communigator

College faculty receives national recognition

Several members of the College’s faculty have been honored by academic and professional organizations over the past several months. “Our talented, hard-working faculty continue to represent our College through their outstanding research, teaching and service,” said Dean John Wright. “They continue to elevate the exceptional reputation of this College that their predecessors built over the decades.”

UF advertising professor to lead national association

University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications Associate Dean of Graduate Studies Debbie Treise will take over as president of the American Academy of Advertising on January 1. Treise has spent 2010 serving as president-elect.

Founded in 1957, AAA aims to advance advertising education. It has more than 600 members, including faculty members, graduate students and advertising professionals. The organization’s president appoints more than 100 members to 15 committees, such as the industry relations and fellowship, international advertising education and publications.

“I was stunned and speechless when I got the e-mail that I won the election,” Treise said. “I want to continue to build and improve on this already premier organization for advertising scholars and professionals.”

Treise’s experiences as a college administrator and many years of working in television and radio advertising have prepared her for this challenge. Treise, who heads the graduate division and works with many of the College’s master’s and doctoral students, is just as accomplished on campus. In 2009-2010, she received the campuswide UF Doctoral Dissertation Advisor/Mentoring Award.

Dean Wright described Treise as a “deeply caring, unequivocally dedicated and supremely effective advisor and mentor.”

Lu Zheng honored at American Academy of Advertising annual meeting

A research paper co-authored by Lu Zheng, assistant professor of advertising, was named the 2011 Best Conference Paper at the American Academy of Advertising’s annual conference in April.  “Revising the Transportation-Imagery Model and Expanding Understanding of Persuasion via Narrative Advertising,” was co-authored by Professor Joe Phelps of the University of Alabama and researches the use of narrative in advertising, and is drawing national recognition.

“Narrative advertising uses stories to persuade in lieu of arguments,” said Zheng. “I’m employing a relatively new persuasion model, Transportation-Imagery Model, to examine narrative advertising across modality.

“The transportation theory has been used primarily in the field of psychology, and not in advertising. However, past research has shown consistently that when you are mentally transported into the narrative world, you tend to exhibit positive attitudes toward the story characters and also display story-consonant beliefs.”

Zheng joined the College in the fall of 2010 after earning her doctorate degree from the University of Alabama. Her dissertation was recognized last year by the AAA for one of its two 2010 Doctoral Dissertation Grants, the most prestigious award the Academy awards to doctoral students nationwide each year.

PR faculty members earn research recognition

Two College public relations faculty members have received national recognition for their research. Juan Carlos Molleda, associate professor and graduate coordinator, earned top honors in the PRSA Top Research Paper award at the PRSA International Conference in Orlando for his paper “Testing a perceived authenticity index with triangulation research: The case of Xcaret in Mexico.”

Spiro Kiousis, professor and chair of the department of public relations, and two of his co-authors also were recognized at the PRSA conference for their paper on “Congressional Agenda-Building: Examining the Influence of Congressional Communications from the Speaker of the House.” Kiousis, Alexander Laskin and Ji Young Kim’s article was selected as one of the year’s top research articles published in the Public Relations Journal, the industry’s leading peer-reviewed research journal. Their article was published in the Winter 2011 issue.

In addition, Kiousis has co-authored “Political Public Relations,” a scholarly book on this increasingly important communications discipline.

In the new book, Kiousis and Jesper Stromback, Lubbe Nordstrom Professor and Chair in Journalism and professor in media and communication at Mid Sweden University in Sundsvall, Sweden, have mapped and defined this emerging field, bringing together scholars from political communication, public relations and political science to study the different aspects of political public relations.

The book is available through retail outlets and online websites such as Amazon.

“This volume connects differing schools of thought in political public relations,” said Kiousis. “We brought together theoretical and empirical investigations to better define a field that is becoming increasingly prominent in national and international settings.

“This book fills a significant gap in the existing literature and we believe it will influence future theory and research and enable these political and communications systems to be more fully understood.”

Molleda contributed a chapter on global political public relations, public diplomacy and corporate foreign policy.

Judy Robinson named scholastic journalism’s educator of the year

Journalism Assistant Professor Judy Robinson received the Scholastic Journalism Division’s David Adams Educator of the Year award at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication conference in St. Louis in August.  

Robinson was cited for her leadership in the use of new technology in journalism education and for sharing her expertise in ways that help others improve their own teaching with technology.  She has presented numerous workshops and seminars over the years, introducing participants to new technologies and demonstrating how they can be implemented in college and high school journalism classrooms.  

Ron Rodgers promoted to associate professor

Congratulations to Ron Rodgers who was promoted to associate professor of journalism and awarded tenure earlier in the summer.  

“Since joining the faculty at UF in 2005, Ron has consistently performed with distinction in the classroom, excelled in his research and been a valued and respected colleague who makes significant contributions in all aspects of his work,” said Dean Wright.

Rodgers spent more than 20 years as a journalist before deciding in 2002 to return to school and earn his doctorate degree in mass communications at Ohio University. He worked as assistant city editor for both the Anchorage Daily News and The Bulletin in Bend, Oregon, and also served a five-year stint at the Seattle Times.  

His research interests revolve around journalism history, especially the raucous, changing world of journalism in the latter part of the nineteenth century and first two decades of the twentieth, and the similarities seen in the current upheaval in the industry involving issues of new technology and consolidation and the questions that follow about objectivity and journalistic ethics.