• Dorothy Bland, dean of the Frank W. and Sue Mayborn School of Journalism and director of the Frank W. Mayborn Graduate Institute at the University of North Texas, has been re-elected to serve a second three-year term on the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications as a representative for the Association of Schools of Journalism and Mass Communication. She also serves on the ASJMC Executive Committee. Under her leadership, the Mayborn School earned the 2016 Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication Equity & Diversity Award.

  

• During the NAHJ annual convention in Anaheim, California, five of the nation’s top journalists, academics and documentarians will be inducted into the National Association of Hispanic Journalists’ Hall of Fame. Eraldo “Dino” Chiecchi, current multimedia professor at University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP); trailblazer of diversity Federico Subervi, Ph.D.; journalist and documentary producer Andrés Cediel; NBC Bay Area reporter Jodi Hernandez and Pulitzer Prize winner Nancy Rivera Brooks will be inducted into the 2017 Hall of Fame class. This year’s gala honoring these individuals will be held on Saturday, Sep. 9, 2017, at the House of Blues Anaheim during the Excellence in Journalism Conference. (See more at:
  http://www.nahj.org/2017/07/12/2017-hall-fame/)
• Carolyn Brown, an award-winning broadcast journalist, producer and director with more than 20 years of experience in the industry and more than a decade teaching broadcast journalism in the academy, joins the faculty of the UNT Frank W. and Sue Mayborn faculty this fall semester. Documentary filmmaking also is one of her passions. She “can help prepare our students for a wide range of jobs from field reporter to executive producer,” said Thorne Anderson, an associate professor in photojournalism and search committee chair. “She can help connect our students with jobs and internships across the nation.”

  

She has worked for a variety of news outlets ranging from Fox News and CBS in New York to KRON Bay TV and KNTV News in the San Francisco area. “The Salinas Project,” her documentary, has been distributed by American Public Television to public TV stations nationwide and the World Channel. She is the producer and director for “Las Mujeres: Latina Lives, American Dreams,” which is expected to be released in 2018. As an assistant professor at American University, she helped overhaul the broadcast curriculum and designed the production studio. Carolyn has helped generate grants to fund her documentary work and her work has been screened at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.

She has done broadcast interviews about her work with NPR, the “CBS Evening News” and “CNN in Espanol.” Her work has been published in Electronic News and online as part of The Investigative Reporting Workshop’s “PBS Frontline Investigation: Lost in Detention.” She earned her M.A. in liberal studies from Northern Arizona University and her B.A. with a dual major in political science and art history from Colgate University. She also studied at the Swedish Film Institute in Stockholm. She is bilingual and speaks Spanish.

• Kyle Huckins, CSM chairman, has won honors for his latest book and other writings. His “Race, Faith and Politics Today” took a national eLit award for best religion work and an Indiana Society of Professional Journalists honor for best nonfiction book. Huckins won an award for best reporting from the Evangelical Press Association for his feature on a Michigan bishop and his Church of God in Christ congregation. He finished second in the National Association of Black Journalists’ 2017 Salute to Excellence competition for best newspaper column for his “Keeping Faith” feature on spirituality and second for best magazine single-topic series for the “Church Spotlight” he writes for The Whole Truth, the official magazine of the Church of God in Christ.

  

• Meredith Clark, Ph.D., has accepted a tenure-track position as an assistant professor in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia, effective fall 2017. Her research focuses on the intersections of race, media and power. She earned her doctorate from the University on North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2014; her dissertation on Black Twitter was awarded Dissertation of the Year from AEJMC’s Mass Communication & Society Division in 2015.
• The AEJMC Equity and Diversity Award Committee has selected the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University as the EDA 2017 recipient. The selection committee, which includes the Commission on the Status of Minorities chairman, noted that at the Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, equity and diversity are not just goals but have become a way of life.

• The student-produced “NewsVision” broadcast a 30-minute newscast on Howard University’s PBS station, WHUT-TV. The newscast aired at 9:30 p.m. EST, Wednesday, Dec. 7; 1:30 a.m. EST, Thursday, Dec. 8; and 8:30 a.m. EST, Monday, Dec. 12. The program was prerecorded live to tape with WHUT staff and broadcast to over 2.5 million households in the Washington, D.C., area, the ninth-largest television market in the country.

  The students assumed all newsroom roles: anchor, reporter, producer, assignment editor, floor director and director. The culminating newscast is a testimony to the benefits of the program, says Jennifer Thomas, assistant professor in the Department of Media, Journalism and Film, who teaches the “NewsVision” capstone course.

  “The students are getting hands-on experience, from covering the White House to the historic 2016 presidential election,” remarks Thomas, who rose from a student journalist at WHUT to CNN executive producer. “This newscast provides an opportunity to inform the community and showcase their work as professional journalists.” The newscast is underwritten by NBCUniversal, which received the Corporate Partner Award at the 45th anniversary celebration of the Cathy Hughes School of Communications.

  After an absence of more than 20 years, “NewsVision” returned to WHUT last May immediately following President Obama’s address at Howard’s 148th Commencement Convocation. “It is already paying off in the students’ transition from classroom to newsroom,” says Yanick Rice Lamb, associate professor and department chair.

  Many 2016 graduates are working at outlets ranging from ESPN to NPR. Others have recently received national recognition: Jasmine Turner, Hearst Award for Radio Broadcast News; Alexis Porter, Hearst Television Producing Fellowship; Jourdan Henry, National Association of Black Journalists Salute to Excellence Award; and Erin Winters, Top Ten Finalist in the “Live With Kelly and You” co-host competition.

  ● In mid-August 2016, thanks to an invitation of professor David Maciel, CSM member Federico Subervi went to the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City to participate on a panel discussion about Latinos, the 2016 elections and implications for that country. Before the end of the month, he was invited to lecture on a similar topic at University of Texas’ professor Victoria DeFrancesco-Soto’s graduate class at the LBJ School of Public Affairs.

  

  September started with an invitation that professor Hernando Rojas extended for Subervi to visit the School of Journalism & Mass Communication at his alma mater, the University of Wisconsin, to deliver a lecture about Latinos and the 2016 elections. Shortly after, he attended the Annual Conference of Ford Foundation Fellows and the Senior Ford Fellows in Washington, D.C., at which he served on panels to address challenges and guidelines for success in academia. Another series of lectures about Latinos and the 2016 elections was delivered at California State University in Fullerton in early October. This invitation was made possible thanks to professor Julián Jeffries, and professor Inéz González, director of the Latino Communication Initiative of the College of Communications.

  Before the month was over, Subervi traveled to Barcelona, where thanks to professor Joan Cuenca Fontbana, the Facultat de Comunicació–Blanquerna of the Universidad Ramón Llull invited him to deliver the opening lecture for the incoming master’s class plus two additional guest lectures. November also brought an international experience with a weeklong series of lectures to students from various countries attending the School of Journalism & Mass Communications at St. Petersburg State University in Russia. This invitation, funded by the U.S. Consulate in that city, was made possible thanks to professor Svetlana Bodrunova, who directs research efforts on ethnic media in that country.

  In between travels, Subervi completed four book chapter manuscripts, two of which were published this year, plus an article, published in Diálogo UPR, the biweekly Web-based newspaper of the University of Puerto Rico. The two published book chapters are: “The State of Emergency Communications at a Time of Population and Linguistic Shifts: A Case Study in Central Texas,” published in M.E. Cepeda & D.I. Casillas (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Latina/o Media (pp. 123-142), NY: Routledge, 2016; and “Do Spanish-Language Broadcast Media Serve a Changing America?” published in M. Lloyd & L. Friedland (Eds.), The Communication Crisis in America, And How to Fix It (pp. 95-105), NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.  The newspaper article is titled “Escasa la Investigación Sobre Comunicación Política en Puerto Rico.” This piece is based on his analysis of the master’s theses and doctoral dissertations about communication completed at the University of Puerto Rico between 1950-2015.

  Another achievement was helping launch the Mentorship Program of the Minorities & Communication Division, Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communication. In November, new horizons in community service were opened when he was elected to the Board of Directors of the National Association for Media Literacy Education.

  Last, but certainly not least, Subervi said it was fabulous to spend more time with his family, including grandson Preston, whom he taught how to play chess.