEM in Richmond, Ky.

Appendix A: The Park Fellows

Jennifer Kowalewski, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at Texas Christian University.

Justin Martin, Ph.D., is a CLAS-Honors Preceptor of Journalism in the Honors College at the University of Maine.

Eileen Katherine Mignoni, M.A., is a freelance videographer and photographer based in Santiago, Chile.

Melissa Joanne Moser, M.A., is a communications specialist at Duke University.

Patrick Downey O’Donnell, M.A., is an adviser for the Education Abroad Program at UC-Santa Barbara.

Sara M. Peach, M.A., is a freelance journalist and senior producer at the Reese News Lab. Joseph Arthur Recomendes, M.A., is a digital marketing strategist at Walker Marketing in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Derigan Silver, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at the University of Denver.

Tiffany White, M.A., is a doctoral student at The Ohio State University School of Communication.

Courtney Marie Woo, M.A., is a senior account executive at Edelman in New York City.

2010 “The Park Fellowship taught me balance. Not only balance in terms of maintaining a schedule, but the importance of making time for work, pleasure and rest.

Without the Park Fellowship I would never have gotten this job nor would I have had the ability to manage the numerous responsibilities I have acquired in my time at Patuxent Publishing.”

Brian Conlin Reporter | The Catonsville Times, The Arbutus Times

Carole Bell, Ph.D., is a postdoctoral teaching associate in Communication Studies at Northeastern University in Boston.

Brian Conlin, M.A., is a reporter for the Catonsville Times and the Arbutus Times in Maryland.

Erin Coyle, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at Louisiana State University.

Jeremy Rollin Cramer, M.A. Lauren Ann Frohne, M.A., is the senior communications coordinator for multimedia at Open Society Foundations in New York City.

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Michael Fuhlhage, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at Auburn University.

Jessica Vanleeuwen Fuller, M.A. Andrew Michael Gaerig, M.A., is a web developer at Pitchfork Media.

Ryan Greene, M.A., is a magazine assistant in Oakland, New Jersey.

Jennifer Douglas Harlow, M.A., is an associate partner for The Gallup Organization in New York City.

Audrey Justine Hill, M.A., is an editor and writer with Palladian Partners in Washington, D.C. Lynette Holman, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of journalism at Appalachian State University.

Lisa Suzanne Hoppenjans, M.A., is an attorney in St. Louis.

Michele Jones, Ph.D. Sumati Krishnan, M.A., is the owner of K4 Solutions.

Kimberly D. Kuzma, M.A. Sabrina Lopez, M.A., is a marketing communications and import logistics manager at United Natural Foods.

Katherine Macon DeGenova, M.A., is a marketing manager, digital and social media at MilkPEP. Dean Mundy, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at Appalachian State University.

Emily Ogilvie, M.A. Sheila Peuchaud, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at the American University in Cairo.

Christopher Bradley Saunders, M.A., is associate editor at NC State Alumni magazine.

Mark Slagle, Ph.D. Jessica Smith, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at Texas Tech.

Allison Redford Soule, M.A., is a communications specialist at SAS. Nora Anne Sullivan, M.A./J.D., is practicing law in Washington, D.C. Joseph Edgar Williams, M.A., is a social media analyst for BIA/Kelsey.

Joanna Williamson, Ph.D., is chair of the Master of Science in Marketing and Communication program at Franklin University Columbus, Ohio.

Weiyang Joann Wong, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at Indiana University.

Erica Keppler Yamauchi, M.A., is social marketing director at Project Kealahou in Hawaii.

Appendix A: The Park Fellows

2011 “My Park Fellowship experience included much more than curriculum. It also taught me how to exist within a university ecosystem, how to be a valuable member of the faculty to other professors as well as the administration, and how to avoid the many pitfalls that inevitably arise as part of this profession. I keep in regular contact with others in my cohort and my mentors at UNC. Upon reflection, the Park Fellowship was the single most crucial aspect of my ability to succeed as a professor.”

Woodrow Hartzog | Assistant Professor, Samford University

Delphine Andrews, M.A., is an advertising operations coordinator at Blogads.com in Durham, North Carolina.

Michelle Cerulli, M.A., is a senior writer at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

Scott Dunn, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at Radford University in Roanoke, Virginia.

Erin Engstrom, M.A., is the web and communications manager at Illinois College of Optometry in Chicago.

Carrie Gann, M.A., is a digital journalist in Atlanta.

Andrea Goetschius, M.A., is a graphics and content producer at the Harvard School of Public Health.

Hadley Gustafson, M.A., is a videographer at the North Carolina Harm Reduction Coalition.

Woodrow Hartzog, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at Samford University.

Anne Johnson, M.A., is a freelance science writer based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina Amanda Komar, M.A., is the Green Plus community coordinator at GreenPlus.

Christina Malik, Ph.D., is at McKinney agency in Durham, North Carolina.

Temple Northup, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at University of Houston.

Catherine Orr, M.A., is an entrepreneur, documentary storyteller and business owner of StoryMineMedia.com.

Sheetal Patel, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at University of Texas, Arlington.

Sheila Foote Read, M.A., is the justice and peace administrative specialist at St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Church in Raleigh.

David Remund, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at Drake University.

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Remy Thomas Scalza, M.A., is a freelance writer in New York.

Autumn Shafer, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at Texas Tech.

Dean Smith, Ph.D., is a visiting professor at N.C. State University.

Lesley Smith, M.A., is an associate director at DaVita Clinical Research in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Lynsy Smithson-Stanley, M.A., is manager of Media Relations at Climate Nexus in New York City.

Justin Weber, M.A., is an assistant project manager at Blogads.

Brooke Weberling, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at University of South Carolina.

Bartosz Wojtek Wojdynski, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at Virginia Tech.

2012 Mackenzie Cato, Ph.D. Joshua Davis, M.A. Margaret Eason, M.A. Carolyn Edy, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at Appalachian State University.

Melita Garza, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at Texas Christian University.

Stephanie Gillam, M.A., works in corporate communications at Carolinas Healthcare System.

Kelly Izlar, M.A. Robert McKeever, Ph.D., is a research associate at University of South Carolina.

Jeffrey Mittelstadt, M.A., is an independent multimedia producer in Boston.

Rebecca Ortiz, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at Texas Tech.

Fatimah Salleh, Ph.D. Mimi Schiffman, M.A., is a fellow at the Magnum Foundation.

Stephanie Soucheray-Grell, M.A. Andrew Westney, M.A., is a writer for Sports Business Daily in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Appendix A: The Park Fellows

Gillian Wheat, M.A., is a doctoral student studying telecommunication at the University of Florida.

Eric White, M.A. Lydia Wilson, M.A., is a media content and strategy consultant at Southern Sun. Brendan R. Watson, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota.

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Appendix B roy h. park distinguished visiting professorship The Roy H. Park Distinguished Visiting Professorship, sponsored by the Triad Foundation, allows the school to bring in leading professors from around the country to UNC for one semester. The professor teaches graduate-level courses and works with graduate students.

Past visiting professors have included: Mary Beth Oliver, Penn State University Department of Film/Video and Media Studies (2012) Betty Houchin Winfield, University of Missouri Curators’ Professor Emerita, Professor Emeritus of Journalism (2010) W. Wat Hopkins, Department of Communication, Virginia Tech (2009) David H. Weaver, Roy W. Howard Research Professor, School of Journalism, Indiana University (2008) Anne Cooper-Chen, professor, E.W. Scripps School of Journalism, Ohio University (2008) Melissa Johnson, associate professor, Department of Communication, North Carolina State University (2007) David Arant, associate dean of the University College and professor in the Department of Journalism, University of Memphis (2006) Jay Black, professor emeritus, University of South Florida at St. Petersburg (2005) Ed Caudill, professor and associate dean for graduate studies and research, University of Tennessee (2004) John Merrill, professor emeritus, University of Missouri (2003) Christine Ogan, professor, Indiana University (2002) Ken Smith, professor, University of Wyoming (2001)

Appendix C t h e pa r k l e c t u r e s e r i e s Since 1999, the Roy H. Park Distinguished Lecture Series has presented the following speakers:

Roger Ailes, chairman and CEO of Fox News, April 12, 2012.

David Kirkpatrick, author of “The Facebook Effect: Ten Lessons from Facebook,” April 7, 2011 P.J. O’Rourke, author and political satirist, “The Government vs. The Citizenry: Which Is Worse?,” April 8, 2010 Jason Kilar, CEO, Hulu, “Sex, Lies & Online Video: From Howell Hall to Hulu,” Oct. 14, 2009 Alan Murray, a deputy managing editor and executive editor for online, The Wall Street Journal, “The Future of Newspapers: Some Light at the End of a Very Long Tunnel,” April 2, 2009 Ken Lowe, chairman, president and CEO, Scripps Networks Interactive, “An Evolving Paradigm: Media in the Interactive Age,” Sept. 11, 2008 Rich Beckman, James L. Knight professor of visual communication, UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication, “The Road Less Traveled: Changing the World One Story at a Time,” April 10, 2008 Deborah Platt Majoras, chairman, Federal Trade Commission, “The Role of Truthful Information in the Marketplace,” Oct. 11, 2007 Charles Krauthammer, columnist, the Washington Post Writers Group, “The View from the Swamp: Washington in the Twilight of the Bush Administration,” April 12, 2007 Jonathan Alter, senior editor, Newsweek, and NBC News contributing correspondent, “Between the Lines: Politics, Media and Society,” Oct. 23, 2006 Dan Wieden, CEO and co-founder of Wieden + Kennedy advertising, “Walk in Stupid Every Morning,” April 18, 2006 Penelope Muse Abernathy, senior vice president of international and development, The Wall Street Journal, “Circling the Globe: No Cakewalk for the Media,” April 6, 2005

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Brenda Buttner, Fox News senior business correspondent, “Tuning Into Viewers: What’s Wrong With the Customer Being Right?” Oct. 5, 2004 Helen Thomas, syndicated columnist, Hearst News Service, “Covering History from President Kennedy to President Bush II,” Nov. 24, 2003 Joie Chen, CBS News correspondent, “Tuning Out: Will Young Viewers Choose Jon Stewart Over the Evening News?” Oct. 9, 2003 Jim Roberts, national editor, the New York Times, “How The New York Times Covers the Nation,” Nov. 18, 2002 Marvin Kalb, senior fellow at Harvard University’s Joan Shorenstein Center for the Press, Politics and Public Policy and faculty chair for the John F. Kennedy School of Government’s Washington Programs, “Journalism Since 9/11: When Are We Going to Get Serious?”

Oct. 14, 2002 William Safire, columnist, the New York Times, “What’s Going to Happen in Washington,” April 16, 2002 George Stephanopoulos, ABC News analyst, “Politics: The Art of the Impossible — A View From Washington,” Feb. 5, 2002 Sandra Mims Rowe, editor, the Oregonian, “Journalism’s Renewed Sense of Mission: Will it Last?” Nov. 13, 2001 Doug Marlette, editorial cartoonist, “Political Cartooning and the 2000 Election,” Oct. 26, 2000 Charles Lewis, founder and executive director, Center for Public Integrity, Washington, D.C., “The Buying of the President 2000,” Feb. 17, 2000 Joann M. Burkholder, professor of aquatic ecology and marine sciences, Department of Botany, N.C. State University, “The Critical Role of Journalists in Environmental Science, Education and Ethics,” Oct. 19, 1999