Carolyn Nielsen, PhD
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In three weeks, I’m starting my American Scandinavian Foundation fellowship in Denmark. It’s the culmination of a lifelong dream that required earning a PhD, launching two kids to adulthood and reaching proficiency in my dad’s first language. Speaking Danish has been described as having a mouthful of potatoes and pronouncing only every third letter. That feels accurate.
I’m excited, but nervous about convincing journalists to let me interview them, sit in on their meetings, and observe in their newsrooms. I’m still figuring out what to say when people bring up Greenland.
In 2024, I finished my term as the head of the AEJMC Commission on the Status of Women, which was important, but exhausting work. I also published two journal articles with Brian J. Bowe and Tunisian colleague Arwa Kooli out of our work in Tunisia.
This year, I’ve been enjoying teaching mass media law, reporting, senior seminar and an over-capacity-due-to-high demand Diversity, Mass Media and Social Change course. Our alumni would be proud of these students’ global awareness, critical-thinking skills and healthy skepticism. The future of our field is in good hands.
I’ve appreciated our alums who have been guest speakers in my classes this year. Gabrielle Nomura Gainor and Lauren Gallup, it was such a pleasure to showcase your work and highlight your paths to show students what is possible.
This brings me to my final point –– it’s difficult, but important to acknowledge.
We lost a dear, bright student fall quarter. Eric Bachman died in a motorcycle accident on Halloween. Eric was a source of light and humor in my classroom. He was a mass of energy going in so many directions at once and with so much potential in each of them.
A few times this quarter, I have mistakenly thought I saw him in the hall, only to experience the sinking understanding that will never happen.
Eric’s mom hosted a standing-room-only celebration of life on campus followed by a candlelight vigil in Red Square. The Journalism Department’s Colleen Van Pelt and Jennifer Dalton set up a memory box to allow everyone to write letters to Eric’s family, then put those letters in a beautiful book for them. The way students, staff and faculty came together to support one another showed a powerful sense of community. I continue to hold his family and friends in my thoughts.
Family, friends and classmates of Eric Bachman gather for a candlelight vigil in Red Square on Nov. 7, 2024. // Photo by Joe Gosen -
This quarter finds me looking forward to putting together two of my favorite things: newsrooms and Denmark. In April, I was named a 2024-2025 American-Scandinavian Foundation fellow. Next spring, I will be living in Copenhagen and Aarhus to observe and interview journalists for my research. My father immigrated from Denmark and I have family there, so it’s a place I feel at home
My projects will examine how journalists use newsroom metrics in editorial decision making, journalists’ habits and values regarding coverage of immigration, and why undergraduate students choose to major in journalism. The first two build on work I have done in the U.S. and the third builds on work I did with Brian and Joe in Tunisia in 2019. We recently had another journal article published out of that study.
Also on the research front, this year I co-authored an article for Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly about the importance of intersectionality in journalism and mass communication research. Over the summer, I co-facilitated a seminar for professors about the same topic.
Serving as the head of the Commission on the Status of Women for the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication in the current political climate has kept me busy. The commission has been actively trying to protect the academic freedom of feminist scholars in states with anti-DEI laws that forbid them from receiving travel funding to present their research. Additionally, I co-authored a Poynter piece to remind some sports editors that it’s 2024.
On the teaching front, I’ve had the pleasure of teaching Mass Media Law for the first time this year. I often hear from our alums that it was one of their favorite classes and I can see why. I loved teaching it. The news cycle has continued to provide real-world examples of almost everything we talk about in class from the right to protest, to the Comstock Act to gag orders.
For fun and stress relief, I built a large kitchen garden and am now looking forward to planting 500 square feet of flower beds. My husband and I also spent two dreamy weeks in the Puglia region of Italy last summer.
Finally, I love hearing from my former students, receiving your holiday cards and seeing all the great things you are doing. Keep in touch!
“Me in Copenhagen in 2021 feeling excited just to be standing outside the press club across from the Danish parliament. Next year, I’ll be hanging out inside! ” // Photo Courtesy of Dr. Carolyn Nielsen -
One of the highlights of the past year was seeing the work of my JOUR 450 Advanced Reporting students represented in the Solutions Journalism Network Story Tracker. The first team’s project addressed Western’s choice to replace a peer-mentoring program for sexual-assault prevention with an online training that has been shown to reinforce problematic beliefs. The second investigated the rise in food insecurity on campus, the university’s unsuccessful systems for addressing the problem, and the effective systems being used on other campuses. Both were published in The Front. These are the first two WWU stories accepted for the Solutions Journalism Network database. Last summer, I attended the Solutions Journalism Network Educators Academy and picked up a few more things to add to the curriculum.
Additionally, I was honored to work with Dr. Brian J. Bowe, professor Joe Gosen and our Tunisian colleagues on a journal article that was published in Journalism in 2021. “After the revolution: Tunisian journalism students and a news media in transition” was one of the articles to come out of work we did with Dr. Bowe’s U.S. Department of State grant. We are looking forward to seeing our Tunisian friends when they come to the U.S. this summer for the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication conference in Detroit.
On the service front, I was a member of the university’s first cohort of Anti-Racist Community Transformation teaching workshops, have been serving on Faculty Senate, and was elected as secretary for AEJMC’s Commission on the Status of Women.
During the pandemic, I’ve continued to be a student. I’ve been taking UW Danish language classes online every morning since fall 2020. I may be the only student who really enjoys learning complex, Scandinavian grammar. I had the opportunity to visit family in Denmark during that nice window in August when there was no COVID-19 there. All of this is helping inform some future research I would like to conduct on coverage of race and immigration in Danish news.
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Photo courtesy of Carolyn Nielsen My book, Reporting on Race in a Digital Era, was published in March and I was finally able to hold in my hands the culmination of five years of tough and meaningful work. Over the summer, I presented my research, “Send Her Back: News Narratives, Intersectionality, and Rise of Politically Powerful Women of Color,” at the International Symposium on Online Journalism. My research was published in the ISOJ journal special issue, Power, Privilege and Patriarchy in Journalism. I also enjoyed collaborating on with colleagues on research we presented at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (virtual) conference. Prof. Betsy O’Donovan and I conducted a study about Hearken/engagement journalism. Dr. Brian J. Bowe, Prof. Joe Gosen, and I worked with two of our colleagues from our 2019 visit to Tunis to conduct a study examining why Tunisian students choose to study journalism.On the teaching front, I was thrilled to have WWU alumna and New York Times bestselling author of “So You Want to Talk About Race” Ijeoma Olumo as a guest speaker in our Diversity, Mass Media and Social Change class just before we moved online.Additionally, I am participating in the university’s first cohort of Anti-Racist Community Transformation teaching workshops and serving on a committee to help redesign general-education course requirements related to power, liberation, equity, and justice.For fun, in lieu of travel, I dug up and landscaped my front yard, tried my hand at woodworking (that did not go so well), and have been taking advantage of online classes to learn Danish at UW. I’ve also enjoyed maintaining connections with so many of our wonderful alums, mostly via social media. Keep in touch! -
The highlight of my year was traveling to Tunisia with our colleagues and students to work with students and professors at the Institut de Presse et des Sciences de l’Information. I taught a workshop on ethics in the digital age and another on data journalism. I learned so much from our Tunisian partners with whom we continue to engage in research. We were treated with such hospitality and saw the most beautiful places from Sidi Bou Said to Carthage to the Medina in Tunis. This experience will stay with me always.
On the research front, my book, “Reporting on Race in a Digital Era” will be published in mid-March 2020. The book includes analysis on coverage of significant contemporary racial moments from the election of Barack Obama to the birth and growth of the Black Lives Matter Movement through the events that unfolded in Ferguson, Missouri after a white police officer shot and killed unarmed African American teen Michael Brown Jr. It also features interviews with prominent national journalists who cover racial issues including The Washington Post’s Wesley Lowery, NPR’s Gene Demby and Soraya McDonald of ESPN’s The Undefeated. I’m proud to say that part of this work was nominated by the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication for a “professional relevance” award as scholarship that bridges research and practice.
I also had the pleasure of being on the radio several times recently. It was wonderful to hear from former students who heard the programs and recognized my voice. For those of you who remember my 2009 fight to protect my reporter’s notes, which resulted in a positive precedent for student journalists, you might be interested in WBEZ’s Motive podcast about the T.J. Jimenez case.
This fall, I enjoyed teaching a JOUR 307 Reporting course that I turned into an election lab. Students enjoyed covering local elections and breaking news on election night. Yes, of course there was election night pizza.
I am continuing to serve as Student Publications Council chair and am chairing a department committee to examine and revise our curriculum. This promises to be a busy and important job for our department.
One of the great joys of being a professor is seeing the ways in which our alumni are flourishing in work and in life. Please continue to stay in touch. I love hearing your news, reading your work and seeing those baby pictures.
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Over the summer, my paper, “Old Norms, New Platforms: Objectivity and U.S. Reporting About Race in a Digital Era,” earned recognition from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication’s inaugural Research Prize for Professional Relevance. My research examines news coverage of racial issues in a digital era. It combines analysis of coverage and interviews with journalists who covered Ferguson to help understand how the field is changing. This will also be the topic of my upcoming presentation for the CHSS Dean’s Lecture Series.
In October, I had the pleasure of being interviewed on KNKX’s All Things Considered about teaching journalism at a time of skepticism. It took about five minutes before former students started reaching out on Twitter because they recognized my voice on the radio. That was my favorite part.
Prof. Nielsen served as the officiant for her former students Mason Cheung and Amanda Winters Cheung. I am continuing to teach reporting and advanced reporting and striving to continue to push audience engagement and big data. I am also still chairing the Student Publications Council.
This summer, I look forward to traveling with Brian Bowe, Joe Gosen and six WWU journalism students to work with journalists, professors, and journalism students in Tunis, Tunisia. The Tunisian group will visit us in Bellingham in the spring. Brian’s U.S. Department of State grant will allow us to learn from journalists working in an emerging democracy and share our expertise and experiences with them, too. I cannot imagine a more exciting opportunity for people dedicated to our field.
On a personal note, I was honored to officiate the wedding of two of my former students (who didn’t meet until after they graduated) and I’m still adjusting to being the mom of a college freshman (yes, Honey, *read the syllabus*).
I hope our former students will continue to reach out with their life updates. I love seeing what you are doing.
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In June 2017, I successfully defended my PhD at the University of Washington, which was a big milestone for me. My mixed-methods study analyzed news content about racial issues from the election of Barack Obama through the decision not to indict Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson in the killing of Michael Brown, Jr. and then turned to in-depth interviews with journalists to explore the factors influencing their coverage. Key to this work was looking at emerging paradigms of journalism such as BuzzFeed and NPR’s Code Switch and comparing them to traditional publications including The New York Times and The Washington Post. I loved doing this work. I was able to present a portion of it, a look at narratives of the Black Lives Matter Movement across news paradigms, at the International Communication Association conference in San Diego. Earlier last year, I had the honor of workshopping my research with Dr. Donald Shaw (one of the fathers of agenda-setting theory) at the Wayne State Summer Doctoral Seminar.
I’m still regularly teaching reporting and advanced reporting and am happy to say I am zero percent burned out on teaching these courses. My students are regularly using new data tools paired with foundational, solid interviewing and research skills to produce complex stories. Last year, my JOUR 307 Reporting students worked as a team to produce a fantastic, data-driven piece on the city’s new rental-inspection program and The Western Front published it. The Front also published most of the projects out of last spring’s advanced reporting class, which looked at topics such as lack of access to mental-health care on campus, the increasing rates at which WWU students are regularly failing basic math classes, and the “bottlenecks” that are resulting in Running Start and transfer students taking longer to graduate that students who begin as freshmen.
I’m also spending a lot of time in my role as Student Publications Council chair trying to ensure our editors are being better compensated and our students have access to the tools they need to continue to grow. Somehow, I thought I might be less busy with the PhD behind me, but I seem to keep finding new things to do… Oh, and those of you who remember Maren being desk-height in office might find it bewildering to know she is now applying to colleges.