Director's Note

Happy New Year! We are looking forward to a great year in SJMC.

We capped off 2022 hiring two new assistant professors who will start in Fall 2023: Bingbing Zhang and Sang Jung Kim! Bingbing and Sang will teach strategic communication, media effects, and research methods classes for SJMC undergraduate and graduate students. We are thrilled to welcome them to Iowa. 

                     Sang Jung Kim                                               Bingbing Zhang

Our December graduates are already doing great things. SJMC graduate Isaac Goffin is working at CBS-42 in Birmingham, Alabama. Alexa Linder and Claire English, Event Management Certificate and Nonprofit Leadership and Philanthropy Certificate graduates, are working in jobs that combine these two areas. Alexa is an Event Coordinator at the University of Minnesota Foundation, and Claire is a Donor Relations Associate at the Greater Cedar Rapids Community Foundation.

The University of Iowa recently featured Journalism and Mass Communication student journalists in its newest video. Check it out to hear from recent graduate Maddie McCarron and current students Eleanor Hildebrandt and Hannah Pinski.

If you have a story to share, please send it to sjmc@uiowa.edu.

Melissa Tully, Interim Director

Welcome!

Cassie Moeller joins us as the new Graduate Program Coordinator. Cassie is a recent graduate of the Cinema and Screenwriting majors at the University of Iowa. She worked as a student office assistant in the Becker Communications Studies Building as an undergraduate student.

Jake Mayer joins us as the new Student Success and Engagement Coordinator. Jake double majored in Cinema as well as Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa. They worked in broadcast news and as a social media coordinator before returning to the University of Iowa Journalism School.

Faculty News

Interim Director Melissa Tully published “Can News Literacy Help Reduce Belief in COVID Misinformation?” in Mass Communication and Society co-authored with Seth Ashley, Stephanie Craft, Adam Maksl, and Emily Vraga.

Professor David Dowling will be delivering the keynote address at The Future of Technical Meditation in Journalism and the Media in Paris March 7.

Undergraduate News

SJMC students and employees at The Daily Iowan have been nominated for several awards by the Iowa Newspaper Association, including General Excellence. The DI has a history of success at the INA awards including the award of best newspaper in 2020 and 2021. The award ceremony is February 2, 2023 in Des Moines.

Ellie Cast and Lally Morales have been chosen for the Mean More Mentorship at Meyocks, a full-service branding and marketing agency in Des Moines. In May they will join students from Iowa State and Northwest Missouri State to learn about advertising/branding/marketing agency work and be paired with a mentor from Meyocks who can guide them before, during and after the program.

We are excited to announce the official addition of the Online News Association (ONA) student group as a registered student organization at Iowa. ONA is an interactive and emerging media club that focuses on creating long-form multimedia projects revolving around campus and the Iowa City community. These projects will focus heavily on AR/VR and drones to showcase these stories along with podcasting for other smaller projects.

Grace Smith placed in the top 10 in the Photojournalism News & Features Competition of the Hearst Journalism Awards Program.

Graduate Student News

Abubakar Ibrahim and Ugochukwu Madu were both selected to participate in the Graduate Engagement Corps at the University of Iowa. This opportunity will provide them training in areas of community engagement with a focus on community-engaged teaching, community-engaged research, and building community partnerships.

Patrick Johnson was invited by the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Journalism Ethics to create curriculum for the annual Shadid Award. He has also been selected to receive a research grant from the Michael Hoefges Graduate Student Research Fund.

Our Graduate Students are going to be participating in many conferences throughout the spring semester! You can read more in depth about the conferences and the roles our graduate students will have here.

In Memoriam

We are saddened to share that former SJMC Director, Ken Starck (1934-2023), passed away on January 8. Read more about Ken here.