department news

CLP journalists explore Middle East

During a six-week journey that took them through northern Iraq and Syria, Common Language Project journalists and Department instructors Sarah Stuteville, Jessica Partnow and Alex Stonehill reported for a series called The Road to Damascus. The Common Language Project is housed in the Department of Communication. Since their return to the U.S., the team continues to write about their experiences, especially now that politics has taken a turn in many of the areas they visited. Their friends and colleagues Daniel O'Brien, a Seattle native and former Corporal in the U.S. Marine Corps, and Sarah Glidden, a cartoonist who specializes in non-fiction and political comics joined them. The team updated blogs and Twitter feeds as often as they could find Internet access. Their visits included Iraq’s amusement park, squatters at Saddam's old prisons and army barracks, and the outskirts of Kirkuk with the former water minister. They documented their experiences with photography and video posted alongside their blog entries.

Dart West Receives Border-Reporting Grant

Dart Center West was awarded a $20,000 grant from the Gannett Foundation to provide support for student journalists and educators interested in reporting on U.S.-Mexico border issues. Dart West, housed in the Department of Communication, is a satellite office of The Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma based at Columbia University in New York.

The award will help Dart Center West continue the Teaching Border Reporting Initiative. The grant will fund a second conference in 2011, and support web-based curriculum projects related to covering risky communities along the border. “The Gannett Foundation grant is a great acknowledgment of the good work already done by journalism educators in the Southwest, and the value of an ongoing Dart Center project on teaching trauma journalism as it relates to border reporting,” said Meg Spratt, Associate Director of Academic Programs for the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma. Read more >>

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The Egyptian crisis from our perspective

Technology is bringing us closer than ever to news events that take place far from UW. The turmoil in Egypt is but the latest example of this.

Nathanial Greenberg, a UW doctoral student based in Cairo, wrote a harrowing first-person account about his efforts to stay safe even as Egyptian police confronted protesters outside his apartment building. He fed his article to the Common Language Project’s website. The CLP is based in the Department, where its three principals teach multimedia reporting. The Seattle Times later picked up Greenberg’s story.

The decision by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to curtail Internet and mobile-phone communication in his country drew the attention of the UW Flip the Media blog. That blog, which is sponsored by the Department’s graduate program in digital media, has offered up several posts on this and other developments in Egypt. The blog’s emphasis has been on explaining the role that social media have played in this crisis.

And one of the nation’s biggest “mainstream” news organizations, CBS News, interviewed faculty member Phil Howard about the consequences of Mubarak’s decision to clamp down on communication in Egypt. Howard’s latest book, The Internet and Islam: The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, talks about precisely this issue. That book examines how digital communication technologies can help undermine the power structures in populous Muslim countries — like Egypt.

—By Randal Beam

Our community scholarship

The MCDM's unique focus on storytelling and social media has inspired a lot of interest among companies and non-profits alike. Over the last few years, we’ve struck partnerships with those organizations, to engage them as “clients” in our various classes and create implementable real-world solutions in collaboration with them. We call it “community scholarship.”

We just wrapped up an incredible quarter of community scholarship in our required “Strategic Research and Business Practices” course (this class is co-taught by Dr. Malcolm Parks and me). I’d like to share the multimedia proposals that our student teams created for our clients. Probably our greatest challenge was doing business with the Environmental Protection Agency’s “Climate Change” program — especially since they’re based in Washington, D.C. The embedded videos are testimony to the diversity of thought that our professionally-minded students bring to the task at hand. They’re all worth watching, so I’ve also posted the links from our other teams’ client work (including Birdnote, The New Hive, the Woodland Park Zoo, and the Pacific Science Center).

—By Hanson Hosein

Wikileaks conversation Friday

We have made a breaking news decision and will hold a public conversation about Wikileaks and its release of documents tomorrow, Friday, at the Seattle Public Library. Watch video of the event >>

Here’s our description of the event:

The UW’s Department of Communication and Master program in Digital Media, in collaboration with the Seattle Public Library and City Club, present “Open Secrets: An Open Conversation about Wikileaks and Information Transparency in America”

With the explosion of digital and social media platforms over the past decade, we celebrate the idea of an openness and transparency – especially online. Is Wikileaks just another platform within this new “open” environment? Or has the past week’s events provided a harsh lesson in our need to retain control over certain forms of information? We’ll engage the public in a conversation about the nature of Wikileaks and its impact on our understanding of the Internet.

Confirmed participants in this conversation include:

• Mike Fancher, Editor at Large, The Seattle Times
• Brett Horvath, Director, The Leaders Network
• Sarah van Gelder, Editor-in-Chief, Yes! Magazine

—By David Domke

Debate Central

Debate was back, in a big way, in the Department this past weekend.

On Friday and Saturday we partnered with the Washington Debate Coalition, Newport High School, and Puyallup High School to host the Becky Galentine Memorial Tournament. The tournament was a stunning success: 23 schools comprising 124 policy, Lincoln-Douglas, public forum, and student congress debate teams and 64 individual events competitors competed. Thanks to volunteers from Newport and Puyallup high schools, coaches, judges, and students received great hospitality and the tournament ran smoothly and on time despite having hundred of attendees.

A highlight of the event was the closing awards ceremony. Glen Frappier, the Director of Debate at the University of Gonzaga, spoke about Becky Galentine, after whom the tournament is named. Becky was a student at the University of Washington, excellent debate coach and debater, and tireless advocate for debate in Washington. Glen told the audience about his time as Becky’s teammate and how much he inspired her. He also told the audience about her tragic death from breast cancer at the age of 27.

Anjali Vats, a Ph.D. student in the Department and the Director of Washington Debate Coalition, told me this.

Read more >>

—By David Domke

Department ranks well

On a periodic basis the National Research Council rates academic programs in higher education around the United States. The NRC ratings draw on data collected about faculty, students, and features within an academic unit; these data are from 2005-2007, so they are a bit dated. Perhaps the most noteworthy feature of the NRC rankings is that they do not rank programs #1, #2, #3, and so on; instead, the NRC places each program within a cluster of comparable programs. The ratings vary in applicability across disciplines; that is, ratings in disciplines such as Chemistry, Music, and Political Science are unrelated to ones in Communication.

We are proud to tout some marks of excellence for the UW Department of Communication in the NRC rankings.

First, when evaluated along with a total of 83 communication programs across the country, we rate approximately the same as University of Southern California, Indiana University, University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Minnesota, University of Texas-Austin, University of California-Santa Barbara, and University of Iowa.

Second, we are one of a small number of Communication programs that includes faculty and students spanning many sub-fields of communication normally divided into separate departments. If we look at programs with similar scope and vision, there is only one fully-integrated communication program with a ranking higher than ours—the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism, housed at the University of Southern California.

Third, the NRC creates an “impact” score that seeks to assess the visibility and influence of research produced by a Department faculty. The NRC rankings fail to include research published in several venues that faculty in a comprehensive Communication program such as ours target. Nonetheless, even though some significant amount of our research is not included in the NRC’s counts, our impact rating is quite high. Of the 10 institutions that have the most publications in the database that the NRC draws upon, 5 had lower impact ratings than us: University of Arizona, Michigan State University, University of Pennsylvania, University of California-Santa Barbara, and University of Missouri.

—By David Domke