Bill Gentile speaking at the National Press Club (Photo by Fatima Garcia Gonzalez)

On October 19, Bill Gentile also hosted veteran photojournalist Robert (Bob) Nickelsberg to share his work and career with students in his "Photojournalism and Social Documentary" class. Having worked for Time magazine in Asia and Latin America for over a decade, Nickelsberg now is in the process of installing his vast collection of images into the Archives and Special Collections component of the American University Library.

Gentile met Bob while both covered the civil war in El Salvador in the 1980s. Bob is an inspiration to all who aspire to make a career by speaking the visual storytelling language.

Bob Nickelsberg speaking to Bill Gentile’s class in the McKinley building

Daniella Jiminez, a journalism major and IRW intern, had her story on the immigration visa backlog published by Mother Jones magazine. Jiminez is also the president of AU chapter of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.

The University of California Press has posted the cover design of the expanded and updated edition of Joe Campbell's book about polling failure, Lost in a Gallup. The press says the new edition will be released in soft cover in February 2024.

Cover art for the updated edition of Lost in a Gallup

Several SOC alumni’s films screened at the Santa Fe Film Festival last weekend. The Santa Fe Film Festival is extremely competitive and this speaks to the quality of our alumni’s work. Films screened included:

River Finlay's, Eat Flowers

Laura Waters Hinson's, The Test

Brad Algood's, Patrol

Lois Lipman's, First They Bombed New Mexico

Aram Sinnreich and the students of COMM-467/667 Communication Copyright and Culture took a field trip to the US Copyright Office and the Library of Congress, where we met with several officials, including the Associate Register of Copyrights, Miriam Lord. 

Aram and his class at the Library of Congress

Aram Sinnreich’s research on music and fashion (coauthored with Marissa Gluck) was cited in a new article entitled "Thanks for the music: The creative bond between the fashion industry and pop stars reaches new heights” in El Pais.

Aram Sinnreich was an invited workshop participant at a Microsoft Research New England Social Media Collective event entitled "Promises and Perils of Generative AI for the Creator Economy” in Cambridge, MA.

Aram was also interviewed live on KCBS radio about the “last Beatles song,” which will be produced using new AI tools and released on November 2nd.

Publishers Weekly called Margot Susca's forthcoming book Hedged, which investigates the last 20 years of private equity investment and hedge fund ownership of U.S. newspapers, a "damning debut." It closed its review saying, "Readers will be outraged." The University of Illinois Press' senior marketing manager said this is the first time Publishers Weekly, the trade magazine that dates back to 1872, has ever reviewed one of the books in its catalog.

The Investigative Reporting Workshop received a $25,000 grant from the Scripps Howard Fund’s Diversity and Inclusion in Journalism initiative. The program seeks to get students from diverse backgrounds invested in journalism and foster an environment where all journalism students can actively participate and feel welcome.

Wendy Melillo was invited to speak to the U.S. State Department’s Edward R. Murrow Program for Journalists about media responsibility in the age of disinformation. The event, part of the State Department's International Visitor Leadership Program, was attended by 18 European journalists and a NATO program officer. Wendy’s presentation focused on understanding coded language in combatting online hate speech.

Nearing the end of her graduation this December, Gaby Sosa, a Film & Media Arts student with a minor in Business & Entertainment spent this past October as a VIP guest for Gotham Week. The Gotham Film and Media Institute is a non-profit organization for independent film and storytelling. To date, it has supported over 10,000 projects and offered resources to more than 30,000 filmmakers, including the likes of renowned creators Barry Jenkins, Dees Rees, Laura Poitras, Richard Linklater and Ava DuVernary. During Gotham Week, Gaby had access to screenings, expo sessions, happy hours and an Amazon party. One of her favorite panels included a conversation between Stacy L. Smith, the founder of the USC Annenberg Inclusions Initiative (AII), Amy White, the head of corporate social responsibility and Mollye Asher, film producer for Nomadland, She’s Lost Control and Catch The Fair.

Gaby Sosa attending Variety’s Gotham Week

SOC Journalism grad students Cameron Adams and Nicole Wiley represented AU at the annual Press Visit to the European Union Headquarters in Brussels earlier this month. The students learned about the European Union, its structure, policies, values, and decision-making procedures, as well as the EU's relationship with the United States. Senior EU officials, representatives of the public policy community, and Brussels-based U.S. diplomats discussed current issues on the transatlantic agenda. Topics covered included EU/U.S. cooperation on issues such as Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, building the global clean energy economy and tackling other global challenges.

Dr. Andrew Phelps, Director of the AU Game Center and faculty in both FMA and Computer Science, contributed to and was quoted in a new report by Public Good Projects funded by the Ruderman Family Foundation entitled Harnessing the Power of Gaming to Combat the Youth Mental Health Crisis. Kelli Dunlop, PsyD and alum of the AU Game Center MA program in Game Design also contributed, in addition to numerous friends and colleagues.

IRW’s staff and students have co-published new stories this fall under Executive Editor Wesley Lowery, including:

Professor Aarushi Sahejpal, in his role as IRW's data editor, has worked for months with reporter Jenny Gathright of WAMU/DCist to produce a detailed look at overtime earned by Metro Police Department officers. IRW intern Cleo Pool also received a contributing credit. The main story documents the top earners and the potential impact of officers who work 18-hour days. 

SOC senior and IRW intern Daniella Jimenez worked with Executive Editor Wesley Lowery on a story about the backlog and broken promises in a diversity visa program, also known as the “green card lottery,” The story was co-published by the Center for Public Integrity and Mother Jones.

SOC graduate and former IRW intern Savanna Strott, now writing for Public Health Watch, reports that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and 18 other state attorneys general are fighting an administration plan to crack down on fine particle pollutants that have been linked to heart disease, breast and lung cancer, and other ailments. 

The Washington Post examines the erosion of the nutritional value of school lunches across the country, comparing them with those from Chile, where typically nothing is prepackaged, and the only drink available is water. IRW's Hayden Godfrey, who recently earned his master's degree at SOC, contributed to the story by Lenny Bernstein, Lauren Weber and Dan Keating, another in a series on America's life expectancy crisis.

Special: SOC at the Association of Internet Researchers’ 2023 Conference

Philadelphia, PA

Patricia Aufderheide presented "Norms-setting in digital documentary production: racial reckoning, streaming explosion, and the ethics conversation" on October 19.

Patricia also joined the pre-conference working group on research on alternative social media systems, on October 18.

Megan Finn and Youngrim Kim (Rutgers University) presented a paper titled "Messy and Useless COVID Data: COVID dashboard builders and the productions & maintenance of underrepresented COVID datasets." The paper focused on projects that have focused on underrepresented or missing COVID data such as COVID cases in prisons and long-term care facilities, racial/ethnic breakdown of cases, as well as deaths due to COVID enforcement. People working on COVID data projects employed sometimes creative, sometimes mundane and laborious data practices to not simply collect, but to produce these data that are often absent or invisible in the official COVID dataset. Megan and Youngrim’s paper examined how in this process of data production, dashboard builders problematized the state’s hegemonic ways of quantifying death and illness, as well as grappled with the questions of how certain data is collected, who/what is missing from the dataset, and how these data voids shape and manipulate our understanding of the pandemic.

Aram Sinnreich presented a paper coauthored with Patricia Aufderheide, SOC PhD student Thomas Struett, and York professor Robert Gehl entitled “Can This Platform Survive? Governance Challenges for the Fediverse”

In addition, Aram also gave three other talks, which included:

A paper coauthored with Jesse Gilbert entitled “Algo-Vision: Internalizing the Algorithmic Gaze” (on a panel Sinnreich co-organized)

A talk about sound on the internet, on a roundtable entitled "Sound and Aurality: The ‘Deafspot’ of Internet Studies?”

A book talk about his forthcoming THE SECRET LIFE OF DATA (MIT Press, 2024), with coauthor Jesse Gilbert

Aram during one of his talks at the AoIR conference