Journalism

Journalism Faculty Work

February 5, 2016

Professor Blumenkrantz
Professor David Blumenkrantz with students who attended one of his lectures at Yangtze University, China

 

Journalism faculty members continue to be engaged in creative and scholarly work, including presenting at conferences, working on significant research projects and earning prestigious honors. Their endeavors include:

 

Dr. Elizabeth Blakey will be presenting her research on how the globalization of a city shapes media coverage of protest activities. This continues Blakey's work on geographic variation of First Amendment liberties. Her paper, "News of Protest: Variable Influence of Structural Pluralism on Media Coverage of Occupy L.A. and Occupy Fresno," was accepted for presentation at the midwinter meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) that will take place later this month at the University of Oklahoma.

 

Dr. Stephanie Bluestein was recently selected to work on a long-term project, editing a volume on academic dishonesty for New Directions for Community Colleges. She was also awarded an eLearning grant through CSUN Faculty Technology to implement more educational technology into her news-writing classes.

 

Prof. David Blumenkrantz spent the first part of his Fall ’15 sabbatical finishing the writing, editing and design of Africana, a 200+ page anthology of his writings and photographs done in Africa from 1987-1994. The book is virtually finished and he is actively seeking a publisher. He then went to China for a month where he gave a series of lectures on visual communication and photojournalism ethics to a group of international graduate students at Wuhan University Journalism and Communications Department and spoke at the 8th Intercultural Communications Conference. He also was invited to speak at other campuses in the province: the Wuhan Media and Communications College, and Changjiang (Yangtze) University in the city of Jingzhou. In addition to his academic activity, he was able to create a sizable collection of street photography in Wuhan. During the sabbatical, he participated in two exhibitions at the 1831 Gallery in Paris, France. The first exhibit featured 15 of his African photographs, and beginning Feb. 2, a collection of 20 of his street photographs from Los Angeles, New York and China went on display.

 

Prof. Rory Cohen took the reins of California Real Estate, an award-winning publication in early 2015. She overseas content, planning, and layout in her role as magazine editor. Cohen has also authored public policy articles on the subject of homeownership and Millennials – namely the danger in Gen. Y becoming a renter nation. She is also working on a documentary series on the Jewish exodus from Iraq during the 20th century and a long-form magazine series on the subject. 

 

Prof. Benjamin A. Davis, a veteran broadcast journalist with 30 years' experience as a reporter and producer in radio and television news, has joined the CSUN journalism faculty. He taught journalism as an adjunct professor at Rutgers University for 10 years and has worked for three years as the CBS Harold Dow Visiting Professor at Florida A&M University. Davis has helped develop digital journalism courses and explored ways to target young news consumers online. Davis teaches what he calls a synergy of broadcast, print and Internet, and has written an E-Book on a model of digital writing that he refers to as the Digital Media Pyramid. Among his teaching strengths, he stresses critical digital thinking and draws on his extensive network of industry contacts to help students with internships and employment upon graduation.

 

Dr. Marcy De Veaux is continuing a research project creating oral histories of African Americans who migrated out of the American South and into New England, fleeing racial segregation and state-sponsored oppression. During her Spring ’16 sabbatical semester, she will travel to New England to interview individuals whose families migrated from the South into New England during the height of The Great Migration, 1920 to 1960. She will also travel to the south to meet with family members who stayed behind in addition to traveling to New England. With the assistance of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society of New England, The Portsmouth Black Heritage Trail, Maine Historical Society and the Sampson Center for Diversity in Maine, at the University of Southern Maine, she will meet with each individual and record their oral history. The goal of the project is to fill in the gaps of missing history during a time of significant historical change and provide an unfiltered perspective of those who lived the experience, offering a more complete and complex picture of America’s history.

 

Dr. Bobbie Eisenstock was awarded a grant from the Office of Community Engagement to continue her partnership with the National Eating Disorders Association’s Proud2Bme On Campus Campaign. Last year her students helped to launch the nationwide campaign and developed a guide entitled How to Spread Body Positivity in Your Community.

Dr. Eisenstock and her student project manager presented the campaign at the National Association for Media Literacy Education Conference in Philadelphia. This fall she and three of her students participated in the Annual Conference of the National Eating Disorders Association where Dr. Eisenstock served as a faculty host and her students facilitated social media activities. Her community engagement students also helped to launch the first U.S. National Media Literacy Week with campus-wide and social media-driven activities that were featured on the national website.

Dr. Eisenstock also participated in the 2015 "Digital Media and Developing Minds" Sackler colloquium co-sponsored by Children and Screens and the National Academy of Sciences.

 

Prof. David Grewe, visual storyteller, who received his master's degree from Syracuse University in 2011, recently joined the CSUN journalism faculty. He has taught visual journalism and multimedia storytelling at Washington State University, the University of Alabama and Syracuse University. He is currently working with fellow team members to complete a multimedia application on the The 1964 Blackfeet Flood, the worst natural disaster in Montana’s recorded history. The mobile documentary presents place-based short films, survivors’ stories, text, historic documents and images that allows viewers to experience and remember the Blackfeet Flood online and “in the field” at various Blackfeet Reservation-area sites. The project received grants from both Vision Maker Media/PBS and Humanities Montana.

 

Prof. Gretchen Macchiarella, who serves as publisher of the Sundial, presented at the 2015 College Media Association conference on takeaways from the first years of digital focus for the Sundial newsroom. She will be presenting again at the conference this month, speaking about Digital storytelling tools for mobile presentation. She was also awarded an eLearning grant through CSUN Faculty Technology to redesign the Sundial practicum class to a more digital format.

 

Dr. Melissa Wall's research on the cellphone use by Syrian refugees was presented at the International Association for Media and Communication Research conference in Montreal and at the National Communication Association conference in Chicago. Her co-authored article on the same topic was published in the New Media & Society journal. She also wrote about Syrian refugees for the Washington Post. Wall was selected as an Open Society Academic Scholar for Ukraine and worked with students at the Mohyla School of Journalism, where she served on the committee of the first graduate student to be awarded a doctorate by their program. She also presented her research on training students in mobile journalism at the European Communication Research and Education Association in Portugal.