The Academic Minute for 2017.6.5-6.9

Academic Minute from 6.5 – 6.9

Monday, June 5th
Aly Colon – Washington and Lee University
The New Gatekeepers of News
Aly Colón is the Knight Professor of Media Ethics in the Department of Journalism and Mass Communications at Washington and Lee University.  Prior to joining Washington and Lee, Colón spent more than 30 years in journalism. He worked for a news service, daily newspapers, public radio, network television and a journalism institute. Most recently, he served as a Director of Standards & Practices at NBC News and Telemundo Network News. He held editing and reporting positions at The Seattle Times, The Everett Herald, The Oakland Press and Fairchild News Service. He also spent a decade teaching professional journalists about ethics and diversity at the Poynter Institute, a global resource in journalism. Editor of Best Newspaper Writing book, more than 400 pages of award-winning journalism used by journalists and university journalism professors. Colón has conducted newsroom training for more than 50 news organizations and has done consulting on diversity, ethics, writing, editing and leadership. He has been a media consultant and independent journalist, and has worked as a corporate communication manager.

Tuesday, June 6th
Ivan Dylko – University at Buffalo
Personalized News Feeds
Dr. Dylko is interested in the nature and political effects of Internet-based information and communication technologies (ICTs). In his research, Dr. Dylko uses Mix-of-Attributes framework to study how ICTs affect various political outcomes, such as political participation, political knowledge, political selective exposure, and political information processing. Currently, Dr. Dylko is leading several projects:

• Examination of how customizability technology (also known as personalization or tailoring) increases exposure to information that supports individuals’ political attitudes and beliefs, and how such selective exposure leads to political attitude polarization.
• Identification and explication of politically important affordances of social and mobile media.
• Algorithm audit of top-trafficked websites with the goal of describing how much political ideology-based personalization is taking place on those websites.
• Development of a general theoretical model that explains how ICTs create individual-level political effects.

Dr. Dylko’s research is inherently multidisciplinary. He has collaborated with researchers from psychology and computer science, and published articles on such topics as media effects, communication technology, public opinion, and political communication in International Journal of Public Opinion Research, New Media and Society, Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, Communication Theory, and others.

Wednesday, June 7th
Amanda Lotz – University of Michigan
The Media is a Business
Amanda D. Lotz is professor of Communication Studies and Screen Arts and Cultures at the University of Michigan. Her research examines the operations of the U.S. television and the representation of gender on television. She teaches courses about media industries and gender in media.

Thursday, June 8th
Michael Mann – Penn State University
Extreme Weather and Climate Change
Mann is author of more than 200 peer-reviewed and edited publications, and has published three books including Dire Predictions: Understanding Climate Change, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines, and The Madhouse Effect, co-authored with Washington Post editorial cartoonist Tom Toles. He is also a co-founder of the award-winning science website RealClimate.org.

Mann was a Lead Author on the Observed Climate Variability and Change chapter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Third Scientific Assessment Report in 2001 and was organizing committee chair for the National Academy of Sciences Frontiers of Science in 2003. He has received a number of honors and awards including NOAA’s outstanding publication award in 2002 and selection by Scientific American as one of the fifty leading visionaries in science and technology in 2002. He contributed, with other IPCC authors, to the award of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. He was awarded the Hans Oeschger Medal of the European Geosciences Union in 2012 and was awarded the National Conservation Achievement Award for science by the National Wildlife Federation in 2013. He made Bloomberg News’ list of fifty most influential people in 2013. In 2014, he was named Highly Cited Researcher by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) and received the Friend of the Planet Award from the National Center for Science Education. He is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, the American Meteorological Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Friday, June 9th
Marie Gould Harper – American Public University
Family Leave Policies
Dr. Marie Harper holds a master’s in instructional systems from Pennsylvania State University, and a doctorate of business from Capella University. She is the Program Director of the Management program at American Public University. Her experience is in the areas of human resources, instructional design, online learning, management, and more. Some of the organizations that she has been active and held leadership positions include: Society for Human Resource Management, Organizational Development Network, Association of Collegiate Business Schools and Programs, Students in Free Enterprise, and Delta Mu Delta.