Graduate Studies
New journalism faculty members ramp up the research
Research productivity in the Journalism Department of the College of Journalism and Communications has increased at a rapid pace over the past few years with the addition of several new faculty members. Each of these professors combines professional experience with his or her research specializations and they encourage graduate students to contact them about potential collaboration. Here is a snapshot of their scholarly productivity:
Recent work by Dr. Cory L. Armstrong has included content analyses of women in news stories and magazines about obesity and dieting, which were published in Journal of Health and Mass Communication and Health Communication. She has also developed manuscripts on the perceived credibility of men and women as news sources and on how macrolevel factors (e.g., community demographics) affect news content. Her publications have appeared in journals including Mass Communication & Society, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Atlantic Journal of Communication and Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. A former public affairs reporter, her current research examines how nutritional messages reach underserved populations through mediated content. She teaches graduate classes, including Race, Class, Gender and Media, Research Methods, and Issues in the Press and serves as an associate editor of Mass Communication & Society.
Dr. Norman P. Lewis, a former newspaper editor and publisher, researches newsroom culture and plagiarism. His research is featured in the current editions of two academic publications. A study of how editors lagged behind society in how they viewed women was published in American Journalism and an examination of professional plagiarism over a 10-year period is in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly. He teaches undergraduate courses in editing and ethics, and a doctoral class in mass communication theory and the philosophy of science.
Dr. Judy Robinson has been developing digital multimedia for storytelling and for distance education for more than 15 years. She has recently developed a new course for online journalists and is studying user satisfaction in online journalism education. While she has researched scholastic journalism and media literacy she has recently written on "Where are the Millennials in journalism?" and is involved in gathering data on crowdsourcing and using UGC (user generated content) strategies to develop online communities. She also may be found researching strategies for teaching at a distance in virtual worlds. At the graduate level she teaches Survey of Electronic Publishing and Developing Digital Online Learning.
Dr. Ronald R. Rodgers has more than 20 years of experience in newspapers as a reporter, editor, and designer working both in Asia and in five Western states. He directs the editing program in the department, where he teaches basic and advanced editing and a graduate seminar in literary journalism. Dr. Rodgers’ research agenda is driven by his professional experience, and his research interests revolve around media history, especially an exploration of the etiology of journalistic normative standards derived from the many agents of influence on conduct and content – to include public relations, newspaper readers, social scientists, public figures, government and the courts, other journalists, the trade press and magazines, and religion. The applicant is especially interested in the raucous, changing world of journalism as it was becoming unhinged from partisan financial sustenance in the latter part of the 19th century and first two decades of the 20th, a topic that has currency a century later as journalism faces a similar upheaval involving new technology and consolidation and questions and criticism about objectivity and journalistic conduct and ethics. Dr. Rodgers has presented 19 papers at national conferences and has published articles in American Journalism, Newspaper Research Journal, Journalism History, Journal of Mass Media Ethics, Public Relations Review, Journal of Media and Religion, Media History Monographs, the Journal of Global Mass Communication, and Explorations in Media Ecology.
Dr. Amy Zerba joined the faculty in 2010 as an assistant professor. She was a copy editor and page designer at three large dailies and most recently worked as a multimedia producer at CNN.com. Her research interests focus on Millennials and their news habits and non-news habits. Three recent projects include: examining the reasons behind why young adults don't read print newspapers through focus group research; experimenting with ways to increase relevancy, comprehension, interest and informativeness of news stories for a young adult audience; and comparing young adults' non-use reasons for not using a news medium across media. Her research methods include experiments, online surveys, content analyses, secondary data analyses, in-depth interviews and focus groups. She teaches courses in online journalism and visual journalism.
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