FACULTY AND STAFF

Faculty accomplishments

Highlights

Paul Parsons is serving a three-year term on the national Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications (through 2007). He was on ACEJMC's accreditation site-visit team at Drake University in October 2004 and has been appointed to the site-visit team for the University of Oregon in January 2006. He is a member of the Accrediting Council's ethics committee. Parsons is the author of a chapter in "Global Journalism: Topical Issues and Media Systems," 4th edition (Pearson/Allyn & Bacon, 2004). The chapter is titled "Barriers to Media Development." He was a mentor in 2004-05 in the Journalism Leadership Institute for Diversity program sponsored by AEJMC. He is a member of the diversity committee, Association of Schools in Journalism and Mass Communication (ASJMC); the mass communications advisory board, Washington Center for Internships and Special Programs; and the editorial board for "Journalism & Mass Communication Educator."

Parsons and Don Grady completed chapters about indirect measures of assessment for the book "Assessing Media Education," edited by William G. Christ, to be published in late 2005 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Connie Book and Grady completed a study of satellite radio that was funded by a research grant from the National Association of Broadcasters. Book has won top research presentation honors at the annual Broadcast Education Association conference for six of the past seven years. Her text "Digital Television: DTV and the Consumer" is part of Blackwell's Media and Technology Series. She also wrote the new-media chapter for the text "Mass Communications in the Global Age." She is working on an examination of the impact of high-definition video on news package construction. She has served as a consultant on cable franchising to the cities of Oshkosh, Wis.; Dubuque, Iowa; New Haven, Conn.; San Mateo County, Calif.; and others.

Brooke Barnett's research has appeared in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Journalism & Mass Communication Monographs, Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, Visual Communication Quarterly, Journal of International Communication and the Federal Communications Law Journal. She is the author of "The War on Terror and the Wars in Iraq" in the Greenwood American War Reporting series and she is co-editor of "Communication and Law: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Research." She wrote the law chapter for the book "Mass Communications in the Global Age," and co-authored a chapter titled "America Under Attack: CNN's Verbal and Visual Framing of September 11th" included in the book "Media Representations of September 11th."

Michael Skube regularly serves as a juror for the annual Pulitzer Prize series, also often acting as a division chair. He has freelanced articles on many subjects for major U.S. newspapers and magazines, including a profile of Ernie Pyle for the Los Angeles Times and an op-ed piece on the decline of liberalism for the Washington Post. He writes a monthly column for the Greensboro News & Record's op-ed pages.

Michael Frontani taught for five weeks at Southeast University in Nanjing, China, representing Elon in a faculty exchange program. Frontani's "'Beatlepeople': Gramsci, The Beatles, and Rolling Stone Magazine" was published in American Journalism. His current study of the depiction of the Beatles in the 1960s will be spun into a book to be published by University Press of Mississippi.

David Copeland is editor of an 8-volume series titled "Media and War" for Greenwood Press for which he wrote the volumes on the French and Indian War and the War of 1812. The volumes cover all wars from the French and Indian War through the War on Terrorism. He served as president of the American Journalism Historians Association in 2001, and he is the editor of Media History Monographs, an online journal. He and Anthony Hatcher are co-editors of the introduction to communications textbook "Mass Communications in the Global Age," for which Barnett and Book wrote chapters. He is chief editor of the Thomson Gale 19th Century Newspaper Digitization project and series editor for the Peter Lang Media History Series and the forthcoming book, "The Development of a Free Press: The Enlightenment and Its Unruly Legacy." He will have another book released this fall: "The News Media: A Documentary History."

Hatcher has attended an internet reporting seminar and a religion writing workshop at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, St. Petersburg, Fla. He wrote an article on religious magazines for the Encyclopedia of Religion, Communication, and Media. He earned a Project Pericles grant that brought Pulitzer-winning cartoonist Doug Marlette to Elon.

Vic Costello served a two-year term as chair of the research division of the Broadcast Education Association. He was also a member of the team that won the Coltrin Award for Excellence in Communications Education, International Radio and Television Society Foundation, New York City. He presented research at AEJMC-Toronto about fandom and audience activity. He serves annually as technical director of the awards ceremony for the Electronic Retailing Association, and he'll be directing the Broadcast Education Association's awards show in the spring.

Frances Ward-Johnson has been a workshop participant at the American Press Institute. She served as a discussant at the AEJMC conference in Toronto in the research session "Let's Talk about Race: News, Health and Community;" she also moderated a teaching session on instituting diversity in the curriculum. She has written columns for PR Tactics and the daily newspaper in Fayetteville, N.C.

Harlen Makemson's research on historic political cartoons has been published in journals such as Journalism History, Media History Monographs and the International Journal of Comic Art and presented at numerous conferences all over North America. He also has attended a workshop on converged media at the University of South Carolina's Newsplex.

Grady and Jessica Gisclair represented Elon by teaching at Southeast University in Nanjing, China. They did research while there that produced material for a number of major papers and presentations. For instance, Gisclair presented "We Are Not Just a Market, We Are a People: Representations of Mainland Chinese Personal and Cultural Identity" at the Popular Culture Association Conference in New Orleans. Gisclair is the founding adviser of Elon's chapter of the Public Relations Student Society of America. She has also co-taught in Elon's winter-term study-abroad program.

Byung Lee spent the 200-4-05 academic year serving as a Fulbright Scholar in South Korea. He has been an editorial board member of the Journal of Human Subjectivity, and he has presented research on new-media topics such as the characteristics of internet users and the development of web sites by daily newspapers.

Glenn Scott presented a paper titled, "Who Broke Up These Two Families? Transnational Coverage of a Japanese Abductee and Her American Husband" at the International Communication Association annual conference in New Orleans. Scott also served as a lecturer and judge for the North Carolina Scholastic Media Association's summer institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Kenn Gaither often serves as a field-office coordinator in the Institute for Shipboard Education's Semester at Sea program - as a floating university for more than 500 college students. A book proposal he co-prepared with Pat Curtin at UNC-Chapel Hill was accepted by Sage Publishers. The book, tentatively titled "Public Relations Theory: Culture, Power, and Difference," is slated for completion in 2006.

Tom Nelson often spends his summers keeping his broadcast tools up to speed, including stints in Idaho and North Dakota. He co-wrote a successful Project Pericles grant to tape profiles of local nonprofit social services groups for use in university courses. He leads an annual winter term course across Europe for students interested in studying about World War I, its time and culture.

George Padgett took part in the "Diversity Across the Curriculum" seminar at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. He teaches a course at North Carolina A&T through a diversity exchange, and he won a Project Pericles grant to assign students to staff "listening posts" in local minority communities. He has a contract to produce a book on diversity.

Ray Johnson produced a documentary film on the Occaneechi Tribe of the Saponi Nation, a Native American group in the eastern United States. The film focuses on their attempts to regain their cultural and historical identities. He is now at work on a documentary work on a documentary film about David Rhodes, California's deputy attorney general, a quadriplegic with an uplifting personal story. He also mentors student documentary projects.

Ocek Eke took part in the Institute on International Affairs conference in Washington, D.C. The workshops covering global issues were taped and have been run as programming on CSPAN. Eke also presented his work at AEJMC in San Antonio in 2005.

Mark Fox served as a judge at a national speech conference in Lynchburg, Va. He travels to Kenya biannually to teach. He's also a regular speaker at home-schooling conferences. His book "Who's Afraid of Public Speaking?" is aimed at homeschoolers also has a general appeal. He has written a book titled "Family Integrated Church" that is pending publication. He teaches Interpersonal Communication at a college in Michigan every August. Fox writes a weekly column for the religion page of the Burlington Times-News.

Gerald Gibson regularly appears on panels at the annual Broadcast Education Association convention. Recent topics have included "Using Outside Clients in Television Production Assignments" and "Building or Renovating: Ten Things You Should Know Now."

Kelli Burns attended AEJMC in Toronto, where she co-presented a paper. She helped set up and run focus-group research sessions for the Pew Internet & American Life Project at Elon. She also created marketing materials as a volunteer for an exhibit called "A Thousand Words: Photographs by Vietnam Veterans" at the Sawtooth Center for Visual Art in Winston-Salem.

Janna Anderson worked withLee Rainie and Susannah Fox of the Pew Internet & American Life project to produce an expansive 2004-05 survey of nearly 1,300 internet luminaries, gauging their projections for the future of digital communications. The survey is tied to the award-winning Elon/Pew Internet Predictions Database (www.elon.edu/predictions), underwritten by a $30,000 grant Anderson gained from Pew. Her book "Imagining the Internet" (Rowman & Littlefield) was published in 2005. She has served as a consultant for the Online News Association's Digital Journalism Credibility Study, funded by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. She and Parsons are co-creators of Elon's School of Communications web site, which won top honors in AEJMC and BEA new media competitions.