This year’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism Research Colloquium is scheduled for Wednesday, April 11. The guest speaker will be James S. Ettema, professor of communication studies at Northwestern University, who will speak on “Soldiers’ Stories: Representation of Warfare and the Critique of Empathy.”
Ettema is the editor, with D. Charles Whitney, of Individuals in Mass Media Organizations: Creativity and Constraint, and Audience Making: How the Media Create the Audience; and author, with Theodore L. Glasser, of Custodians of Conscience: Investigative Journalism and Public Virtue.

Professor Ettema, received his B.A. and M. A. degrees from the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Minnesota, worked as a writer, filmmaker, and photographer before completing his doctoral studies at the University of Michigan. He is currently director of Northwestern’s doctoral program in Media, Technology, and Society.

The research colloquium will be held in Room 2114 of the Journalism Building from 12:30 - 2:00 p.m.

Indira Somani, a Ph.D. candidate at the Merrill College, has accepted an offer from Washington and Lee University as a tenure-track assistant professor in broadcast journalism.Somani will join the W&L faculty in the fall of 2008, after winding up her doctorate this fall. The extra time also will allow her to complete a documentary film.

Somani brings ten years of broadcast journalism experience as a producer to the classroom. She has been a writer and producer of financial broadcasts for CNBC, a senior producer for “Early Today,” a network newscast which aired on 200 NBC affiliates, a field producer for WJLA-TV, the ABC affiliate in Washington, D.C., and a producer at several network affiliate stations.

Ira Chinoy, a visiting professor and Scripps Howard Doctoral Fellow, has been appointed as an associate professor with tenure by University President C.D. Mote Jr.

Chinoy brings more than 24 years of newspaper experience to the faculty and is one of the nation’s experts in computer assisted reporting. As director of the CAR department at The Washington Post, he was part of a team that won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for a 1998 series on the use of deadly force by the D.C. police. At The Providence Journal, where he was a reporter from 1981 to 1995, Chinoy was part of a team that won the Pulitzer Prize in Investigative Reporting for coverage of corruption and patronage in the Rhode Island courts.

Chinoy joined the Merrill College in 2001 where he’s taught courses in computer-assisted reporting, the use of archives as a resource for journalists, and news reporting and writing.

J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism, a center of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism, launched a new online tool for citizen journalists.
The Knight Citizen News Network, a free web portal to help both citizens and journalists create and responsibly operate community news sites, launched today with an array of learning and resource modules contributed by a network of participants.

Among the site’s initial offerings are:
• A unique database of U.S. citizen media sites, searchable by keyword, town or state and displayed on a Google map.
• A “Things We Like” feature, starting with more than 20 cool ideas from sites around the country.
• An interactive overview of the “Principles of Citizen Journalism,” with more than 40 audio and video interviews and scores of resources.
• The latest citizen media research.
• Mini case studies on how to train citizen journalists.
• A list of resources to jumpstart reporting.

Please find the full release here.