News

Q&A with UConn Journalism’s incoming department head Marie K. Shanahan on the changing landscape of news & information

Posted on July 21, 2021July 22, 2021 by UConn Journalism

Teacher working with journalism students — Marie Shanahan ’94, seen here working with students, will be the third head of the UConn journalism department in the program’s 56-year history. (Bri Diaz/UConn Photo)

As the only nationally accredited program of its kind in New England, the UConn Department of Journalism has for decades played a role in shaping how the news is reported, disseminated, and understood. Alumni have made their marks in places as far away as Berlin and Moscow, and as close to home as Willimantic and Manchester, and their ranks include winners of every major award in the industry, including the Pulitzer Prize.

Starting in Fall 2021, Marie Shanahan ’94 (CLAS), an award-winning print and online journalist who has taught at UConn since 2011, will become just the third department head in the program’s nearly 60-year history.

Shanahan – who in 2022 will conduct research in the Philippines as a Fulbright US Scholar – recently spoke with UConn Today about the state of the news industry, the opportunities for experimentation that exist at UConn, and why the skills that make good journalists are more valuable now than ever. The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

When you look at the news industry right now, what do you see? Are you optimistic, pessimistic, something in between?

It’s a mixed bag, actually. Right now there are a lot of interesting things happening on the nonprofit side, which I’ve been able to see develop here in Connecticut [Shanahan serves as a board member for two nonprofit news organizations, the Connecticut Health Investigative Team, and the Connecticut Mirror]. There are a lot of opportunities to do really valuable journalism, and to find new ways to fund it.

On the other hand, you see what’s happening to newspapers, and it’s so disheartening. I worry in particular about local news. As good as these journalism nonprofits are, right now they’re not doing what newspapers traditionally have done, which is closely pay attention to what’s happening on the local level.

Given that, what are your priorities as the head of the UConn journalism department?

As head of the journalism department at UConn, where we’re educating the next generation of journalists, there are a number of things we need to do. We need to look at how news organizations are finally coming to grips with the need to improve diversity within the newsroom, and our role in that is to attract a more diverse group of potential journalists, and direct them to mainstream news organizations, or to something new and exciting that’s coming up.

We just hired a new faculty member, Martine Granby, who has a joint appointment with the Africana Studies Institute as part of the College of Liberal Arts and Science’s new Anti-Racism and Anti-Bias cohort. She’s a documentarian. She looks at the news through the medium of documentary film, which is a wonderful opportunity for our department, to have someone who can change some of our curriculum and bring these new perspectives and skills to UConn.

Another thing I want to do is look for synergies. We have all these things happening at UConn – the School of Business, Digital Media and Design, you name it – and I’m always interested to see what kinds of partnerships can be developed. I love that UConn rewards entrepreneurship, and I’d love to see our students work with, say, business students on new ways to fund good journalism. Journalism is interdisciplinary by nature anyway, and the University is a perfect environment to develop that.

Speaking of new skills and perspectives, what are the skills UConn journalism students should develop? The industry has changed so much in a short period of time, but I imagine some of the fundamentals still apply.

Some of our graduates go into journalism, and some don’t. But what we want is for all of them to be clear communicators, because those skills are valuable wherever you go. Other departments are always coming to us to ask for students who can help with writing or editing, because people know journalism majors are good communicators.

You have to be able to write, obviously, but it’s more than that. Every student has to come out of our program with some visual acumen, and we have a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist on our faculty who can show them how to develop that. You have to be able to speak about your work – I teach a podcasting class, for example – which is something new for a lot of journalists. Being on camera, editing audio, editing video, and being able to communicate clearly and effectively on social media are all skills that we teach.

Beyond that, critical thinking is obviously a skill everyone with a college degree should have, but especially for people studying journalism. It’s crucial to have those critical thinking skills when it comes to news literacy, media literacy, information literacy. Today, when information is coming at you like a torrent, and a lot of it is basically garbage, it’s vital to know how to be good consumers of news as well as good producers.

That’s a great segue to talk about what it means to be a journalist, and what journalism means, in 2021. What do people need to be good journalists, and what do people need to be good consumers of journalism?

The technology keeps changing. The way people get their news keeps changing. Nobody gets all their news from one place anymore, it’s all cherry-picking from different sources. One of the first questions I ask students on the first day of class is, “Where do you get your news?” And don’t tell me “I just read the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal,” because no one does that. It’s different for everyone – maybe you check Facebook first thing in the morning, read some emails, look at headlines on Twitter, then get in the car and turn on NPR. Maybe a friend texts you a link to a story. Maybe you get your news from Buzzfeed, or maybe you get your news from TikTok! I’ve got friends who’ve become fully addicted to TikTok, and the Washington Post has a journalist who’s dedicated to producing TikTok videos.

It doesn’t always have to be the way it was. You can produce the news in so many different ways, so you need to think about the best way to reach the audience you want to reach. That’s one of the great things about UConn, we can experiment with all of this.

Because I’m on those two nonprofit boards, I get to hear about what’s happening in this industry every day, and what I hear about is how they’re dealing with super fragmented audiences and the trust problem. We’re struggling to convince half of America to accept basic facts, and for some people there’s an automatic distrust of journalists.

That’s something we need to address, and one of the ways you do that is by having conversations with people and making sure they’re represented. Not every student at UConn is a liberal, and it’s great to have these conversations with students who lean right, lean left, and some who aren’t sure what direction they lean at all, and talk through how they go about receiving information and what builds their trust. The same thing is true of people from minority communities, which haven’t gotten the most detailed or in-depth coverage in the past. The more that people see themselves in the news, the more they’re likely to engage with it.

A big part of journalism is just being adaptable. What’s great about journalism is that you get to learn something new every day, and you get to talk to real people about real problems. We have the opportunity at UConn to innovate and try new things as this industry changes, and I’m excited for it.

Interview by Tom Breen – UConn Communications | July 21, 2021

Once novelty, now necessity: Journalism alumni share their favorite technology and apps that got them through the pandemic

Posted on July 19, 2021July 19, 2021 by UConn Journalism

Headshots of UConn Journalism alumni — *UConn Journalism alumni tell us about the tech that helped them get through the pandemic. On the left, Eric Ferreri and Zac Boyer; center, Purbita Saha; on the right, Jeremy Kohler and Grant Welker.*

The COVID-19 pandemic brought out new forms of resilience in journalists. While the world retreated to houses and apartments, public life closed, and traditional ways of finding people disappeared, reporters found that technology provided a crucial line of communication to sources and coworkers. It made the difference between getting work done and not getting it done, in many cases.We asked UConn Journalism alumni and faculty to name their favorite app, program, or technological gadget that allowed them to keep working through the pandemic. The answers range from methods to do reporting to methods that save or transmit documents and data.

Prof. Maureen Croteau, the outgoing department chair, said her favorite tool is Scanner Pro, a scanning app that allows sending documents electronically. What once might have seemed like an alternative method of sending something evolved into a necessity during the pandemic.

For Grant Welker ’06, a projects reporter for the Boston Business Journal, the technology he could not do without was Google Sheets. “Especially as a business reporter and particularly during the pandemic, there have been lots of cases of coming across huge spreadsheets that needed to be quickly combed for data or simplified and cleaned up for use with a story,” he said.

He learned how to use Google Sheets from a class taught through the New England First Amendment Coalition. A few weeks ago, Welker said he “relatively very quickly went through a national database to find more than 2,500 restaurants in Massachusetts that received federal pandemic aid.” He had done a similar exercise in his previous job at the Worcester Business Journal in a series that covered Paycheck Protection Program loans and grants in Central Massachusetts, and an earlier story tracking prescription opioids.

Pandemic or no pandemic, 2008 graduate Zac Boyer, NFL editor at The Athletic, said his favorite technology has always been his digital recorder—his Sony, not his smart phone. “Call me old-fashioned,” Boyer said. “I just don’t think it’s professional enough.” He added, “Having the ability to convey what someone says accurately is a pillar of our industry, and there’s no better way to do that than with a tape recorder. That may be basic, but I’ve found that allows me to have a better conversation with a subject or a source than it would if I was just jotting down notes that I might get wrong, too.”

Programs — *Zoom, Microsoft Teams, scanning apps, Google Sheets, Blue Yeti Microphone and Otter.ai transcription software, were among the favorite tools of UConn Journalism alumni and faculty during the pandemic.*

With newsrooms and studios closed everywhere, journalists’ homes became recording studios for podcasts and interviews. Purbita Saha ’12, a senior editor at Popular Science, said her favorite tool during the pandemic was hardware. “Popular Science gave me a Blue Yeti Mic before the pandemic for occasional guest spots on our podcast, ‘The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week.’ But now with the microphone, I can turn my drafty apartment into a makeshift audio studio for podcast recording, Zoom webinars, social media, and more.”

Saha said her web cam is terrible but her voice always sounds good for interviewing and connecting with colleagues and online readers.

Reporters have for more than a century relied on telephone calls, but apps that allow calls over computers may have truly come into their own in 2020 and 2021. ProPublica reporter Jeremy Kohler, who graduated in 1994, said iOS TapeACall and Otter.ai, a transcription app, “have been life changing. Being able to quickly transcribe interviews, news conferences and livestreams, has been a huge timesaver and has allowed me to get great quotes, relying less on notes and memory.”

Kohler believes that when he can record interviews, that frees him to do do a better job interviewing. “Worrying less about note taking lets you use all of your brain to ask better questions and control the flow of the interview,” he said. “I’m not sure how I survived this long without them.

Associate Professor Scott Wallace, who reports on indigenous people in South America, said he too puts a phone app first on his list of crucial technology. “This probably sounds kind of antiquated,” Wallace said, “but I’d say without a doubt that for my current project in Brazil, I am using WhatsApp more than anything else.” He said that groups in Brazil keep track of indigenous and environmental issues in Brazil using WhatsApp. “I use it to communicate with Brazilian contacts quickly by text, audio messaging or voice calls.”

Connecticut freelance journalist Jamiah Bennett ‘20, author of a recent piece about the first Black anchor in Connecticut, said she relies the most on her laptop computer. It might seem to go without saying, but imagine living through a pandemic without this basic piece of equipment. “In terms of technology, I rely on my cell phone and laptop the most. On my phone, I use Instagram, Facebook, and Spotify the most,” Bennett said. “On my laptop, I rely on Google Chrome the most. My favorite piece of technology is my laptop.”

Eric Ferreri, who graduated in 1995, said Zoom for virtual meetings and Microsoft Teams for sharing documents were “crucial” in his work as senior writer for Duke University Communications. Those two programs “became everyday tools to communicate with my team from afar. Zoom isn’t flawless, but it’s easy to learn and use. Teams can be overwhelming because it does so much, so you use it for what you need.”

Ferreri added that he became hooked to the apps that allow ordering food online and picking it up without interacting with anyone.

Reported and written by Christine Woodside, Visiting Assistant Professor in Residence.

Filmmaker Martine Granby joins Journalism faculty and Africana Studies Institute

Posted on July 19, 2021July 19, 2021 by UConn Journalism

*Martine Granby is a filmmaker who will hold a joint appointment in Journalism and Africana Studies at UConn.*

Documentary filmmaker Martine N. Granby has joined the Department of Journalism as an assistant professor. She holds a joint appointment in the Africana Studies Institute, and is an affiliate of UConn’s Women’s Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program.

She has worked as a documentarian, producer, editor, video journalist, and educator for The New York Times, Kartemquin Films, The New School, City Bureau, BRIC TV, UnionDocs, and Global Girl Media, an organization empowering young women with the tools for visual journalism to tell their own stories.

Granby’s films weave between documentary, experimental non-fiction, hybrid, and essay forms. Her creative research focuses on interrogations of and material experimentation with family and collective moving image archives, ethical considerations of found footage usage, discourses around mental health in BIPOC communities, and the narrative residues of pop culture in personal memories/viewership.

“I’m beyond thrilled to meet and work with the students and faculty in both the Journalism department and my joint-appointed home in the Africana Studies Institute,” Granby said. She will relocate from Brooklyn, N.Y. and be in residence on campus in Storrs this fall, doing occasional guest teaching. She will begin teaching her own courses in spring 2022.

Her teaching focuses on technical film training and observational critique pulling from diverse film, video, journalistic, and media arts samplings that include but go beyond the traditional canon.

She received her bachelor’s degree in sociology and film studies from Mount Holyoke College and earned a master of arts from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism.

“Some of the best advice I received while in graduate school was not to compare yourself to your peers,” Granby said. “We are all learning together, and everyone brings something different to the table. Honor your own eye and point of view in this field.” In 2015, Granby and a group of her fellow black female documentary filmmakers formed the coalition Brown Girls Doc Mafia.

Her current project is a short film that is part of a three-film series on access to and barriers against mental health care in Black communities. Her earlier work includes a feature film, “The Mask that Grins and Lies,” a personal essay portrait of intergenerational silence around women’s mental health in her family.

This fall she will premiere a documentary short co-directed with Shirin Barghi for Brooklyn-based BRIC TV. It covers the history of New York City’s oldest women’s motorcycle club: “its place in queer history, the lives of its members, and the sisterhood of a chosen family,” she said.

Her teaching goals include teaching about the shifting landscape of film production, to encourage students to ask questions about how they interact with their subjects and audience, and helping students look at media in new ways.

“Students must approach my class as members of a collaborative, democratic, and generative environment,” she said. “We create a collective space in which students shape, share, and strengthen their journalistic and filmic voices.”

Granby added, “Budding documentarians and video journalists must learn how to articulate the choices behind their work, and learn to examine how the media they create is received, ingested, and impacts the surrounding polity is an essential part of the documentary practice.”

Caroline LeCour ’22 (CLAS) is reporting from NBC CT

Posted on July 16, 2021July 19, 2021 by UConn Journalism

Name: Caroline LeCour ’22 (CLAS)

Hometown: Old Lyme, Connecticut

Major: Journalism and communication

Internship: NBC Connecticut’s Digital Team

How did you find this internship?

I knew this past spring that I wanted an internship, so I applied everywhere I could as early as mid-February. I am looking to get into on-air reporting, so I applied to a lot of local news stations around Connecticut and in neighboring states. However, due to the coronavirus pandemic, a lot of internships for broadcasting stations were either cancelled or postponed to the fall. Around mid-April, when I thought all hope was lost due to all the cancellations, the head of NBC Connecticut’s Digital Department, Brad Luck, reached out to me to see if I was interested in interning remotely for his team. I interviewed for the position and shortly after found out I was accepted!

Trajectory: Juliana Mazza ’13, live from Boston

Posted on June 22, 2021July 19, 2021 by UConn Journalism

Juliana Mazza in the WHDH 7 studio — *Juliana Mazza ’13 is a UConn Journalism alumna who now reports and anchors the news at WHDH 7 in Boston.*

Being a TV news reporter is hard. It’s not just the insane hours, rising at 2 a.m. to work the morning shift, or missing important weddings and birthdays, or never having the same days off as your partner, or being told by hurtful trolls on social media that you need to lose weight or change your hairstyle — right after you just got back from covering a blizzard where you were pelted in the face by snowflakes the size of chicken pot pies. But the most difficult part, says Juliana Mazza ’13 (CLAS), reporter and morning anchor at WHDH 7 in Boston, is being human.

“It’s really hard, meeting people at the lowest moment in their life, where they’re facing unspeakable tragedy, somebody who is on their knees in tears, and it’s your job to talk to them.”

Sometimes you hold the mike, and sometimes you hold the person.

UConn Is Again a National Leader in Fulbright Scholars

Posted on February 26, 2021July 19, 2021 by UConn Journalism

UConn Fulbright faculty scholars — The Fulbright Program is the government’s flagship international educational exchange program. UConn faculty scholars include: top Row (L-R): Amanda Denes, Damir Dzhafarov, and Michael Lynes. Bottom Row (L-R): Anne Oeldorf-Hirsch, Marie Shanahan, and Steven Wilf.

The University of Connecticut has been recognized among the top producers of Fulbright U.S. Scholars from research institutions for the third time in the past five years.

The University has seven Fulbright Scholars on its faculty who were given the opportunity to teach and perform research around the world in the 2020-21 academic year, according to the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.

The national leaders were featured in The Chronicle of Higher Education on February 15. UConn is tied for ninth nationally on that list.

Associate professor of journalism Marie Shanahan is among the UConn faculty offered Fulbright projects abroad. She will conduct research at Leyte Normal University in the Philippines to determine how news organizations are combating – or contributing to – the online spread of inaccurate or deliberately deceptive information under the guise of news.

Q&A: Trump, the Capitol, and Social Media

Posted on January 18, 2021July 19, 2021 by UConn Journalism

Capitol Riot 1/6/2021 — Social media played a significant role in the storming of the U.S. Capitol, and its influence in shaping American politics is unlikely to wane, says UConn’s Marie Shanahan.

On Wednesday, Jan. 6, following a speech by President Donald Trump at a rally dedicated to the false claim that he won the presidential election in November, a large crowd of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol, leaving five dead – including a Capitol police officer – and causing damage throughout the building that serves as the seat of representative government in the United States.

Although the images from the Capitol were shocking, the event itself was partly the product of an atmosphere of paranoia and anger that had been building for years, primarily on social media. Two days after the Capitol was stormed, Trump and many of his supporters were banned from a number of prominent social media platforms, including Twitter and Facebook. This in turn led to accusations that a handful of powerful private companies effectively control public discourse in the United States.

Associate Professor of Journalism Marie Shanahan ’94, who won awards as a reporter and editor at the Hartford Courant before joining the UConn faculty, is an authority on the rapidly shifting online media landscape. Her 2018 book, “Journalism, Online Comments, and the Future of Public Discourse,” grapples with many of the questions being asked in the aftermath of the storming of the Capitol. She recently spoke with UConn Today about the role social media plays in shaping American political life – in ways both good and bad. The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

While obscure social media platforms like Parler, Gab, and Telegram have gotten a lot of attention recently as gathering places for the kinds of far-right activists who were instrumental in what happened at the Capitol, most of the planning for that event seems to have taken place in the open, on sites like Facebook and Twitter. To what extent was this event a product of social media?

Social media can tap really quickly into the power of the crowd. That’s what it’s good at. You can’t blame it for causing an insurrection, but social media certainly can play a role in accelerating one. Thanks to the Internet, we all now have the ability to interact constantly. People don’t have to be concerned about geographical distances or time differences, because now you can directly communicate all the time with people all over the world, and they can communicate with you. So you have this active, participatory culture online, but it doesn’t necessarily stay online. An idea for a protest, a political rally, or even what we saw on Jan. 6, can move out of the online space and into real life.

But the mainstream media is also responsible in some ways. People are gathering in these obscure corners of the Internet to plot armed marches, but I recently read a New York Times story that detailed those plans in the first three paragraphs. Maybe these people are on the fringe, but as soon as it gets picked up by the mainstream media, it becomes part of the larger discourse. I’m not sure journalists think enough about their ability to amplify.

UConn Graduate Lauren Stowell Tells Inspiring Stories Through Eyes Of ESPN

Posted on December 29, 2020July 19, 2021 by UConn Journalism

Laurel Stowell holding an Emmy award — The first time Lauren Stowell ’06 walked into a television production truck, she knew this was how she wanted to make a living.

The first time Lauren Stowell ’06 (CLAS) walked into a television production truck, she knew this was how she wanted to make a living.

“It was organized chaos, and you could cut the tension with a knife,” says Stowell, who was working as a runner for ESPN that day for a UConn basketball game when she was a student. That meant she was doing every little odd job the ESPN crew needed during their time in Storrs.

“I remember looking at the producer and the director in front of the board calling camera shots. There were graphics people yelling. It was the most chaotic, but beautiful, orchestra of madness I ever experienced. When I went home, I told my dad, I am not sure what I just experienced, but I want to be doing that.”

Stowell knew about sports at an early age, as her father, Bob Stowell ’71 (CLAS), was a UConn football student-athlete and then a long-time photographer at Husky events.

Lauren Stowell, who graduated with a degree in journalism with a concentration in pathobiology, is now a features producer at ESPN and a five-time Sports Emmy Award winner.

‘Learn by Doing’: Journalism, ARE Departments Team Up for New Dual Degree

Posted on December 20, 2020July 19, 2021 by UConn Journalism

harvesting beans — UConn’s departments of journalism and agricultural and resource economics have together created a new dual-degree program aimed at helping journalists specialize in agriculture, economics, and related policy areas.

UConn’s Department of Journalism and Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics (ARE) have worked together to develop a dual-degree program that allows students to simultaneously complete with a bachelor of arts in journalism and a bachelor of science in ARE. The dual degree was created in response to requests from journalism students interested in pursuing ARE as an additional area of study. The new program allows students to gain experience in applying journalistic perspective to economics, the environment, and related policy.

Emma Bojinova, a lecturer in ARE, and Maureen Croteau, professor and head of the Department of Journalism, worked together to formalize a plan of study for the program that allows completion of both degrees in four years while leaving room for electives and the fulfillment of all general education requirements.

For Scott Wallace, Remote Learning Means Getting Off the Beaten Path

Posted on December 16, 2020July 19, 2021 by UConn Journalism

inteviewing — *Scott Wallace interviewing an officer from the Sandinista Popular Army in Nueva Segovia, Nicaragua, 1984. (Photo by Bill Gentile)*

Most kids who spent childhoods thumbing through the pages of the canary-yellow-framed National Geographics on their coffee tables, marveling at titular photos of exotic people and places, only imagined a day when they’d travel the world and see their own names attached to such stories and photos. Scott Wallace made it happen. Actively into his fifth decade of reporting, writing, and shooting stills and video for not just National Geographic but Smithsonian, Travel & Leisure, Harpers, and the like, the journalism professor illustrates his trade secrets and advice to students with real-life narratives that sound straight out of a big-screen blockbuster — one in which the pursuit of truth and justice is filled with as much trauma as triumph.

Telling us how he uses these exploits to illustrate the tenets he most wants to impart to his students, Wallace checks himself. “I don’t want to spend a lot of time talking about my own career, but I think I do have a rich trove of experiences to draw on.”

It’s an understatement. Wallace has traveled on assignment to the remotest of remote places on Earth and had a career most storytellers and adventurers only dream of. His recantations arrive humbly, however, with thoughtful pauses, counter questions, and intellectual insights that serve to remind he’s usually on the other side of the interview.