Prof. Mark Feldstein
Dr. Mark Feldstein, Richard Eaton chair of broadcast journalism at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism, spoke to Politico about the latest controversy surrounding Bob Woodward and the questions raised about the veracity of his reporting during the Watergate scandal.
The full Politico article can be found here.
Dr. Mark Feldstein, Richard Eaton chair of broadcast journalism at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism, appeared on CNN’s Reliable Sources program on Sunday for a discussion of questions raised about the veracity of Bob Woodward’s reporting during Watergate.
He also joined host Howard Kurtz and former NBC News Correspondent Fred Francis for a conversation about Dan Rather’s new book and his continued defense of a story that ended his career at CBS News.
Dr. Ronald Yaros, Merrill assistant professor of multimedia and mobile journalism, won the university’s prestigious Undergraduate Studies Teaching Award and the Undergraduate Studies CORE General Education Teaching Award Sunday for his development of two innovative undergraduate courses in journalism.
Students were asked to nominate teachers for the award who changed or reinforced a career direction, made a difference in how the student views the world, served as a role model or improved the understanding of challenging material.
The University’s Associate Provost for Academic Affairs and Dean for Undergraduate Studies presents the awards to two faculty members each May.
Yaros’ first innovative course — “Information 3.0,” an I-Series course recently designated as a new “Scholarship in Practice” course — engages students with multiple technologies, including a custom mobile app that Yaros developed.
The second course – “Introduction of Mass Communication” – received funding to provide students with mobile devices to research how audiences are seeking, selecting and sharing digital news.
Yaros presented his work last month at the University’s “Innovation in Teaching and Learning Conference” at Stamp Student Union and at the Sloan Consortium’s “National Blended Learning Conference” in Milwaukee.
His research will also appear in a special issue on mobile computing this summer in the peer-reviewed “International Journal of Cyber Behavior, Psychology and Learning.”
Yaros is also one of ten Center for Teaching Excellence 2012 Lilly Fellows, an interdisciplinary team charged with the implementation of new “Scholarship in Practice” courses for the upcoming academic year.
For the list of past winners click here. Eligibility information for both awards is available on the Office of Undergraduate Studies website.
COLLEGE PARK – A team of student investigative journalists at the University of Maryland Philip Merrill College of Journalism won several 2011 Society of Professional Journalists Mark of Excellence awards for a national project on food safety standards.
The “How Safe is Your Food?” project was produced by student journalists at the Merrill College, Arizona State University, the University of Missouri and Harvard University as part of News21. News 21 is a program of the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, fostering in-depth, interactive and innovative investigative journalism at journalism schools across the country.
The package included in-depth text stories, interactive graphics and video segments that examined holes in the corporate and government systems for preventing outbreaks of foodborne pathogens.
The package won first place in the online in-depth reporting categories. Additionally, a section of the package focusing on salmonella authored by Merrill students Jeffrey Benzing, Esther French, Judah Ari Gross and Robyne McCullough (“Salmonella Lurks from Farm to Fork”) won first place in the online feature reporting category and was a runner-up in the in-depth reporting category.
The project was produced by students working in two newsrooms, one at Merrill and the other at Arizona State University. The project was overseen by former Washington Post top editor Len Downie.
“You see the full palette of Merrill students’ talents and skills in the News 21 project — in-depth reporting presented in a high-impact mix of text, video and interactive graphics. The project also highlights the important role that universities play in training the next generation of journalists — and producing good journalism,” said Deb Nelson, a professor of investigative journalism at the Merrill College who directed the newsroom at the University of Maryland.
Other Merrill faculty members served as editors on the project, including Sean Mussenden, co-director of the college’s Capital News Service program, Sandy Banisky, the college’s Abell Professor in Baltimore Journalism, and doctoral student Stanton Paddock.
“These journalists spent the summer reporting from farms, farmer’s markets, slaughterhouses, grocery stores and congressional hallways. They got answers from people who didn’t want to talk to them. And they found compelling ways to tell stories – as the judges acknowledged,” Banisky said.
Other Merrill students also won 2011 SPJ awards. Christopher Haxel won the national SPJ Mark of Excellence Award for general column writing and Merrill Student Jeremy Schneider placed second in the sports column writing category.
First-place national winners will be recognized at the Excellence in Journalism 2012 conference Sept. 20-22 in Fort Lauderdale.
For the entire list of SPJ 2011 National Mark of Excellence Winners, please click here.
Dr. Ronald Yaros, Merrill assistant professor of multimedia and mobile journalism, will share his latest research on communication technologies in journalism courses at upcoming national and regional conferences.
“Studying how today’s students seek, select, produce and share digital information is providing invaluable insight into future journalism audiences,” Yaros said. “The best way to design the new journalism models of tomorrow – especially in mobile – is to focus on what today’s app users prefer.”
Yaros has been invited to present his findings on April 24 at the national Sloan Consortium’s “Blended Learning Conference” in Milwaukee, Wis., and to the regional “Innovations in Teaching and Learning Conference” hosted in College Park on April 26-27 at the University of Maryland.
Yaros is also a 2012 Lilly Fellow collaborating with an interdisciplinary team of Maryland faculty to promote development of new “Scholarship in Practice” courses for the 2012-13 academic year.
COLLEGE PARK – Merrill doctoral student Andrew Nynka has been awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to examine how new media shapes the public agenda in Ukraine.
“I’m extremely honored to have been selected for a Fulbright grant to Ukraine, and excited by the prospect of teaching and conducting research in a foreign country, particularly one in which truly independent journalism and democracy have a relatively short history,” he said. “While preparing my application, I got invaluable advice and guidance from the university’s National Scholarships Office as well as from faculty at the Merrill College. I couldn’t have done it without them and I can’t thank them enough.”
As part of his research, Nynka plans to analyze more than 2,000 blogs and traditional news stories in Kyiv and Lviv.
“While there has been increasing interest in research on the relationship between new media and public discourse, I expect Andrew’s project to provide an important contribution to our understanding of how this dynamic works in an emerging democracy,” said Merrill Associate Professor Ira Chinoy, Nynka’s advisor. “Andrew’s fluency in the language and his familiarity with Ukraine’s culture and history will provide rich context for his study.”
Nynka will work in collaboration with Professor Yevhen Fedchenko at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and Professors Ihor Balynskyi and Olena Dzhedzhora at the Ukrainian Catholic University.
Nynka earned a bachelors degree in political science and economics from Muhlenberg College and a masters degree in journalism from New York University. In 2004, he covered the Orange Revolution in Ukraine as Kyiv bureau chief for The Ukranian Weekly, a U.S.-based English-language newspaper. While at the paper, he also covered the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics and reported from the White House, Congress and the United Nations.
After that, he worked as a general assignment reporter for the Daily Record in Parsippany, N.J., and covered education for the Daily Journal in Vineland, N.J.
Nynka entered the doctoral program at Merrill in 2009. His research interests include the future of journalism, its impact on democracy and public discourse and journalism history. Nynka plans to complete his dissertation when he returns from Ukraine in 2013.
Adam Goldman, a 1995 University of Maryland graduate and an Associated Press investigative reporter, won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting earlier this week along three other AP reporters for a series that exposed the New York Police Department’s clandestine monitoring of Muslims in New York City and surrounding areas in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.
This is Goldman’s first Pulitzer.
“It’s been a tough story,” he said. “I’m just trying to process everything.”
Goldman, 40, graduated with a degree in history in 1995. After college, he immigrated to Israel and talked his way into an internship at a magazine in Jerusalem. He caught the reporting bug and decided to return to the U.S. in 1998 to attend graduate school and study journalism.
Instead, he managed to land jobs working at newspapers in Virginia and Alabama. Goldman covered local government and the police beat. He learned how to manage a beat and cultivate sources. He also learned something about persistence from an editor who worked with him at both papers.
“That guy taught me one thing,” he said. “Get the story. Don’t give up.”
Goldman joined the AP in 2002.
The Pulitzer Prize is the fourth major award for the NYPD series, which also won the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, a George Polk Award, and the Edgar A. Poe Award from the White House Correspondents’ Association.
Tom Frank, A USA Today investigative reporter and Merrill adjunct professor, was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in exploratory reporting for his exploration of inflated pensions for state and local employees.
This is the first time that Frank was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist. He teaches news writing and reporting at Merrill.
“I started hearing rumors a month ago that I’ll be a finalist,” he said. “But when I wrote the stories, I absolutely didn’t expect that they would compete for a prize like a Pulitzer.”
During the eight-month investigation before the series was published, Frank, 49, examined thousands of pages of pension laws from all 50 states and filed 70 public records requests to calculate the pensions for state lawmakers.
Their reaction: “Most of them didn’t have much response,” Frank said. “They knew that was the way it was. In three or four states, there were a few state lawmakers who didn’t even know that their pensions were calculated the way they were.”
Merrill Dean Kevin Klose called Frank’s series, “distinguished journalism in the public interest.”
Frank’s series ran in USA Today between September and December 2011. The full series can be seen online at www.pensions.usatoday.com.
Rem Rieder, editor and senior vice president of the American Journalism Review, spoke to The Huffington Post after David Wood – one of the organizations’ senior military correspondents – won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting earlier this week.
Rieder said the Pulitzer represents a big step forward for the online-only, seven-year-old news organization and for all digital news outlets.
[The award] is, “Quite a benchmark in the evolution of The Huffington Post, which early on, had plenty of aggregation and plenty of opinion and no original reporting,” Rieder said in The Huffington Post article.
To read the full piece, please click here.
AJR Editor Speaks to Al Jazeera English About the Impact of Social Media on Journalism
Rem Rieder, editor and senior vice president of Merrill’s American Journalism Review spoke to Al Jazeera English about the impact of social media on journalism. Rieder discussed the significance of social media for newsgathering, the distribution of news coverage and public access to information via social media sites.
The Al Jazeera interview with Rieder was produced for a segment on the opening of the new-media gallery at the Newseum, the museum of news in Washington, D.C.
To learn more about the Newseum’s new-media gallery, read American Journalism Review’s story here.