Faculty Updates

Brian J. Bowe

Brian J. Bowe, PhD

Professor, Dept. Chair

Dr. Brian J. Bowe Updates

Winter 2025 Update

The last year has been filled with a lot of global experiences for me.

After my Fulbright scholar grant in the West Bank was cut short in 2023, I was able to be reassigned to Jordan. It was my second time as a Fulbrighter in Jordan. I spent the fall of 2024 working at Yarmouk University in Irbid.

I was hosted by my colleague Dr. Naheda Makhadmeh, who is a friend and frequent research collaborator since our days as grad students at Michigan State. She served as vice dean of the Faculty of Mass Communication and was instrumental in helping me make connections at Yarmouk. I made great contacts with the Refugee, Displaced Person, and Forced Migration Studies Center, where I helped start an English language conversation club.

While at Yarmouk, I worked on research and accreditation projects and gave guest lectures in undergraduate and graduate classes. I also took part in UNESCO’s Global Media and Information Literacy Week in Amman and the annual meeting of the Arab-US Association of Communication Educators in Cairo.

The experience wasn’t only intellectually stimulating — it was also culturally rich. I took classes in the regional dialect of Arabic. I studied traditional Arabic musical instruments (the oud and the mijwiz). I also organized a workshop for my Fulbright colleagues in dabke, a traditional dance in the region.

I recently learned that I was named to the Fulbright specialist roster for the next three years. This means I will be able to work on short-term projects with international institutions. I’m excited to learn where life will take me next.

Brian J. Bowe plays the oud, a traditional Arabic instrument, at a community hub in Irbid, Jordan, at Yarmouk University in fall 2024. // Photo courtesy of Brian J. Bowe
Spring 2024 Update

It would be a serious understatement for me to say that the last year has been an eventful one for me.

Last summer, I worked with Western political science professor Bidisha Biswas on a U.S. State Department-funded project to provide media literacy training to young Palestinian content creators. We led workshops in Jerusalem and Ramallah, and we worked with Palestinian filmmaker Dina Amin on a short film titled “Creating Change.” The film took the silver award in AEJMC’s inaugural Festival of Visual & Interactive Media.

Bowe, second from right, meets with An-Najah colleagues Alia Gilbrecht, Yasmine Shahrour, Faisal Saleh, Farid Abudheir and Ra’fat Al-Jallad.

I returned to the West Bank in September to serve as a Fulbright Scholar at An-Najah National University in Nablus. My work plan involved research collaborations and curriculum design. My time in Nablus was shaping up to be very productive. However, my work was sadly interrupted by the increase in hostilities following the Oct. 7 attacks. I was eventually evacuated to Jordan, where I stayed for a few weeks before returning home. I’m continuing to work remotely with some of my colleagues from An-Najah.

This has been a very productive era for me in terms of research. I have a series of projects going with teams in Palestine, Jordan and Egypt, and I’m mapping out additional projects in Cameroon and Mongolia. I’ve published three journal articles so far this year, and I’m presenting two papers at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication conference in Philadelphia this August.

The last year has been hectic outside of work, too. I spent the better part of 2023 helping my family operate an 84-year-old art deco movie theater in Michigan after the theater’s owner — my uncle Joe Yuchasz — passed away in January. The Elk Rapids Cinema has always played a big role in my life, and it was an honor to help continue my uncle’s legacy. Running a movie theater is a great deal of fun, but it is also challenging. At the end of the year, the family sold the cinema to a nonprofit organization, and they’re doing a fantastic job.

Brian J. Bowe enjoys a knafeh in September 2023, which is a dessert that is a specialty of Nablus.
Winter 2022 Update

I spent most of 2021 on leave from Western to spend time teaching in the American University in Cairo’s Journalism and Mass Communication Department. In Arabic, Egyptians refer to Cairo as the “umm al dunya” — the mother of the world. It can be overwhelming to contemplate the sweep of history when strolling on the banks of the Nile or taking an Uber to the pyramids. But Cairo is not just some antiquarian’s dream. It’s a thrilling city with a beautiful beating heart. I enjoyed working with the creative and energetic students and faculty colleagues at AUC, and I learned so much.

Photo by Kim Fox

Spending time in Egypt was a continuation of my engagement with the Middle East and North Africa region. In recent years, I’ve also done work in Jordan, Tunisia and Morocco. I was recently awarded a fellowship by the Palestinian American Research Center, and I will be attending their faculty development seminar in the West Bank in June.

I had some good successes with research in 2021. I published an article on Islamophobia on Twitter; another on the communication strategies of a Muslim American advocacy group; and a third about Tunisian journalism students. I was grateful to get to work with my journalism department colleagues Derek Moscato, Carolyn Nielsen and Joe Gosen on these projects.

Professors Nielsen and Gosen and I continue to work on our U.S. State Department-funded project with the Tunisian journalism school IPSI. The pandemic has upended our work several times, but the current plans are to welcome a Tunisian delegation to Detroit for the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication conference in August. If you’ve met me, you know how much I love Detroit, so it will be nice to show people around.

On a personal note, my father, Jack Bowe, passed away in February 2021. My dad was a television journalist with a five-decade career as a news director that included an Emmy and induction into the Nevada Broadcasting Hall of Fame. As a kid, I always loved it when he would bring me to the newsroom. Eventually, he’d let me write little things, and those long hours are what sparked my lifelong love of journalism. My dad specialized in long-form video features — a genre that has all but disappeared from local TV news. One of my favorites is this 1986 short film he did for WYTV in Youngstown, Ohio, about the closing of the Idora Park Ballroom. This piece marked the end of an era — as did his passing.
Winter 2021 Update

If 2019 was the year I traveled the most in my life, 2020 was the year I traveled the least.

Photo by Joe Gosen
Throughout 2019, I spent time teaching, researching and talking about journalism in Jordan, France and Tunisia. Like a lot of folks, I had big plans for 2020 that were dashed by the pandemic. In addition to my teaching, I published three journal articles related to journalism education, including one about ACEJMC accreditation (which our department is now pursuing) and two about capstone classes. I also managed to do a little music journalism for Detroit’s Metro Times weekly, writing about the death of acclaimed soul singer Sweet Pea Atkinson and Michigan Sen. Gary Peters plans for a bailout for the pandemic-ravaged live music business.

As 2021 began, I boarded a plane for the first time in a year. I’m currently in leave from Western and am based in Egypt, where I am teaching in the Journalism and Mass Communication Department of The American University in Cairo.
Winter 2020 Update

In 2019, I spent more time outside of Bellingham than I did in it. Throughout my travels in Jordan, France and Tunisia, I had many transformative experiences that will influence my teaching and research for years to come.

I spent the first half of the year in Amman, teaching in the American Studies graduate program at the University of Jordan as a Fulbright scholar. In addition to my teaching duties, I gave a public talk on my research at the University of Jordan, and I guest lectured in three classes in the journalism program at Yarmouk University in Irbid. At Yarmouk, I was able to reconnect with a friend and colleague from my doctoral studies at Michigan State University, Naheda Makhadmeh, who is now the chair of the journalism department there. I tried to immerse myself in Jordanian culture in as many ways as I could. I studied the Jordanian dialect of Arabic, I learned how to play the oud, and took a class on the regional dabke folk dance. I also explored Amman’s music scene and wrote an article about the group 47Soul for the Detroit Metro Times.

Only a few weeks after I returned from Jordan, I boarded another plane — this time to the World Journalism Education Congress [http://www.wjec.paris/] in Paris, which attracted journalism educators from 70 countries. I presented three papers and was present for the signing of the Declaration of Freedom of Journalism Education. I was thrilled to see alumni Daniel Thomas and Kristina Rivera win awards in the creative competition.

As you will read elsewhere in this newsletter, I led a project to Tunisia in September. I was joined by two faculty colleagues — Carolyn Nielsen and Joe Gosen — as well as six of our most excellent students. In Tunis, we worked closely with a group of faculty and students from IPSI (L’Institut de Presse et des Sciences de l’Information), which is the public university responsible for training Tunisian journalists. The run-up to Tunisia’s second democratic presidential elections since the 2011 Jasmine Revolution was a thrilling time to work with students on reporting projects. We will be welcoming our Tunisian partners to Bellingham for a week this year. One of my biggest hopes is that we will be able to provide more international experiences like this for our students in the future.

This has been a busy year for me in terms of research. I worked as part of a team with researchers from Washington State University, Columbia University and the Pennsylvania State University on a wide-ranging, multi-platform report on Islamophobia in the 2018 midterm election. The report, which was released in November, was the subject of media coverage in outlets like the Washington Post, the Detroit Free Press and the Newark Star-Ledger. I co-authored op-eds based on our work for the New York Times, Foreign Policy and The New Arab. We are continuing to analyze our data and will be continuing this work throughout the election year.

I had success in research collaborations with WWU colleagues this year. Joe Gosen and I analyzed media coverage of the burkini swimsuit with Shahira Fahmy of the American University in Cairo for an article that was published in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly. Derek Moscato and I worked on research on the public relations of the Council on American-Islamic Relations with Mariam Alkazemi of Virginia Commonwealth University. This paper won the Doub Newsom Award at the Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communication (AEJMC) conference in Toronto. Finally, my ongoing work with Sheila Webb on improving our senior seminar class took second place in AEJMC’s Mass Communication and Society division’s teaching ideas competition.

Going back to my punk rock roots, I published a new and substantially revised editions of my biographies of the Ramones and the Clash, which are geared for the seventh grade level. I was honored to be interviewed a part of KEXP’s International Clash Day celebrations.

If 2020 ends up being half as eventful as 2019 was, it’ll still be a busy year!
Winter 2019 Update

If nothing else, 2019 is shaping up to be a year of expanding international horizons for me.

As I write this, I’m living in Amman, Jordan as a Fulbright scholar. I’m teaching master’s students in the University of Jordan’s Prince Al Hussein bin Abdullah II School of International Studies. I’m also studying the Jordanian Arabic dialect, and learning how to play the oud. Amman is a fascinating and vibrant city, although the winter is turning out to be just as cold and rainy as it is in Bellingham.

In July, I’ll be heading to the World Journalism Education Congress in Paris to present three papers, all related to my current research about journalism education and curriculum design.

In August, I’ll be traveling to Tunisia with professors Joe Gosen and Carolyn Nielsen and six of our top-notch journalism students for a series of reporting workshops with faculty and students from L’Institut de Presse et des Sciences de l’Information and journalists from the Tunis-Afrique Presse wire service. We are able to embark on this project thanks to a $100,000 grant from the U.S. Embassy in Tunis. In spring, 2020, a group of Tunisians will visit Bellingham as part of the same project.

While I’ve got a lot of international work happening, I’m also conducting research back home. Washington State University’s Lawrence Pintak and I are working on a multifaceted research project about the experiences of the unprecedented number of Muslim-American candidates who ran for office in the 2018 midterm elections. This project includes a survey, an analysis of media coverage and social media traffic and interviews with candidates. Our work was honored with a Senior Scholar grant from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. I’m also working with professor Derek Moscato on research on press releases from the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

I have managed to keep up with my first love, music journalism. I recently published an article about the Jordanian/Palestinian band 47Soul in Detroit’s Metro Times alt-weekly. New editions of my young adult biographies of punk bands The Ramones and The Clash were released in January by Enslow Publishers. I wrote the original books before I went back to grad school to get my Ph.D. I’m a much better researcher now, and I was better able to access archival materials for these books, and I think the new versions are much improved.
Winter 2018 Update

Of course, 2017 has been a momentous year for anybody who cares about journalism. World events have given us a lot to talk about in the classroom, and our students seem especially fired up about the importance of journalism’s civic mission. This year, I had the opportunity to teach an honors seminar on religion and news, and I took my first crack at teaching feature writing.

I’ve continued to teach senior seminar each quarter, and I have been working with colleagues in Western Libraries on a yearlong research project to help students design research projects that are more meaningful to them.

The year began for me with a couple of invitations from the League of Women Voters of Bellingham/Whatcom County to give presentations on the concept of “fake news.” In February, I gave a talk about my research into media representations of Muslims and Islam as part of Western Libraries’ reading series.

On the research front, a highlight of the year was the publication of my article, “Permitted to Build? Moral Foundations in Newspaper Framing of Mosque-Construction Controversies” in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly. Another article I co-authored was a finalist for that journal’s outstanding article of 2016 award.

I have a lot of research projects in process, with a half-dozen articles undergoing peer review currently. Working with colleagues, I contributed to a book chapter about TV network news coverage of immigration and deportation narratives for the forthcoming book, “The Trump Presidency, Journalism, and Democracy.” I presented papers at the International Communication Association conference in San Diego and the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication in Chicago. The AEJMC conference was preceded by a tour of Chicago area sacred spaces that I organized in my role as teaching chair of the Religion and Media Interest Group.

I was awarded a research fellowship from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Library & Archives and the Center for Popular Music Studies at Case Western Reserve University to conduct research on the legendary Detroit proto-punk band the MC5. I spent a week in the archives in Cleveland, and I’ll be devoting a lot of my research energies to this project in 2018. This is research that is dear to my heart, and it will be nice to get back to my music journalism roots.

Joe Gosen

Joe Gosen, MA

Associate Professor

Joe Gosen Updates

Winter 2025 Update

I’m not what you’d call a diehard baseball fan who can cite obscure stats from the fifth inning of some random game six years ago, nor am I someone who knows the batting average of every shortstop in the AL West, but I have an appreciation for the game. I grew up in Fremont, California, and the Oakland Coliseum was just 20-minute drive from my home (depending on traffic). I enjoyed my share of games there, whether I was in the cheap seats as a fan or on the field taking pictures early in my career. So, like many fans I followed the eventual countdown of the A’s departure from Oakland (just like the Raiders and Warriors did before them). In September I managed to catch the last two games where the Athletics donned their Oakland jerseys when they faced the Mariners at T-Mobile Park. My childhood friend, Eric, who is an actual diehard fan, flew up for the occasion. Although it was bittersweet to witness the end an era, it was fun to share that time with an old friend and see the late, great Ricky Henderson throw out the first pitch while sporting a half-A’s, half Mariners jersey.

Back at work I have carried on with my usual course load of visual journalism classes but I also organized another Bellingham Visual conference in October. It was a fun and inspiring day filled with filmmakers and visual journalists from around the region. If you missed it, News-Ed student Jenna Milliken wrote up nice recap of Bellingham Visual for the alumni newsletter.

Looking ahead, I will be on professional leave during the spring 2025 quarter so I can begin working on another documentary project with Brian J. Bowe. Stay tuned! In June I’m planning to attend a visual communication conference in Estes Park, Colorado.

During my free time I’ve been slowly going through my archive and digitizing my slides and negatives from the 1980s and ’90s. It’s a slow and tedious process but it’s also fun to look back. Here’s a photo from the Oakland Coliseum from 1988, the year I graduated with a degree in photojournalism from San Jose State University. I wanted to capture the whole scene with Jose Conseco in the foreground. I then moved in much closer and knelt down to get a low angle shot of him as he took some practice swings. He chuckled and nicely asked me to step back a little so I he wouldn’t knock my head off. The access and freedom to move about on the field between batters is unheard of these days. As I always say to students, hold onto your pictures because you’ll someday you’ll enjoy looking back. And you never know when you might discover a hidden gem, like this photo for me. This image has never been published until this post. It captures a time and place that will never occur again.

Oakland A’s outfielder Jose Conseco at the on-deck circle as Dave Henderson gets ready to bat during their game against the Milwaukee Brewers at the Oakland Coliseum in 1988. // Photo by Joe Gosen
Spring 2024 Update

In last year’s update I mentioned a short documentary project that I worked on with Brian J. Bowe. Since then our film “Dreaming of a Free Press” garnered some recognition with acceptance into eight international film festivals and winning the 2023 Creative Research Award in the Visual Communication Division of AEJMC. Brian and I accepted the award at AEJMC conference Washington, D.C. in August 2023 and had the opportunity to show our film there, too.

Joe Gosen and Brian J. Bowe present their film during the 2023 AEJMC conference in Washington, D.C. // Photo by Dr. Carolyn Nielsen

I’m still clicking away and teaching classes in the visual journalism track – photojournalism, digital media, intro VJ and advanced VJ. During winter quarter the J370 students created some nice short documentary films. I’m sure they’d love it if you took a minute to check out some of their work on the class website DigitalMediaInJournalism. This quarter students in the J446 are busy working on projects about Lake Whatcom, looking into its history, recreational uses and water quality issues to name a few. Be sure to check out 48DegreesNorth this June to see their work, too.

It’s always fun having hearing from VJ alums and staying in touch via social media. It’s even better when we can coordinate opportunities for classroom visits and guest lectures. In the last year I’ve had classroom visits by Hailey Hoffman, Finn Wendt and Jaya Flanery, all of whom are conveniently working at the Cascadia Daily News. Oliver Hamlin of the Skagit Valley Herald recently presented his work in J446. Andriy Semenyuk was on campus for a couple days and carved out time to present his film “Wounded Land” and discuss what it was like filming in Ukraine. I saw Paul Bikis a couple months ago when he was in town to screen rough cut of his project “Adapted the Film” at Backroad Essentials.

Outside of the classroom, I’m in the planning stages for Bellingham Visual this October. You might recall the BVJC events that John Harris ran from 2006 to 2011. Well, in April 2023 we had a successful relaunching of the event with a day of talented and inspiring photographers. It was a great having a community of professional visual journalists and students in the room and handful of VJ alums, including presentations by Daniel Berman and Jordan Stead. I’ll be updating the event website and sharing more details for this year’s event soon, so stay tuned!
Winter 2023 Update

A highlight of 2022 was finally meeting up with our Tunisian cohorts in Detroit for the first time since 2019, which allowed us to finish up a collaboration that had been put on hold during the pandemic. To recap, Brian J. Bowe, Caroline Nielsen and I traveled to Tunisia with six journalism students back in 2019. One of the students, Stella Harvey, wrote about the experience here. The original plan had our Tunisian friends visiting Western’s campus in Spring 2020 but COVID-19 travel restrictions halted everything. After much juggling and paperwork, Brian arranged to have everyone meet at the AEJMC conference in August. It was great connecting with everyone again and it also allowed me work with the students to film interviews for a documentary short that Brian and I wanted to pursue.

Joe Gosen, left, works with two Tunisian students while interviewing Kim Fox about press freedom during the AEJMC convention in Detroit, Mich., in August 2022. Fox is a professor of Practice at The American University in Cairo. // Photo by Brian J. Bowe

In my spare time I spent the fall quarter editing the interview footage from Detroit, culling through footage I shot in Tunisia, securing archival footage from the Jasmine Revolution and creating animated maps with Google Earth Studio. The thing that tied everything together was a combination of Brian’s voiceover work and original three-song soundtrack he created. The result is a fast-paced documentary short titled, “Dreaming of a Free Press.” We finished it in early December, just in time to meet some contest and film festival deadlines. Stay tuned!

Throughout 2022 I continued teaching the subjects I love – photojournalism, digital media, intro and advanced VJ. In the advanced classes student continued producing community focused work for our website 48DegreesNorth. In spring students explored various projects related to sound and in fall they had fun reporting the on rising popularity of Pickleball. We also had an active NPPA student chapter with weekly meetings, guest speakers and a couple of field trips.

Spring 2022 Advanced Visual Journalism class photo at Whatcom Falls Park in Bellingham. // Photo by Rowan Forsythe

Advanced VJ students worked on a project about the rising popularity of Pickleball during the 2022 fall quarter. // Photo by Joe Gosen

Outside of my Western life, I continued enjoying being the homebody that I am, tinkering around the house and pretending to fix up my old BMW. But I also did a fun two-week road trip with my son to California and back and had several opportunities to continue sailing with a group of friends, including the International Swiftsure Yacht Race in May, which we managed to finish in 18 hours (meaning we crossed the finish line at 3:30 a.m.).
Winter 2022 Update

I love the convenience of streaming music from my favorite artists over the internet, but nothing beats seeing them perform live. I occasionally watch stand-up comedians on TV, but I never laugh as loud or for as long as I do when I’m in the audience while they work the room. So, while I appreciated having the option to continue teaching remotely this academic year, I was eager to get back in the classroom at the start of fall quarter and once again feel the energy students create in a room as they pursue common goals. One such class was Advanced VJ, where students worked together on small-group video projects along Chuckanut Drive. In addition to the road’s fascinating history, students explored artisans, niche businesses, trail running and tide pools. Similarly, with the video class it was a welcomed relief to once again conduct gear demonstrations in person, such as lighting interviews and syncing audio on a multi-camera shoot. While I much prefer teaching in person, the time I spent teaching remotely played an instrumental role in helping me organize my course content and delivery in ways that continue to benefit my in-person instruction.

Outside of teaching, I continue to stay involved with the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication and the National Press Photographers Association. With AEJMC I chaired the annual conference logo competition for the second year in a row, and this year I am co-chairing the Best of Digital competition. This is an annual web and app competition co-sponsored by the Communication Technology and Visual Communication divisions. With NPPA I am in my sixth year as the associate director of the Northwest region and recently started serving on the NPPA executive committee as the associate regional chairs representative. On the academic front I feel fortunate about having a published article in Journalism with professor Brian J. Bowe, professor Caroline Nielsen and our Tunisian cohorts, and I’m looking forward to reconnecting with everyone at the annual AEJMC conference in Detroit this summer.

I am also happy to announce that in December we managed to pull our WWU NPPA student chapter out of hiatus and are now one of only a few officially recognized student chapters in the country (as of this writing). We’ve been meeting on Wednesdays at 5 p.m. in CF202 to share ideas and stay inspired. So far we’ve had a couple of guest speakers, including VJ grad Hailey Hoffman who is now staff photographer at the Cascadia Daily News, and Andrew Stanfill the NPPA immediate past president who is an editor for the New York Times News Service. We recently had a photo outing to Locust Beach and are planning other photo walkabouts. Follow the student chapter on Instagram @western_nppa.

Wednesday night sailing in Anacortes, Wash. // Photo by Joe Gosen

A couple of personal highlights from the past year include taking up sailing thanks to a friend of mine who needed more “rail meat” on his crew. I participated in series of Wednesday night races in Anacortes throughout the spring and summer. I’ve been offered a spot on the boat for this year’s Swiftsure Yacht Race if I’m up for the challenge. We shall see.

Neuscharfeneck Castle in Germany. // Photo by Joe Gosen

Another highlight from last summer was spending a couple of weeks in southern Germany with my family. We stayed in small villages, hiked to castle ruins and ate cake every day. My wife and son also graciously agreed to tag along with me to the BMW museum in Munich one day so I could get my classic car fix, (my favorite one on display was the 1968 Inka Orange BMW 2002ti). Speaking of cars, our son turned 16 in January and I recently had the luxury of him driving me to school instead of the other way around! Time marches on.
Winter 2021 Update

During my late teens and early twenties I would roll my eyes as I watched my dad trying to navigate the TV remote and VCR. During March 2020 and March 2021 I often imagined my Dad was looking down on me and getting in the last laugh as I fumbled my way through my Zoom classes – conducting lectures with my mic on mute, sharing the wrong screen, showing videos that students couldn’t hear, etc. While I like to think I’m pretty tech savvy, switching to remote teaching threw me a lot of digital curve balls. I swung at everything with all I had. I struck out a few times, got on base a few times and, from my perspective, hit it out of the park a couple times. I am so grateful for how patient and determined the students have been through it all. One thing this past year has reinforced is my preference for being behind the camera instead of in front of it. I’m looking forward to being in the classroom when it’s safe to do so.

The social distance mandates and guidelines not only shifted how we teach but how students reported on projects in the advanced visual journalism class. It would be great if you could take a moment and look at the class website to see how students covered stories during the pandemic. In spring 2020 the students worked on multimedia projects that aimed to show how people in the PNW were coping with COVID-19. In fall 2020 the students wanted to show how we stay connected while being apart. Together, the projects document these unprecedented times. It not only captures the resilience of the subjects they covered but demonstrates the resilience of the students as they navigated the challenges of creating videos from a distance.

Outside of school responsibilities I am currently serving my second year as the chair for the AEJMC logo competition and started my second three-year term as the associate director of NPPA’s Northwest Region. With spring and summer approaching I am eager to find a better balance of screen time and outside time.
Winter 2020 Update

A major highlight of the year for me was spending the first two weeks of September in Tunisia with professors Brian J. Bowe and Carolyn Nielsen and six students from our department thanks to a grant through the U.S. Embassy. You can read more about our experiences here, but in summary it was an incredibly rewarding experience to team up with Tunisian journalism educators and students to discuss and practice journalism in this cross-culture exchange. We are all looking forward to hosting our Tunisian cohorts at Western later this year.

In addition to Tunisia, in August I traveled to Toronto, Canada, to attend the AEJMC annual conference where I participated on a panel about project pitches and getting student work published. This year I will keep busy serving as the chair of the AEJMC logo competition. My three-year term as the associate director of NPPA’s Northwest Region concludes in December but I will continue looking for opportunities to volunteer my time with the organization. On campus I am continuing to serve on the CHSS Faculty Affairs Council and the Digital Media Center Advisory Board.

In the classroom you will still find me teaching courses in the visual journalism sequence (photojournalism, digital media, intro & advanced VJ). The projects created in JOUR 446 from 2016 onward continue to be showcased on our class website. In spring 2019 the students worked on multimedia projects related to Bellingham Bay, including stories about the Alaskan Ferry, the Community Boating Center, women in the commercial fishing industry, accessibility to public art, as well as historical projects about the bay and the waterfront.

I love hearing from former students, so please keep in touch or follow me on Instagram (it’s as simple as clicking on one of the social media links under my mug). I also love having alumni back in the classroom, so let me know when you’ll be in the area and we’ll try and coordinate something. Cheers!
Winter 2019 Update

The journalism faculty take turns supervising the annual alumni newsletter and this year my name came up in the rotation. With the approval from the faculty, I spearheaded an effort to move away from the traditional printed (and mailed) newsletter toward a digital platform – this website. I found an eager student to help lead the charge, as well. Monique Merrill, a news-editorial senior, and I spent winter quarter 2019 gathering content, conceptualizing the site and building it from the ground up. I think it turned out pretty cool and I hope you all do too. One goal with the site is to help keep the lines of communication open between our alumni and department, and allow us to provide updates more than just once per year. We shall see. As with many sites, it’s a work in progress so please do not hesitate to contact us with ideas.

Aside from the newsletter, I had another rewarding year at Western. I taught the usual mix of VJ classes (photojournalism, digital media, intro & advanced VJ) and served on the CHSS faculty affairs council and Digital Media Center advisory board. During the summer I attended the AEJMC annual conference in Washington, D.C., where I chaired the visual communications creative research competition. Other highlights included getting a behind the scenes tour of the photography archives at the Library of Congress, visiting the Newseum and soaking in as much as I could at the National Portrait Gallery.

In other news, a research project I worked on with Prof. Bowe and Prof. Shahira Fahmy of the University of Arizona gained some traction. Our paper “Personal Choice or Political Provocation: Examining the Visual Framing and Stereotyping of the Burkini Debate” was presented at the International Communication Association conference in Prague, Czech Republic, in May and was recently published in Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly. Another project I’m excited to be a part of is planned trip to Tunisia this September with professors Bowe and Nielsen and six journalism students from Western. This project is being funded through a university linkage grant with the U.S. Embassy in Tunisia. You can read more about the Tunisia project here.

And one last shoutout to the advanced visual journalism students (past and present)! The projects they created from 2016 onward are archived on our class website 48DegreesNorth.Com. Check it out. In fall 2018 the students worked on a project about Mount Baker, including a 13-minute documentary, and the spring 2018 explored the theme of “The Edge.”
Winter 2018 Update

It has been a busy and rewarding time since the last alumni newsletter. I continued teaching courses in the visual journalism track, as well as newswriting and editing. During the spring quarter, students in the advanced visual journalism class decided to use the Nooksack River as a guide for seeking out stories in Whatcom County. Over the span of several weeks, they explored the river from Mount Baker to Bellingham Bay. Together they produced a series of multimedia projects that highlighted the impact and significance of the river on the community. Students sought out researchers, scientists, and members of the Nooksack and Lummi tribes to learn about environmental concerns and possible solutions related to the Nooksack River, including its impact on the native salmon. In contrast, two students, Connor Jalbert and Alex Powell, focused on the recreational aspect of the river by doing a project about kayaking. Their film, “Northfork River Rats,” was accepted in the second annual Streams of Thought Film Festival, which took place during Whatcom Water Week in September. I had the honor of introducing them and their film during a screening at the Pickford Theatre.

Outside of teaching I continue to advise our school’s student chapter of the National Press Photographers Association. At the start of 2017, I was also named the associate director of Northwest NPPA. The Northwest region includes Alaska, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Utah, Washington, Wyoming, British Columbia, Alberta, Northwest Territories and the Yukon Territory.

In April I served on a panel discussion at the Western Gallery with journalism colleagues Peggy Watt and Dean Wright to discuss the legal and ethical concerns associated with photographing people in public and private spaces. Our panel discussion was held in conjunction with the gallery’s exhibition titled “Surveillance and Voyeurism.”

During summer I attended AEJMC annual convention in Chicago and participated in a “teaching marathon” where I discussed a multimedia assignment I have students do in the intro visual journalism class that incorporates the history of a building or space over time. A week after my Chicago trip I attended Poynter Institute’s three-day drone school in Portland. In addition to exploring innovative storytelling techniques, a significant amount of time was dedicated to discussing ethical and privacy issues related to drone use in journalism. Another aspect of the workshop was helping participants prepare for the FAA’s Part 107 drone pilot’s certificate. VJ student Rose Carr and VJ alumna Krya Betteridge attended the workshop, too, and are now certified drone pilots! Taking the exam is on my “to do” list.

Over the summer I also supervised 10 internships. One of the highlights included spending an afternoon at Grist in Seattle to observe VJ student Jesse Nichols produce a video about fixing old iPhones instead of buying new ones.

In the fall I started shooting a video project with Whatcom County Library System. With the help of VJ alumni Robert Dudzik, we filmed a series of book talks with librarians throughout the county. We filmed in Ferndale, Maple Falls, Deming, Lynden, Sumas and Sudden Valley during October and November.

John Harris

John Harris, PhD

Associate Professor

Pride of a Nation blog

Lummi Football - Facebook

Redemption in '64

Dr. John Harris Updates

Winter 2025 Update

I’ve always enjoyed track and field, even though I’ve never been good at it. When I moved to Eugene, Oregon, in 1978 I found myself in America’s mecca for the sport. Over the years I attended meets at the old Hayward Field, and I continued to go when the renovated, world-class stadium opened in 2022. Last summer I had the opportunity to compete there in the Hayward Classic, a meet for masters athletes. I won a silver medal in the shot put, finishing second out of two in my age group (men 70-74). The man who beat me, also from Bellingham, was the only person I beat in the 100 meters. Now, as I’m about to retire, I’m hoping to compete in more meets, if I can stay healthy. As the saying goes for masters athletes, “The best ability is availability.”

John Harris dons his silver medal from the Hayward Classic meet in 2024.

Over the previous winter break I spent a week with friends hiking in Death Valley. We plan to head for Escalante in May. Am I glad to be retiring? Yes, for the opportunity to see more of the world. Will I miss my job as professor? Not the work, but the people, absolutely. That’s always been the best part of the job — watching young people learn and grow. Thank you for the opportunity.
Spring 2024 Update

John Harris during his presentation at VisComm 37 in Mammoth Lakes, Calif., on June 22, 2023. // Photo by Joe Gosen

Professor Joe Gosen and I attended VisComm 37 in Mammoth Lakes, California in June. VisComm is a gathering of visual journalism educators who share their projects and ideas. It was officially summer, but Mammoth was still digging out from a historic snowfall. We hiked to a cabin with snow up to the roof, and to a waterfall with huge chunks of ice roaring down into a lake. The conference was OK, but hanging out in Mammoth was a highlight of the summer. But not the highlight.

Joe and I headed out early on our last day for the three-hour drive to Reno and our flight home. I received a text that my daughter-in-law, Maria, was in labor, and had been since midnight. We stopped at Mono Lake along the way, and then Joe took me on a tour of Reno, where he’d worked as a shooter for the Reno Gazette Journal. We also had lunch with his nephew, an aspiring physician. But the entire time I was distracted, checking updates on Maria’s progress.

Noon. Three o’clock. Six o’clock. Eight o’clock. Still in labor. Joe and I boarded our flight to Seattle, arriving about 10 o’clock. Still no baby.

We took the last leg home to Bellingham, landing about midnight. I turned on my phone. Liliana Sofia Harris-Gonzalez had arrived at 11:05 p.m. The day’s suspense and tension flowed from me in tears of joy. I think Joe shed a tear, too.
Winter 2023 Update

I’m the reigning USATF Northwest Region Masters shot put champion in the 65-69 age group. My winning throw at last summer’s meet in West Seattle was 8.82 meters. No one else came close in my age group because no one else competed in the shot. After the meet, a friend looked at the gold hanging from my neck and said, “Nice participation medal.” Less impressive was finishing last out of six in the 100 meters, more than 2 seconds behind the fifth-place runner.

I can’t contend with elite masters athletes, but I love competing and am constantly amazed by what others can achieve. Daphne Scott, a math professor here at Western, set the world record in the decathlon for women ages 60-64 last summer. I wrote a story about her achievement for Geezer Jock, a website dedicated to, well, just what it says. I’ve included the link to my story in case you happened to miss that issue of Geezer Jock.

Another highlight of the past year was writing a story about the photography team of Darius and Tabitha Kinsey for the Seattle Times’ Pacific NW Magazine. I knew a bit about Darius Kinsey, and my interest in Tabitha was piqued while hiking with a journalism professor from Chile. She was researching museums and was introduced to the Kinseys at the Whatcom Museum of History. She related what she’d learned on our hike, and I decided to explore further. It turned into a magazine story.

Just as gratifying as those bylines was seeing a story by one of my 207 students in Cascadia Daily News. Lily Luna Cruz wrote about the BT Cowboy, a student who practiced his roping skills outside Buchanan Towers, attracting much attention. A student in Scott Terrell’s photo J class, Nico Murch, happened to photograph the cowboy for an assignment. The two students’ work made an excellent package in CDN.

I realized I wanted to pursue teaching full time when I was an adjunct professor and saw one of my student’s bylines. I was more excited seeing hers than my own. That still holds true for this geezer.
Winter 2022 Update

When I started teaching as an adjunct more than 20 years ago I’d trek from the Herald up to campus. By the time I arrived in the classroom I was sweating profusely from exertion and high anxiety. Winter quarter this year I found myself once again in the classroom with my heart racing and my palms sweating. It was a good sign. I was told early on that if you’re not nervous on the first day of class something’s wrong. Returning after nearly two years because of COVID-19 felt like those early days again. I understand remote teaching and learning is best for some people, but for me there’s no substitute for being in the classroom with our amazing students. Their work ethic and eagerness to learn is energizing and gives me hope for the future. After all these years, and despite the damn epidemic, that hasn’t changed.

I’m getting to be that old-timer who calls into the newspaper to nag. Three times in the past year I’ve emailed The Seattle Times, once to complain about a photograph and twice about a sportswriter’s too simplistic ledes. The editors didn’t respond, but I felt better. And I’m still carrying the flag for correct usage of lay and lie, though I realize it’s a losing battle. Oh well. I’m going to lay my computer aside now and go lie down.
Winter 2021 Update

I used to pride myself on not teaching online. Classroom interaction was essential to the educational experience — for me and hopefully for the students. Old school. Hello COVID-19. The end of winter quarter 2020 evolved overnight from spring break to asynchronous, a word I’d never heard.

I’m only teaching two quarters each year now. I took fall quarter off and spent much of my time tromping around the Chuckanuts and Blanchard Mountain. I’ve always hiked the high country, and did this fall, but discovering the woods out the back door was a revelation.

Now it’s winter quarter and I’m back to teaching online. My students have inspired me to bend with the virus. They’ve adapted, often under much more difficult circumstances than I’ve faced. I’m doing my best, which I concede probably isn’t always the best, but the students lift me up with their effort, their talent and their perseverance. Some things never change.
Winter 2020 Update

I continue to follow my new semi-retirement routine: Take the fall off and teach winter and spring quarters only. I did fill in for a couple of weeks in the fall for Don Shelton, recently retired executive editor of the Seattle Times, who taught 207. My task was easy, because Don had two great guest speakers: Asia Fields, a 2018 grad and now a reporter for the Times; and Greg Bishop, senior writer for Sports Illustrated. Asia’s presentation served to showcase the quality of students our program produces, while Greg related what it’s like to work at journalism’s top echelon. The class was inspired by both their talks, and I was, too — inspired to get back to teaching.

In the spring I was invited to Columbus, Ohio, to participate in the Ohioana Book Festival. I sold some copies of my book about the Cleveland Browns, “Redemption in ’64,” and served on a panel about sports books, along with four other authors. The moderator kept referring to the guy beside me as “John,” which made it a bit confusing, but all in all it was an honor to return to my home state as a published author.

The past year was rewarding financially, relatively. I wrote a piece on the photography of the Battle of Antietam for a Spanish journal — the editor translated my English — and it paid 150 Euros. And I received about $300 in royalties for my book on the Browns. Still, I think I’ll stay semi-retired for the time being.
Winter 2019 Update

I’m writing this on the same day I’m about to teach a class — two actually — for the first time in six months. I’m easing into retirement, teaching two quarters each year, following the precedent set by Carolyn Dale and Tim Pilgrim. I’ll teach winter and spring quarters only, and I plan to do it indefinitely. By the time you read this I’ll be back in the swing of things, but today I’m a bit stunned.

The past year saw the publication of a magazine article I wrote on the World War II photographer George Strock, for which I still haven’t been paid more than a year later. The magazine, which will remain unnamed, explained it’s in the midst of restructuring its business model and doesn’t have money to pay its contributors — ah, the joys of freelancing. A chapter on Vietnam War photography I wrote was published in “The Palgrave Handbook of Artistic and Cultural Responses to War since 1914” — apparently, they couldn’t come up with a less sexy title. And my book on the 1964 NFL champion Cleveland Browns, “Redemption in ’64,” came out in October.It’s already selling in the dozens. The best part has been reconnecting with old friends, who heard about and/or read the book. I also received an email from a person in the UK who wrote that he laughed out loud at the line: “Groza’s older brother Frank kicked for the high school team, and Lou went along and shagged.” If you’ve watched the “Austin Powers” movies you know that in England shagged has a different meaning than it does in America. Oh, behave!
Winter 2018 Update

The past year has been busy and rewarding in terms of writing projects. A story I wrote about World War II combat photographer George Strock was published in America in WWII magazine; the book I wrote about the Cleveland Browns is at the copy editor and scheduled for publication in the fall (Scott Terrell took my photo for the back cover); and as I write this I’m finishing up a chapter for a book on war photography. I’m focusing on three images from the Vietnam War, and in the process of researching them had the chance to talk with Nick Ut, who took the iconic “Terror of War” photo showing a girl burned by napalm.

I believe it’s important to continue working as a journalist to keep my teaching effective and relevant. I don’t want to be a dotty old professor in a coffee-stained sweater wandering around reminiscing about the old days. Of course, that could be me, and I just don’t know it.

Jennifer Keller

Jennifer Keller, EdD

Associate Professor

Dr. Jennifer Keller Updates

Winter 2025 Update

Not much has changed during the past year. I’ve continued to fill in for Brian J. Bowe as chair when he is on leave, and will do so again this coming fall. I’m very much enjoying teaching more and this winter I finally am teaching PR Case Studies again. The students just finished their press conferences, which I am sure my PR alums remember fondly.

Speaking of alumni, a huge thank you to all of our alums who have come to speak to my introductory PR classes. It is definitely one of the favorite parts of that class for my students and really helps them understand the variety of careers and experiences they can have. Anyone who is interested in joining us (live or via Zoom) this spring or fall, please reach out!

On the personal side, not much has changed. The remodel of the new house is progressing slowly and we aim to move in by end of year. Excited to travel to Perth this summer to visit my sister and nephews. Please keep in touch and we’d love to see any of you in Bellingham.
Spring 2024 Update

After eight years as chair of the journalism department, it’s been nice to be teaching more courses again, including Mass Media Ethics. I stepped down in fall of 2022, although I did fill in as interim chair while Brian J. Bowe was away on professional leave this past fall.

The best part about teaching more is that in this year’s capstone class there are students who are taking their third class with me, which takes me back to those earlier cohorts. I’ve enjoyed “twisting the arms” of several PR alumni to talk to my introductory public relations students about their career paths. The students are so appreciative and it really opens their eyes to the many opportunities once you graduate. For many of them, that is the best part of the classroom. So, thank you to all my former students – it’s great to hear from you!

I continue to be very active on campus. I am still chair of the Western Coalition for Integrity and after a lengthy development, pilot, revision process, we are about to launch a proactive academic integrity training program for incoming students. The idea for this came out of interviews with then journalism students for my doctoral dissertation. So, thank you again! I have also been fortunate enough to present at conferences the past couple of years – on online learning and academic integrity last spring and about PR curricula this spring. It was particularly nice to present in San Antonio because Derek Moscato and Jenny Bettis were both there for the Borderlands conference. A little WWU meet up!

On the personal side, Mark and I had a lovely trip to France with my parents last June. We spent most of our time in Alsace-Lorraine, with a few days in Paris at the end. We are still working on our new house in anticipation of maybe moving in this fall, or winter, or…. This would be especially good news for Milo, since we bought the house to give him a bigger yard!
Winter 2022 Update

The biggest development for me, professionally, was finally completing my dissertation and receiving my doctorate in education innovation and leadership from Arizona State University. It was a long journey, but an invigorating one (and now I get to be Dr. Keller, although I’m not one who uses titles much). A huge shout out to alumni James Egaran, Hailey Palmer and Logan Portteus for the inspiration through their JOUR 450 investigation of academic dishonesty at Western. For my action research project, I developed a journalism specific Canvas course for our students as a resource on academic integrity. Now, I can’t prove anything — but we haven’t had a violation since it went live. Just sayin’.

This project also led me to take on the role of chair of the Western Coalition for Integrity. We are trying to develop proactive training for all students at Western — as well as resources for both faculty and students. I’m also in my eighth year as chair of the department, which means I have been chair for more than half my time (15 years!) at Western. I continue to enjoy teaching campaigns — even virtually. And I thought now would be a good time to blow up the intro class this quarter to focus more on social media and get rid of the out-of-date textbook.

On the personal side, I finally got to see my parents after nearly three years, which was amazing. And Mark and I got a dog — a very large golden retriever named Milo who just turned 1. And, since the house is still a project (of course) we thought what could be better than to take on a new one? So, we bought a house that needs LOTS of work — but this time we won’t move in until it’s done. Otherwise, all is the same as it can be in these crazy times.
Winter 2021 Update

A very short update as it feels like things have been moving at a glacial pace since last winter. The biggest change has been teaching the PR Campaigns class online both spring and fall. Fortunately, my students are wonderfully adaptive and the course lends itself to being more asynchronous. But to my PR alumni who remember it, the experience is definitely different without the in-person presentations (and room set up) and field trip.

Photo courtesy of Jennifer Keller

One thing that has helped me is that I’ve been working on my doctorate in education for the past three years – in an entirely online program through Arizona State University. So I have experience from the student side on what has worked – an not worked. That dual role of teacher/student in an online environment led to a book chapter I co-wrote with one of my colleagues from my doctoral program. The book, Tertiary Online Teaching and Learning, (https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-15-8928-7) was just published this winter. Also, fingers crossed, I’ll be wrapping up my doctorate in May.

No fun holidays or vacations to share. I’ve been mainly at home, with my co-workers Jake and Elwood supervising my every move. In hopes of better things to come, here’s a photo from the last time the PR campaigns course was taught in-person (Fall ’19). Just so we all remember that one can have fun and learn at the same time. This is Halloween with my project manager, Mia Steben (who graduated spring ’20).
Winter 2020 Update

I continue to enjoy teaching the capstone PR class and am always amazed by the campaigns our students develop. It is exciting to realize that over the last several years the students have assisted approximately two dozen different local organizations through their efforts in this class alone. I’m also nearly halfway through my second term as chair (at the end of this academic year) and it is energizing getting to meet with students in all our tracks as they prepare for graduation.

Of course, I’m also kept busy by my doctoral program. This quarter/semester has been the most challenging with three courses – including an advanced quantitative methods and an advanced qualitative methods course. So I have truly been able to empathize with my students with regards to homework, tests and papers. Luckily, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. After this quarter I will solely be focused on my action research project – to develop online educational materials that I hope will help reduce the number of academic dishonesty violations in our department. I look forward to working with some of my colleagues on developing the materials and anecdotes. And, fingers crossed, one year from now (in March 2021) I will defend my dissertation.

On the personal side, the house is still a project (that will never change) and I’m trying to fit in travels around my work at Western and my studies at ASU. We also adopted to tuxedo kittens last fall – Jake and Elwood – and they keep us entertained (and provided much-needed assistance – and snuggles – during homework or grading sessions).
Winter 2019 Update

I am still serving as chair of our department and primarily teaching our senior PR courses. This winter, however, I am getting a chance to teach the Principles of PR course. It’s been a while (five years) and I always love being there at the beginning when students start to decide whether PR is for them. It is reinvigorating to be teaching the class, although I look forward to the love campaigns course in the spring.

Probably the biggest change for me is that I decided to go back to school (again) last spring. In March 2018, I began an online doctorate in education (Ed.D.) program through Arizona State University. I’m really excited about the program because it is hands-on and practical, with each of us working to try to improve something within our own organization. I got my inspiration from some of our fantastic senior news-editorial students: Logan Portteus, Hailey Palmer and James Egaran. For their Advanced Reporting course they wrote a fantastic series of articles about academic dishonesty issues at Western. Based on their initial findings, my goal is to develop online educational materials to help reduce the number of academic dishonesty violations in our department. Too many result from a lack of information and I’d like to figure out (with the help of my fellow faculty and students) how we might fill in that knowledge gap. One year down, two more to go.

On the personal side, the house is still a project (of course) and I’m trying to fit in travels around my work at Western and my studies at ASU. Next up – Austin in March and then Scotland/London in August (with, I hope, a Chicago visit in between).
Winter 2018 Update

This year I am celebrating my 10th anniversary at Western. I first joined the department back in September 2007. Sometimes it seems like it has been twice that long and sometimes it feels like no time has passed.

I am still serving as chair of our department and teaching our senior PR courses. One great thing about having been here a decade is that I now get to work with some of you through my PR campaigns class. This year I have three former PR students as clients. In fact, one of my former students has now participated in Jour 440 in three different ways—as a student (and part of the “winning” agency), a project manager for the class, and on the client side.

I began a couple of research projects this past year and look forward to focusing on that side of my professional life more in the spring. I will be on professional leave for the quarter, leaving the department in the able hands of John Harris as interim chair. I continue to serve on far too many committees but at least one of them this year is a search for another new faculty member.

On the personal side, I continue to work on the house (a never-ending project), travel to see my family and catch up with as many JKid alumni as I can. My favorite thing about my job has always been my students and getting to see you all grow and mature during your time here. Even more so following your new adventures and careers. We have such a terrific group of journalism department alumni and I am very proud of all my #JKids. After 10 years there are far too many too count but I feel much more enriched as a person. So thank you.

Derek Moscato

Derek Moscato, PhD

Associate Professor

Dr. Derek Moscato Updates

Winter 2025 Update

It’s been another busy yet immensely rewarding year in the journalism department. I’ve returned to the environmental journalism classroom this year to work with students who are doing some terrific work in areas such as science communication and wildlife reporting. Our class is lucky enough to work with a wide range of community organizations, including the Salish Sea Institute and the Pipeline Safety Trust. This winter, we’re joining the latter entity to visit Whatcom Falls Park in Bellingham to learn more about the legacy of the tragic 1999 Olympic pipeline explosion.

These engagements are helping our students to negotiate environmental issues, and crises, through lenses of ecology and community, but also policy and civic connection. Related to this, I’ve recently finished work on a second environmental media book, titled Environmental Communication and The Wild: Image, Industry, and Technology. This new book features some incredible environmental media scholars from across the country. Please reach out if you’re interested in learning more.

Just over a year after the NHL Winter Classic at T-Mobile Park, I’m still paying attention to some fascinating sporting developments in the region, including next year’s FIFA World Cup in Seattle and Vancouver. I’ve been working with Western’s Border Policy Research Institute to examine the cultural, economic, and environmental ramifications of the cross-border flows of sport, whether it’s FIFA, NHL, Major League Baseball, but also up-and-coming sports like global rugby, professional lacrosse, and junior hockey. Needless to say, these discussions about sport and society are finding their way into my new honors seminar called Global Sport: Media, Politics, and Diplomacy. Now I just need to find some tickets to the actual World Cup games.

Back in the journalism department, our new chapter of the journalism society Kappa Tau Alpha is off the ground, providing a terrific way to recognize student excellence across our sequences. In addition to KTA, I’m also keeping busy chairing the university’s Academic Technology Committee and advising our Western chapter of PRSSA. I always look forward to hearing from our alumni, as do our students, so please stay in touch!
Spring 2024 Update

My 2024 started off on a winning note, literally, with a visit to T-Mobile Park in Seattle to witness the Seattle Kraken’s hosting of the NHL Winter Classic and a convincing victory for the home side.

Hockey fandom aside, a focus on student life has also been a fun focus over the past several months. As PRSSA faculty advisor, I’ve been working with a group of motivated journalism and public relations students who have been busy reinvigorating our Western chapter of the Public Relations Student Society of America. Their agenda for the coming months is nothing short of impressive, and includes a terrific line-up of guest speakers, agency and company visits, and collaborations with other groups like WWU’s Society of Professional Journalists chapter. Coming out of the pandemic, with all of its challenges for campus clubs, I couldn’t be happier what our PRSSA students have been able to achieve.

Please reach out to me—or directly to them—if you want to collaborate on ways to make PRSSA even more impactful. We’ve been grateful for the enthusiasm from our department’s alumni and friends to date in setting up presentations, class visits, and more. One point of focus in the months ahead is sending some of our chapter members to PRSA’s annual ICON conference in Anaheim, California. Hopefully they’ll see some of you there!

Another exciting development for students is our launch of the Western chapter of Kappa Tau Alpha (or KTA). The college honors society, founded at the University of Missouri in 1910, “recognizes academic excellence and promotes scholarship in journalism and mass communication.” I’m beyond thrilled to advise the chapter in its first year of membership and engage with KTA in recognizing our students who demonstrate excellence in their academic work. You can learn more about the society and its legacy within the journalism and mass communication field at https://www.kappataualpha.net/history/

On a personal level, outside of cheering for the Vancouver Canucks in the Stanley Cup playoffs, I’ve been keeping busy with various teaching and research initiatives, including research engagements with the Center for Canadian-American Studies, the Border Policy Research Institute, and the Salish Sea Institute; and participation in a program focused on Collaborative Online Interactive Learning (COIL). Off campus, meanwhile, I’ve enjoyed contributing to news publications like the Salish Current, and to volunteer organizations like the Bellingham Sister Cities Association (BSCA). Both organizations have provided wonderful local platforms for writing, professional engagement, and interaction with Western students, alumni, and community members. And this past winter, our senior public relations students developed some exceptional proposals for BSCA’s binational and city-to-city diplomacy aspirations. You can learn more about their work at: https://bsca.org/wwu-students-help-bsca/

As part of their Canadian-American Media Systems class taught by Derek Moscato (third from right), Western students enjoyed a field trip to the Canadian border in June for a first-hand look at “borderlands media.” Highlights from the spring outing included a walking tour through Blaine’s wharf and downtown districts; a visit with the owners and editors of Point Roberts Press, home of the Northern Light, All Point Bulletin, and Mount Baker Experience publications; and a trek to Peace Arch Historical State Park to see the iconic, 67-foot International Peace Arch monument. // Photo courtesy of Derek Mascato
Winter 2023 Update

One of the great upsides of working at Western is the opportunity to interface with some of the country’s most impressive natural geographies, including the Salish Sea and North Cascades ecosystems, and also to work with other researchers and students immersed in their own projects about these environments. This interest has led me to a new collaboration with Western’s Border Policy Research Institute devoted to the Skagit River Headwaters, and recent developments which saw significant mining threats to one of the Northwest’s most vital watersheds. It’s a topic that has driven insightful dialogue inside the environmental journalism and strategic communication classrooms.

It has also catalyzed scholarly interest in how green advocates cooperate in cross-border contexts involving Canada and the U.S. My recent research involving the Skagit River’s so-called “Donut Hole” controversy identified three distinct takeaways for cross-border environmental communication. Firstly, in the case of international watersheds, cross-border media flows provide a critical role in serving the public interest, especially if they challenge unilateral state interests or disrupt a veil of environmental secrecy. Secondly, a growing network of media technologies and networks are fostering a wider-range of debate about ecological topics, especially with a growing chorus of NGOs and other voices finding their platforms on Internet blogs and social media. Finally, the infusion of rhetoric in environmental debates—particularly the kind of communication that lends itself to prominent media headlines and cinematic storytelling—drives a persuasive form of narrative that can influence public opinion and policy action across borders.

Moving from the North Cascades to the Salish Sea, another area that captured my attention during the past year was the arrival of the hockey world’s Kraken to Seattle’s shores. To mark the moment, I developed an Honors Program class called Icing the Kraken: Hockey’s Political Economy and Public Diplomacy, to coincide with the launch of Seattle’s new NHL franchise. This class examined a wide range of social dimensions of hockey, including history, labor, media, marketing, and corporate social responsibility. Students enrolled in this class experienced hockey in the Pacific Northwest and globally as economically transformational, politically transnational, and socially meaningful. Given its focus on publics and audiences, this course also connected hockey to public diplomacy — highlighting the role of sport in mediating national relations between established and emergent hockey nations from North America, Europe, and Asia.

During the term, the class engaged with leading voices from the hockey community. They included hockey scholars such as Andrew Holman and Nicholas Hirshon, but also leading figures from the Seattle hockey community, including Kraken Vice-President of Social Impact and Government Relations Mari Horita and NHL2Seattle founder John Barr. A smaller group also traveled to Seattle to take in a Kraken hockey game, which included a special tour of Climate Pledge Arena with Kraken VP of Sustainability Rob Johnson. It goes without saying that everybody should see the venue’s “Living Wall”, which stretches 200 feet long and features over 25 different species of Pacific Northwest plants; and Climate Pledge’s repurposed landmark roof. While wandering the concourses with Rob, our students learned about the integration of sustainability into the arena’s renovation and construction, and its interfacing with the surrounding Seattle Center and adjacent downtown neighborhoods. A huge thanks goes out to the Kraken leaders and other hockey visionaries who engaged with our students during the winter and spring to set the stage for the arrival of the world’s most exciting professional sport to Western Washington.
Winter 2022 Update

This past year has provided new and exciting opportunities for engagement, teaching, and research. In the spring, I was immersed in organizing a special forum for environmental journalists in the cross-border Cascadia region. The event, titled “Reporting on Ecotopia: Cross-border environmental media in the Salish Sea and Cascadia” was co-hosted by the Journalism Department along with Western’s Border Policy Research Institute, the Center for Canadian-American Studies, the Salish Sea Institute, and Salish Sea Communications. A special thanks goes out to the WWU Alumni Association for their partnership and support.

Our panel forum opened new lines of inquiry about the evolution of ecological reporting and green media in the Canada-U.S. Cascadia region that includes British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon. And we were able to bring together a slate of outstanding journalists from both sides of the border, including Jude Isabella from Hakai Magazine, Lisa Johnson from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Lynda Mapes of the Seattle Times, and Mike Sato of Salish Current and Salish Sea News and Weather.

Some of the key issues we explored in the panel were transboundary issues such as the North American energy economy and climate policy; the role of media outlets in producing cross-border conversations about the Salish Sea and Cascadia region; and the critical importance of place-based news in addressing environmental crises but also solutions in our shared bioregion. Our panelists provided amazing insights into not only how ecological media is produced quite uniquely in the Cascadia region, but how it plays a key role in influencing public policy. For example, reporters have informed public debates with necessary context and background about topics such as the expansion of petroleum pipeline projects, the protection of Pacific Northwest watersheds such as the Skagit and Columbia River basins, and the declining population of the Salish Sea orcas.

We were thrilled to have so many attendees from our student body but also our alumni ranks, as well as local and regional media practitioners. I’m grateful to our campus partners for making this forum a big success. If you are reading this and you were in attendance, let me thank you for attending and know that we are hoping to do an encore in the future.

Furthermore, our forum helped set the stage for a new journalism department class offered in conjunction with Canadian-American Studies during the summer of 2021. The course, Canadian-American Media Systems, gave students the opportunity to learn about the history, growth, and political regulation of news production, broadcasting, public communication, and digital media as they pertain to Canada and the U.S. Along with the imparting of media skills and tactics, the class opened up new channels for cross-border conversations, knowledge, and career growth. I am grateful to our students who took up this adventure in global media and for the unique directions they took the class in, including digital streaming content, cross-border professional sports markets, the advent of Hollywood North, and environmental non-governmental organizations.
Winter 2021 Update

The past year has not been without its challenges but I consider myself fortunate to be embedded in Western’s supportive scholarly community — even if virtually — as we look forward to returning to campus in the future. My thanks go out to our journalism and public relations alumni and industry friends who continue to reach out and provide guest lectures, curricular insights, or share job opportunities and internships for our students. It has been very rewarding to see the larger Western community come together during this time.

One of the highlights from the past winter was our online PRSSA Connections event, which put Western’s public relations students in touch with communication executives from many of the Seattle area’s leading companies, communication agencies, and non-profits. As faculty adviser for our PRSSA chapter, I’m grateful for the hard work of our student leadership group and the engagement of our industry partners — including student president Mackenzie Myhr and event co-organizer Lauri Hennessey of League of Education Voters — for making this mentoring event one to remember. We had 50 participants for this event and I look forward to seeing WWU PRSSA build upon this success in the months ahead.

Inside the classroom, meanwhile, we have made the big adjustment to virtual learning (for now) and our students, staff, and faculty deserve plenty of praise for embracing adjusted pedagogies and integrating new technologies and teaching formats. In our public relations courses, concepts and activities like media training, crisis communication, and corporate social responsibility are taking on new meaning during this era of unprecedented change.

Beyond the virtual classroom, I have enjoyed working on new research sponsored by Western’s Border Policy Research Institute. This ongoing project is focused on the news media ecology of the transboundary Cascadia region. As part of this work I have had the chance to interview journalists and media executives from Seattle and Vancouver, as well as those from smaller border communities in British Columbia and Washington state, to learn more about how Cascadia thematically drives news media coverage and reporting around the region.

While the Pacific Northwest and Western Canada are feeling the same fiscal pinch when it comes to media economics, there are some positive takeaways from my findings. Firstly, our journalists, publications, and media sources continue to share expertise across the region, and across our international border. This is imperative for issues like climate change or the sustainable transportation aspirations of the Cascadia Innovation Corridor. Secondly, Cascadia’s entrepreneurial spirit has made it a hot spot for non-profit and start-up media outlets. And finally, growing expertise in salient reporting areas such as ecology, innovation, and urban planning mean that Cascadia’s stories are reaching national and global audiences. Not to be understated is the reporting role of Cascadia’s media during the COVID-19 pandemic and associated border shutdown. Cross-border media enterprises and community newspapers have been a lifeline for citizens caught up in the unprecedented border lockdown, such as those living in Point Roberts, Washington. You can learn more about this BPRI research here or here.

This project has also provided inspiration in part for a new class I’ll be offering this summer called “Canadian-American Media Systems: News, Culture, and Diplomacy” which provides students with an understanding of cross-border media flows and their impact on the relationship between Canada and the United States. The class will provide for Western’s Journalism and Canadian-American Studies students an understanding of how mass media interpret and produce renderings of the Canada-U.S. relationship for the rest of the world through internationalized media systems, including news outlets, public communication, and popular culture.
Winter 2020 Update

I continue to be energized by our students’ passion for journalism and public relations, and by the connections fostered for them by our alumni. So thank you! For example, this past year our Western chapter of the Public Relations Student Society of America was welcomed with open arms by leading companies and agencies across Washington who are led by our graduates; and our student interns continue to enjoy transformative career-learning experiences with outstanding publications and organizations.

In addition to advising our PRSSA chapter, another engagement opportunity I have thoroughly enjoyed is working with WWU’s Border Policy Research Institute, which explores issues such as trade, transportation, and the environment along the B.C./Washington border. As a 2019-2020 BPRI Research Fellow, I am studying the network of media outlets and communicators in the Cascadia region, which has emerged as a key international region for technology, sustainability, and aviation. Recently, companies such as Microsoft and Amazon have begun to promote the Cascadia Innovation Corridor between B.C. and Oregon, which includes an early-stage proposal for high-speed rail along the I-5 corridor and other business initiatives related to technology, ecology, and human mobility.

My research in progress seeks to help strategic communicators and policymakers—including urban planners, environmentalists, and civic leaders—to navigate the future of this region by understanding how their messages are distributed through news channels, and how the media understands the idea of Cascadia as a political, economic, and ecological entity. Please don’t hesitate to reach me (derek.moscato@wwu.edu) if you are interested in learning more about this study, which will be completed in the summer of 2020. A formal report is forthcoming and will be made available to all who are interested.

Speaking of (ahem) cross-border developments, as a Canadian in the heart of Cascadia I am increasingly excited for the arrival of Seattle’s National Hockey League franchise. Hockey has always been in Washington state’s DNA – and my students from Everett, Spokane, Seattle/Kent, and the Tri-Cities have reminded me of the success of junior hockey franchises in those cities. I have no doubt Seattle’s foray into professional hockey will be a great success – except, of course, when they play the Vancouver Canucks.
Winter 2019 Update

This past summer I had the pleasure of teaching a new class called Environmental Public Relations and Advocacy. Given the ongoing debates over climate change and environmental resources in the media, it was a fantastic time to develop this course. Our students had the opportunity to visit Bellingham’s waterfront revival project and drop in on Sustainable Connections’ impressive operation. We also hiked the refurbished section of Whatcom Creek as we visited the site of the tragic Olympic Pipeline Explosion on its 20th anniversary. Our students took in a lot and are highly motivated to make their mark as environmental communicators.

A personal highlight from the past year was attending the Public Relations Society of America’s North Pacific District Conference in Seattle, where I presented research on environmental PR and green activism to industry practitioners representing chapters across the West. Western was well-represented by students and alumni, and several Vikings presented PR best practices and insights during an impressive slate of panels and workshops. Mostly, it was a great opportunity to engage with the growing network of strategic communicators from Western. Along these lines, I would like to thank the many media and PR professionals, including Western alumni, who took time to engage with our students (including members of our WWU PRSSA chapter) at the conference but also during classroom guest lectures and site visits throughout the past year.

Outside of the classroom, I am continuing my research work in corporate social responsibility, environmentalism, and international public relations, while contributing smaller articles for USC’s Center for Public Diplomacy. In the year ahead, I am looking forward to finishing my manuscript for a book about pipeline politics on the Great Plains, and also to spending more time on my snowshoes in the Mount Baker Wilderness!
Winter 2018 Update

My first year in the Western journalism department is in the books, and I’m well into year two! It’s been a great pleasure to get to know the Western community during this time, including the community of students, alumni, staff, and faculty in the department of journalism. Exploring Bellingham and the Puget Sound region has also been great fun. Outside of the classroom, I’m enjoying advising our ambitious and talented students involved in Western’s chapter of the Public Relations Student Society of America. I’m also keeping busy with Western’s Community Engagement Fellows program. As a fellow, and in tandem with a leading city organization, I’m co-developing a new project devoted to urban and sustainability communication in the Bellingham area. Stay tuned for more details.

One of the great upsides of this region is this longstanding interest and leadership in issues of sustainability and ecology, and this is paramount across Western as well. Inside the public relations and newswriting classrooms, I have appreciated insightful dialogues with our students about topics that have global but also local ecological impacts, including the communication/mediation of environmental activism, corporate social responsibility, and outdoor recreation. There is a growing interest in how journalists, public relations professionals, and advocates factor into green policy decisions—and these topics hold extra weight within the Cascadia corridor.

My interest in this realm also factors into ongoing research. My recent article in the Journal of Communication Inquiry examines the contentious media debates, and moral implications, surrounding the legacy of the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster in Japan. This ethical inquiry focuses on how producers of popular culture (in this case, the prominent manga author Tetsu Kariya) can establish new boundaries for environmental debate in the mainstream news media. Similarly, my recent study in the 2017 Arctic Yearbook investigated how the global public, through mass media, understands the polar region simultaneously as a site of environmental protection and degradation. At the heart of this research are reality television programs like “Deadliest Catch” and “Ice Road Truckers” and how they depict resources extraction in Alaska and the Canadian North, but also how they contribute productively (and perhaps counter-intuitively) to climate change debates in the press.

Back in Bellingham, I’m excited for the year ahead. It’s especially gratifying to watch our alumni and recent graduates grow into their careers and tackle some fascinating public relations and journalism opportunities both locally and globally. I look forward to staying in touch.

Maria McLeod

Maria McLeod, MFA

Associate Professor

Maria McLeod Updates

Winter 2025 Update

Hello, wonderful alumni. I am proud to see you excelling in journalism and public relations positions of note, near and far. This speaks to what makes the Department of Journalism unique — our focus on developing usable and applicable skills, practicing real-life scenarios in the classroom and as part of service learning, and having majors take part in student publications and service courses.

As for me, I am deeply engaged in teaching students about mass media, public relations and journalism at a time when first-amendment rights are under attack and when social media has largely fractured where people get their information and influenced what they believe and care about. My Introduction to Mass Media class winter quarter has grappled with these issues and more and I have found students to be even more engaged in critiquing and understanding the changing media landscape and how it impacts their lives and their communities.

Outside of class, I am actively working to promote and prepare for the 25th Scholars Week in my role as chair of the Scholars Week Planning Committee. This year, we are looking to expand and deepen student and faculty participation in this annual celebration of academic excellence.

As for my own work, I was selected to take part in a weeklong writers’ residency, where I advanced my creative work toward publication of my first full-length book of poetry. I have been invited to serve as a guest editor next fall for a hybrid journal that publishes creative and scholarly work. I continue to research the use of personal narratives as part of testimonials on the websites of the nation’s top cancer centers.

When I’m not teaching, working on Scholars Week, writing or researching, you can find me at the gym, where I’ve been working on maintaining my health by spinning, strengthening my core, lifting weights and running. Sadly, I’m not headed to the Olympics, but I may just run a 5K come June.

Please don’t hesitate to drop me a line or stop by. I’m always happy to hear how our former students are doing in the world.
Winter 2023 Update

Hello, wonderful journalism alumni. I hope that whatever you’re doing, wherever you are, your life has returned to some semblance of normal compared to our pandemic-protocol existence over the last two years. Not that we’re entirely in the clear in terms of susceptibility to highly transmissible illness, but we are certainly better off than we have been over the past two years.

I must admit to being continuously impressed with our students’ ability to weather an uncertain future with passion for communicating critical issues. Whether students have been working remotely or in person, it’s been impressive to see how quickly and deftly they learn and put into practice their new-found skills as reporters, editors, visual journalists and public relations specialists. I appreciate, also, the vast network of our alumni who help build bridges to the professional realm. In that regard, I am always happy to hear and read updates of our talented graduates, both personal and professional achievements.

In regard to my own work, I’ve been researching, writing, publishing and presenting scholarship related to health communications, specifically examining “cancer narratives,” essentially how patient survivor stories are used to promote cancer care centers. I’ve also continued to publish poems, short nonfiction, fiction and book reviews.

I continue my role as chair of the university’s Scholars Week Planning Committee, working collaboratively with students, faculty and staff from all of Western’s colleges and programs to feature the best of WWU students’ creative and scholarly works. That continues to be a university service and PR project near and dear to my heart.

Please don’t hesitate to drop me a line, or stop by. I’m am always happy to hear how you are doing in the world.
Winter 2022 Update

Greetings, wonderful journalism alumni, from the halls of the Communication Facility where I’ve finally returned to teach classes face-to-face (masked, of course!) after not having taught in person since March of 2020. What a strange journey we’ve all been on, but the advantage of teaching and practicing public relations, reporting, editing and other journalistic skills is that we are already poised to digitally engage, which we did with great proficiency. I continue to be impressed with my current and former students’ abilities to adapt and navigate what has been, at times, a quickly changing and challenging landscape amidst a global pandemic, impacting all aspects of life, from social and familial interactions to professional and educational settings.

I’ve had the luxury of another sabbatical this fall, meaning I was able to engage in an ever-expanding research project to study how stories of cancer “survivors” are used to promote leading cancer care centers in the United States. I was able to present initial findings at an international health communications conference in August, and I hope to present and publish related papers this academic year. Earlier this fall, I gave two teacher presentations at the Public Relations Society of America conference — one on the topic of managing social media, and the other on using literary devices to create hashtag-worthy taglines. In addition to generating scholarly work, I continue to publish poetry, fiction and nonfiction. My first poetry collection, “Mother Want,” was published spring 2021, and a second poetry collection, “Skin. Hair. Bones.,” will be published later this summer.

I continue my role as chair of the university’s Scholars Week Planning Committee, working collaboratively with students, faculty and staff from all of Western’s colleges and programs to feature the best of Western students’ creative and scholarly works.

Despite our distance and isolation due to the pandemic, I delight in seeing evidence of our talented alumni online, working diligently to communicate the critical information, remarkable stories and important events of our ever-changing times. Keep up the good work.
Winter 2021 Update

Hello to all our wonderful alumni, working remote from home, or masked-up onsite, or awaiting the job market to re-open with opportunity to put expert skills to good use. I’m guessing this is not the future you imagined for yourselves when you applied to be a journalism major. Seeing my students in Brady Bunch boxes on my computer screen – many of whom are engaging with classes from their childhood bedrooms — is not what I imagined for myself (or for them) when I signed up to teach, yet we soldier on, despite our failing internet connections and clumsy adaptation to our lives in 2-D.

In the midst of this transition to a new way of teaching, I’ve been serving as WWU’s Scholars Week Committee chair. It’s rewarding to be able to offer Western students a venue to feature their best work. This spring, the event will be held online, due to the pandemic, for the second year in a row. I’ve also had the luxury of a sabbatical this fall, meaning I was able to engage in an ever-expanding research project to study how stories of cancer “survivors” are used to promote leading cancer care centers in the United States. I’ll be presenting my findings at an international health communications conference this summer. I’ve been granted another sabbatical next fall to further develop my initial research. In addition to my scholarly work, I continue to publish poetry, fiction and nonfiction. Most recently, I’ve had a book of poetry accepted for publication, which should be released later this summer.

I look forward to returning to campus, post sabbatical, January of next year. At present, I continue to be impressed that, even with the sadness of our circumstances — some of my students having experienced the pandemic’s worst effects, illness and/or loss of loved ones — students arrive (read: log on) in earnest, ready to engage with what I put before them. This lifts me up and inspires me to be a better professor, whether in 2-D, or 3-D or some future reality, virtual or otherwise.
Winter 2020 Update

As some of you know, I’ve been dealing with health issues, namely cancer. At this writing (November 2019), I’m on medical leave from teaching. But, by the time you read this I should — fingers crossed — be back at it, in front of the classroom, doing what I enjoy most. Fifteen months ago, I was diagnosed with breast cancer, but I caught it relatively early, which will give me a better chance of avoiding a second cancer, for which I’m at increased risk. Likely, all of you reading this have been negatively impacted by cancer in some way, whether it be an illness you’ve contended with personally, or something experienced by a family member or friend, and, for that, I’m truly sorry. It’s unfortunately become all too common.

While I don’t like to use the word “lucky” in any way related to a cancer diagnosis, I will say that I was fortunate to catch it early. I found my cancer due to a conversation I had with the mother of a former student, a woman who is surviving breast cancer herself. It’s because of her willingness to talk about her cancer that I decided to write about it here. Had she not shared her experience, and the fact that she detected her cancer through a self-exam, I may not have found mine, which would have resulted in a far more serious health crisis. So, consider this my Public Service Announcement, encouraging both self-exams and mammograms for early detection.

Speaking of receiving help, I thank our alumni for the continued support many still lend to The Western Front editors and reporters. Your attention to the Front, upon which you cut your journalistic teeth, remains crucial to our current students. Last academic year was particularly challenging, as the staff faced intimidation and attempts to influence coverage while reporting upon a racial issue being addressed by Faculty Senate. It was appalling to me, but unfortunately not unusual in the world of journalism, especially in the context of today’s anti-journalism, enemy-of-the-people rhetoric. The Western Front editors and reporters involved addressed the situation maturely, thoughtfully and ethically. They spoke truth to power, exercising the critical role of journalists to help maintain a free and democratic society. I encourage you to read The Western Front Op-ed of May 29, 2019, “Intimidated In the Pursuit of Truth,” if you haven’t already done so. Print it out, frame it, and remember the legacy you helped build is still run by students realizing their role in upholding the tenants of democracy while trying to pass a class that hinges on getting reluctant sources to call them back.
Winter 2019 Update

Since last year’s newsletter update, I’ve accepted a position as Chair of the Scholars Week Committee for WWU, working with Vice Provost Stephen Vanderstaay and Vice Provost of Research and Graduate School Dean Guatam Pillay to help administer the yearly campus event, as well as generate more participation and interest in works of student scholarship across campus. In other words, it’s a terrific opportunity to show my support of students’ academic pursuits, exercise my PR prowess and utilize my administrative skills. Unfortunately, I’ve been dealing with some unanticipated health issues that have kept me from working fall and winter quarter this year, but I intend to launch into my role directly upon my return this spring.

On the scholarship front, I was pleased to partner with my partner (see what I did there?), Senior Instructor Stephen Howie, to publish “Public Relations Videography: A Classroom Case Study in the Production and Dissemination of Digital Content” in The Journal of Communication and Media Studies. The department added the Video PR course to the regular academic schedule this year, but I was unable to teach it due to my medical leave. I hope to be able to offer the course next year, as students are enthusiastic and there is continued interest. In all my classes, I continue to challenge my students, and myself, by incorporating new technologies both for creating and sharing stories on multiple media platforms.

If you are on campus this spring, be sure to stop by. I’m always interested in hearing about your post-baccalaureate life and reminiscing about your student days as one of our #jkids (insert heart emoji here).
Winter 2018 Update

Winter quarter 2016 through fall quarter 2017 was another action-packed academic year. For starters, I was granted tenure—woot, woot!—which brought with it a change of title, from assistant professor to associate professor. This means I get to stick around for a few more years, and I’m happy to do so.

During winter quarter 2017, I worked with WWU’s Campus Equity and Inclusion Forum to stage a revised and updated version of “First Person: Diverse Stories,” with a script derived from interviews with WWU students. I was honored to have WWU President Randhawa call upon the campus to attend the play as an opportunity to learn more about the experiences of the diverse students that Western serves.

I’ve continued to teach Intro. to Mass Media and Advanced PR Writing and Techniques.

This summer session 2017, I was able to offer a new course of my own design, PR Videography, which filled almost instantly. I was joined by Senior Instructor Stephen Howie to teach a fantastic class of highly motivated, skilled and creative students in a six-week session. The results of their efforts can be found on the course Instagram and Vimeo sites. In November, Instructor Howie and I presented on the topic of teaching PR Videography at the Second International Conference on Communication & Media Studies held in Vancouver, B.C. Our presentation was based, in part, on student responses to a survey I conducted related to production and content choices made based on platforms. We’re hoping that our paper, “Mapping Pedagogy and Praxis in the Production of Public Relations Videography: A Classroom Case Study in the Production and Dissemination of Digital Content” will be published in the coming year.

I’ve also been actively writing and submitting poetry and fiction, which has resulted in seven publications of poetry, fiction, and flash fiction in national and international journals within the past year. When invited, I participate in readings of my work. In October, I read at The Public Pool, a venue in Hamtramck, Michigan, supported, in part, by the Knight Foundation.

Of course, the most rewarding element of my job is teaching #jkids, which I consider an honor and a privilege. This year, Howie and I are looking forward to attending spring graduation together to witness and support a fresh batch of graduates as they make their way into the world, from students to professionals. I especially like to see graduates as visitors. I still keep a bowl of candy on my desk, newly refilled, for just such occasions.

Carolyn Nielsen

Carolyn Nielsen, PhD

Professor

Dr. Carolyn Nielsen Updates

Spring 2024 Update

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
Winter 2022 Update

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.
Winter 2021 Update

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!
Winter 2020 Update

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.
Winter 2019 Update

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.
Winter 2018 Update

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.

Betsy O'Donovan

Betsy O'Donovan, MPhil

Associate Professor

Betsy O’Donovan Updates

Winter 2025 Update

Last September, I had a cool opportunity that also delivered a sharp, difficult and important journalism lesson, so I’d like to tell you about both.

Misinformation has become an existential threat to human health and societies; I doubt I need to go into detail to persuade any of our alumni on that point. Climate misinformation is particularly entrenched, and the communities that are most affected by climate change tend to be the same communities that have a hard time getting a hearing from American news audiences.

So, I was excited to go to Tonga — a multi-island monarchy in the South Pacific with a population roughly the size of Bellingham — to run a workshop about how to tell climate stories and address climate misinformation with young leaders from around the South Pacific. Among others, I was joined by Jeff Shaw, the Planet’s adviser (and my favorite person), WWU alumnus Rhys Logan, and friend-of-the-WWU-journalism-program Laura Wides-Muñoz, who’s a standards and practices editor at NBC News in Washington, D.C. We spent months selecting participants and planning the workshop with community organizers in Nuku’alofa, the capital of Tonga. Planning a good, useful workshop is a fun challenge, but it was a familiar one.

One of the reasons I was particularly excited about this workshop is that I knew I had some things to learn, too. I wanted to hear about (and, ideally, see) the process of talanoa, a process of inclusive dialogue that’s used to resolve community problems. It has a lot in common with engagement journalism, which is one of my primary interests, and the way that journalists can become more effective and build more trust by listening to the everyday people in their communities.

But we missed a step in our communication. Somehow, in all of those planning conversations where we talked about talanoa, we missed a key aspect of cultural competency, which has to do with how a roomful of people introduce themselves to one another in Tonga and around the Pacific. Although we built in space for conversations around culture, and for people to introduce themselves in small groups, we hadn’t built time into our schedule to allow each of the people in the space to individually introduce themselves to the whole group and talk about their work and personal purpose as we formed the group. It wasn’t a disaster by any stretch of the imagination, but it meant that the people who’d traveled days to get their (flights in the Pacific can be tricky) didn’t have the information and mental map of the room that they needed in order to do their best work. It was a significant enough problem that we tore up our schedule to address it as soon as we realized how it was affecting the workshop.

And that’s the first journalism lesson here: Those of us who seek connections beyond our “home” communities and cultures are going to miss things. It’s a huge part of the argument for diversifying journalism’s workforce in the first place. And it can be uncomfortable, embarrassing, and a little stressful to be confronted by your own ignorance and have to correct it in real time, which can be a near-daily experience when you’re working to get to know an unfamiliar culture or community.

The second journalism lesson here is that discomfort, embarrassment and stress are not as important as the work we’re trying to do. The workshop’s participants were generous with their insight, and gracious with our misstep and its effects on our schedule and plans. Now, we all know a lot more about how their communities organize and work with information. They, I hope, have more tools to apply to their work in persuading the rest of the world to listen and learn from their experiences of climate change, and to help their communities sort fact from propaganda.

We’re going to need more solidarity, more cultural fluency, and more journalism as we confront the novel challenges ahead of us. Fortunately, journalism’s standard problem-solving techniques are incredibly effective: get curious, be humble about what you know, and never stop asking questions.

I hope the past year has been kind to you. If you need anything, you know where to find me and I hope you will.
Spring 2024 Update

As I write this, I’m transitioning from one remarkable journey with students to another. And, since both experiences highlight our program’s growth and how much we’ve benefitted from our alumni’s support, I’d like to tell you about them.

This year marked Western’s first invitation to the Christopher J. Georges Conference on College Journalism, hosted by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. The conference welcomed us as one of just two West Coast programs, alongside Stanford University (which, vexingly, took the “farthest travel to conference” bragging rights by a single mile).

You can learn more about the insights Franny Vollert and Oren Roberts brought back from the conference [story coming soon], or check out the conference sessions and, eventually, videos, at Nieman’s website. (While you’re there, check out and consider applying for their midcareer fellowships, which are an amazing opportunity and have produced two of Western’s journalism faculty.)

Our weekend in Cambridge and Boston was filled with exploration and deep conversations – including a helpful check-in with Charlie Sennott, the founder of Report for America, about opportunities for our recent graduates.

In April, Franny, Mia Limmer-Lai, Mars Wetzbarger, and Milo Whitman represented Western at the Seattle Times’ inaugural Best of the Northwest Symposium. The Times, as a new way to spot developing talent in our region, invited just seven journalism programs to bring some of our strongest second- and third-year news-editorial and visual journalism majors. Our crew spent two days going out on assignments, having their portfolios reviewed, and participating in skills workshops led by Times journalists.

I’m proud of how seriously Western journalism students take these opportunities – and how they bring back their experiences to enhance our entire program. That’s the kind of collaboration and horizontal loyalty that make a profound difference in the long-term success of our alumni.

Our industry, like many that are built around trust and personal integrity, depends on relationships.

That’s why I’m so grateful to alumni like Kaleigh Carroll, who supported Western’s participation at the Times (and recently used her sharp pen to tidy up our department’s “AP Style Essentials” document); and to Nate Sanford, who made it a point to text about a new opening at the Inlander so that faculty could reach out to our early career alumni; and to Kiana Doyle, who continues to advise and encourage students pursuing a Dow Jones News Fund internship; and to Audra Anderson, Connor Benintendi and Hailey Hoffman, whose kindness to interns at the Cascadia Daily News comes back to us in stories about reporting adventures.

The ways our alumni invest in the future of journalism leaves me inspired and hopeful. I hope you feel the same way.

As for personal things: I’m very happy to have been promoted to associate professor with tenure this year and will be embarking on a project in Tonga and Pasifika this September to explore stories about climate change, thanks to a U.S. State Department grant. I have no doubt that other adventures are on the horizon.

But every good journey concludes with a warm homecoming, and I treasure the moments when Jeff and I walk our hounds and reflect on everything I’ve experienced and shared, and how those things change (or challenge) me as a scholar, a teacher and a journalist.

Stay in touch. Send news. You know we love it.

Betsy
Winter 2022 Update

I salute you, WWU Journalism Department community, from the end of my first week of teaching on campus since March 2020. This is the week in which I discovered that I’ve forgotten how to commute; dug so far in the back of my closet that I had equal odds of finding Narnia or my professional wardrobe; and been entirely, utterly, perfectly delighted to discover how tall all of my students are as we finally gathered in person. (It turns out that guesses about height based on Zoom are unreliable and that teaching while wearing an N95 mask is not as inaudible and sweaty as I feared.)

This year marks another significant milestone: The students who began their journey in the journalism department when I first arrived at Western in 2018 are launching into their professional careers. I’m not sure that there’s anything as joyful as seeing their hard work begin to pay off in first jobs, new mentors, and creative, meaningful work. Can this also serve as a reminder to you that alumni mentorship can make a profound difference? The interest, advice and advocacy of alumni have all played a role in this generation of students’ success. To those of you who have offered help, thank you. To those of you who haven’t had the opportunity, let me invite and encourage you. It’s fun. It’s important, too.

But many of our students haven’t waited for graduation to test their skills. Winter 2021 Front Editor-in-Chief Izzie Lund and Managing Editor Kaleigh Carroll pitched (and published) a guide for writing protest coverage policies in Poynter. Two-term Front EIC Nate Sanford has earned bylines from Crosscut and The Inlander (where he’ll be working as a staff writer after graduation). These opportunities are good for students, obviously, but I’ve also been working with editors at national publications, including The Washington Post, who are eager for student voices as they try to diversify their coverage, include new voices, and spot rising talent. If your newsroom is working on the same goals, I’d love to hear about it so I can direct high-quality student pitches your way. (I should add: Being in academia hasn’t made me forget how busy newsrooms are, so please don’t worry that offering to field student journalists’ pitches will open the floodgates. Part of the value of our work here is in preparing young journalists to pitch wisely and well, to be ready for revision or rejection, and to treat time and attention as the precious resources that they are.)

As for me? After two busy, wonderful years teaching and advising The Front, I got to work with longtime Bellingham Herald reporter Kie Relyea as she stepped into that role. I am excited to see how The Front continues to evolve with her leadership and skills. Although I miss the buzz and frenzy of the newsroom, it’s also amazing to have time to do what I did yesterday: Curl up in my office chair with Wonder Woman slippers and a mug of coffee, working on edits for research in progress, catching up with academic journals that have stacked up for months, and figuring out how to explain what a dangling modifier is to game-but-puzzled editing students.

Let me wrap up on a personal victory: Just before I joined Western’s faculty, I was the executive director at The Daily Tar Heel at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. We had a problem familiar to college newsrooms: UNC refused to disclose the names of people who had been found responsible for sexual assaults on campus. We believed those records were public. The university claimed that they were not. So, in 2016, I cobbled together a coalition of newsrooms that could share the costs, and we sued — with the DTH, the only student newsroom, as the leading plaintiff. Last year, after four years of escalating battles, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear UNC’s appeals, forcing the university to follow the N.C. Supreme Court’s order to release the records. Why is that news that merits a mention in Western’s journalism alumni newsletter? Because I have the same hopes for a suit that three WWU journalism alumni have pursued to resolve the same question here. (You can follow The Front for ongoing coverage — and I hope you will.)

If any of this sounds fun or important to you, or if you’re looking for opportunities to help student journalists on their way, please be in touch: odonove@wwu.edu. And, as ever, thanks for the ways that you support the students who follow you. It makes a difference and means a lot
Winter 2021 Update

Friends, I just ordered 500 adhesive googly eyes for my spring quarter editing class.

I’m running an assignment called “Errors in the Wild,” which requires students to spot tortured English in their daily lives, submit photos of the crime scene, and then explain each problem and how they would fix it.

But, as my fellow word freaks will know, nerdy corners of the internet have a lot of those already — a temptation! — and I want original examples of students bringing their training into their daily lives. Thus we arrive at googly eyes: In order to earn credit for finding their natural prey, the student editors of J309 will have to mark them with a single sticker and snap a photo.

The assignment is one of my answers for how these young journalists and I are finding our way through the pandemic, distance learning, and the struggle to stay connected to our work and each other in editing and at The Front, where I’m wrapping up the second of my two years as adviser. (Please check out spring EIC Izzie Lund’s thoughtful and comprehensive list of all that we’ve accomplished in the past year at The Front in this newsletter. I’m blisteringly proud of these teams and how they’ve handed off big tasks, quarter to quarter, to get important things done.)

In my classrooms and the Front newsroom, the ethos is “We do hard things well” and the rule is “No one struggles or succeeds alone.” I think you all would be impressed with how these young journalists have risen this year, and how they have supported one another in doing smart, hard, thoughtful journalism.

They need support from you, too, so if you have capacity to Zoom into a class, advise someone about internships, hire a new grad, give to our scholarship accounts with the Foundation, or volunteer for the Front’s new advisory board, please be in touch.

I hope you all can stay safe and healthy — and a little joyful, too.
Winter 2020 Update

Writing faculty updates feels (delightfully) like sending a letter used to: I’m writing this long before you’ll read it, and everything will have changed by the time you receive it, from the foliage in the arb (currently October’s bright reds and yellows) to the challenges we’re tackling at The Western Front. That things change so quickly is one of the great charms of working in journalism, higher education, and at Western, in particular.

As I step into my second year on faculty, it’s with the pleasure of working closely with the student journalists at the Front, as their instructor and adviser. Much of the past year has been occupied with imagining and implementing new structures and opportunities for students in the newsroom. We’ve gotten a lot done already, thanks to lots of consultation with former editors, interested faculty (current and emeritus), and particularly Carolyn Nielsen (who chairs the Student Publications Council) and Jack Keith (who made the transition infinitely easier). What does that look like? If you pop into the Front these days, you’ll find student reporters working in beat teams and filing stories every day of the week so we can keep pushing a digital-first strategy. Student editors are tackling significant projects, from revamping our hiring guidelines and job descriptions to rethinking our photo archiving system to creating a consistent design guide for digital and print presentations. We’ve revised how and when our work gets done, changed the way we assess student development, and taken up the challenge of making sure students who pass through this gateway class for the major are well-prepared for all that follows.

I’m especially proud of our student editors: In addition to the regular work of getting the news to the community, they’re also doing special training in newsroom coaching and team management — and the early results are good.

As for the other half of the job: I just closed a magazine feature for Publisher’s Weekly about historical research and romance novels, and used my first-year summer research grant to dive into questions about how Hearken’s community-first approach to reporting is shifting the nature of the news, and their audiences’ relationship to journalists and journalism. I’m also just starting to shape a project that connects the Army War College’s research into military unit cohesion with models for developing high-performing teams of journalists. This summer, I was accepted into the second cohort of Solutions Journalism Academy fellows at the University of Oregon (an experience and approach to reporting that I highly recommend),

Basically, I’ve had an interesting, challenging and beautiful year — and I hope the same is true for you.
Winter 2019 Update

How has this school year been? Let’s take this exact moment as a sample: Here I sit in JFK’s terminal 8, revising a forthcoming article about metrics for The American Press Institute, fresh off of a meeting about newsletter and audience strategy at StoryCorps, with a half-marked-up copy of The Western Front in my bag, a list of students’ investigative story ideas at my elbow, and a half-plotted journalism department hackathon open in another tab on my browser.

And, full disclosure, I’m setting a rotten example: This blurb was due yesterday. (You might want to mark me down a full letter grade for that. I would.)

In sum, my first four months at Western have been lively, demanding and outrageously fun — not unlike our students, come to think of it.

That part is no surprise; I came to Bellingham from The Daily Tar Heel at the University of North Carolina, after a busy few years juggling journalism practice with life on campus (adjuncting at Northeastern and Harvard in Boston, earning a master’s in writing at Trinity College Dublin). I’m looking forward to bringing that practice (20 years’ worth now) to our students as they explore feature writing, new forms and platforms, and develop the crucial, durable qualities of curiosity, skepticism and hunger for growth.

As I find my way at Western, I’d like to hear about your growth, your practices of journalism and storytelling, and how your time here has influenced your careers. Please be in touch!

Peggy Watt

Peggy Watt, MLA

Associate Professor

Peggy Watt Updates

Spring 2024 Update

It’s been a busy time, but with lots of fun, challenging and thought-provoking activities!

My academic year started with an opportunity to explore campus free speech issues as a fellow with the National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement at the University of California. Twenty-five fellows from the U.S. and Canada met to discuss “Advancing the Mission of Higher Education in a Polarized Environment.” I met lots of interesting, creative First Amendment warriors and made wonderful contacts for my classes and scholarship.

I continue to advise Western’s SPJ chapter, which has been very active this year. They’re a bit modest in their report – They’ve had many interesting program meetings, dealing with a range of relevant issues, including local politics, inclusive writing, public records cases and professional development. Three officers attended the national conference in Las Vegas in fall 2023 and some of the speakers who Zoomed into meetings were people they’d met at the conference, such as Joshua Johnson, former NPR host and creator of “Night Light” podcast. Officers organized several tours of local media (often hosted by Western alumni). Many more Western SPJ members went to the Region X conference in Seattle. They hosted a visit from former WWU SPJ Chapter president David Cuillier, who was back on campus to receive an alumni achievement award from the Foundation for WWU & Alumni.

Western students and alumni helped out at the Washington Coalition for Open Government annual Sunshine Breakfast in March 2024 and got a behind-the-scenes tour of T-Mobile Park. Attending: Bella Neff, Sam Kristofferson, Peggy Watt, Desiree Erdmann, Maylis Laverne.

I’m back to advising Klipsun during the academic year, after Joan Connell’s retirement. It’s been great working with creative, motivated editors and writers. One of my favorite sidelights is doing “guerilla distribution” for Klipsun. I keep a couple of issues with me and leave them on ferries, at medical offices (with permission), at bus stops and other random places. My favorites were giving one to a fellow airline passenger and to an author at a book signing. I’m proud of the work the Klipsun staff does and want to share their work.

I’m still on the board of the Washington Coalition for Open Government, which is stepping up its alerts of challenges to Washington’s previously robust access laws. We produced a comprehensive update: Your Right to Know, a special report on the erosion of public access to government information in Washington state, published in February 2024. Journalists and open government advocates should check it out. Last spring, WashCOG gave me the James Andersen Award for my work with the Coalition (but there’s still plenty to do!).

It gives me great joy to hear from Western alumni and learn the paths they have taken. This year, I appreciated visits from several alumni; we had lunch and caught up! Our alumni are using their journalism skills in a wide variety of pursuits and (sometimes) publications. Former Klipsun EIC Paolo Mottola shared his experience and insights with the Klipsun writers, telling how he puts his reporting and storytelling skills to work as a VP at REI.

It’s great to have a plan, but always watch for unexpected opportunities! Tech publications – heck, the tech beat – barely existed when I was studying at Western, but that specialty provided wonderful opportunities for the bulk of my journalism career. It’s so rewarding to see what our alumni are exploring.

Western’s SPJ officers talked with high school journalists at the Washington Journalism Education Association in spring 2024: Julia Hawkins, Sophie Cadran, Jack Glenn, Peggy Watt.
Winter 2023 Update

It’s been a busy year. We’re glad to be back on campus and having activities and meetings in person – but Zoom has also proved handy for remote participation. We’ve welcomed a number of alumni back to campus – in person or virtually – to talk with classes.

Former Klipsun EICs Ciara O’Rourke and Paolo Mottola met in person with Klipsun staffers last summer. Ciara is a freelancer and a regular contributor to such news organizations as PolitiFact and Texas Tribune. Paolo is director of studios and media for REI Co-op. Joining us virtually was Shelby Rowe Moyer, an editor with Nei-Turner Media Group in Wisconsin.

We welcomed some non-journalist guests, too; a surprise one was Bellingham Mayor Seth Fleetwood, who came to the JOUR 307 Reporting class last spring to see students’ Public Records project presentations. We’d covered him at City Council meetings all quarter, but those were still virtual – so it was nice that he visited in person (even though the students didn’t know he was joining us!).

I was awarded academic leave for fall 2022 to focus on an ongoing research project studying journalists who enter public office. This builds on a research assignment I did as a Western undergrad (OK, in senior seminar!) and involved interviews with journalists-turned-politicians and examination of changes to the professional ethics policy of the Society of Professional Journalists.

After taking advantage of the ease of attending conferences virtually, I finally attended one in person, flying to Washington, D.C. in October 2022 to attend the Society of Professional Journalists’ MediaFest. Two officers of Western’s SPJ Student Chapter, Jacob O’Donnell and Joshua Solorzano, also attended and we had a great time at the conference and sightseeing. The chapter picked up a regional award for their outstanding programs.

Peggy Watt (center) stands between two Western SPJ Chapter members, Jacob O’Donnell (left) and Joshua Solorzano at MediaFest in Washington, DC. // Courtesy of Peggy Watt

I continue to volunteer with the Washington Coalition for Open Government, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization focused on promoting government transparency through educational programs and the occasional amicus brief or lawsuit – which also relates to the Mass Media Law class. I help with communications and maintain the WashCOG website. At an Open Government Town Hall conference last fall, alumni Asia Fields and Erasmus Baxter shared their public records tips.

The other journalism students I regularly meet are still in high school, because I volunteer with the Washington Journalism Education Association. After a couple years of virtual conferences, we’re back doing in-person workshops. I give tips on “A high school journalist’s guide to legal snooping” with information about the Public Records Act and Open Public Meetings Act. I also help judge their contests; WJEA always lets me set up a table of materials about Western and its Department of Journalism, so maybe we’ll see some of them in Bellingham soon as future alumni.
Winter 2022 Update
Winter 2021 Update
Winter 2020 Update
Winter 2019 Update
Winter 2018 Update

Sheila Webb

Sheila Webb, PhD

Professor

Dr. Sheila Webb Updates

Winter 2022 Update

The 2021-2022 academic year found us re-emerging into face-to-face classes, which I know all appreciated. After being remote, we then adjusted to hybrid, and are now in person for the most part. One aspect of pivoting the way we had to was an in-depth dip into the pedagogy of teaching online. With the expectation of even more moves to such modalities. WWU provides an invaluable resource in Western Online. As part of their offerings, a faculty mentoring program began Fall of 2022. I am pleased to have been named one of two faculty members dedicated to assisting faculty develop curricular offerings that leverage that environment.In addition to our regular offerings, it’s always a treat to teach the Design + Photo Viking Launch class. This year, we were back on campus and it was a pleasure to introduce the incoming first years to the class as well as to campus.On a personal note, my older daughter Claire’s graduation from MIT had been delayed due to Covid, so in May we traveled to Cambridge to see her get hooded in her Ph.D. regalia. We left from Boston straight for Paris, where I had lived for a year and where my younger daughter Elana had spent a summer. Thanks to Prof. Carolyn Nielsen’s recommendation, we booked an apartment on Île Saint-Louis, a quiet oasis mere feet from Notre Dame. As one does, we walked everywhere, averaging 20,000 steps each day.Inspired by Profs. Keller, Bowe, and Nielsen, who all have taken advantage of WWU’s program which offers faculty the opportunity to take classes, I took several advanced French classes to reinvigorate my skills and to get the chance to converse in French. One memorable quarter on French language and culture was focused on the French elections, which was a stimulating outing for all.
Winter 2021 Update

Last year presented unique challenges for students, faculty, and staff. Faculty had to adopt classes to a remote format, and all in all, my experience was mostly positive. I am grateful I had taken the workshop on remote teaching that the Center for Instructional Innovative and Assessment offered right before March! I missed being able to engage with students face to face especially in the lab in the production classes, for example, the Magazine Design and Production class in the summer, but students were appreciative that the class was still offered and produced great projects. In a related activity, in my role as Chair of the Academic Coordinating Commission, I served on the WWU Covid Incident Response Team from the academic side, and was able to represent faculty and curricular issues as WWU dealt with all of the emerging concerns that Covid presented. I continued my national service in my role as Chair of the AEJMC History Division Covert Award Committee, which reviews and then gives an award to the best article published in a given year. My research continues to be engaged in the intersection of periodicals and American cultural and social life, especially as it involves gender. My chapter “Curating Community: Reiman Publications 1970-2007 — A Model of Reader-Submitted Content” in the book Curating Culture: How 20th Century Magazines Influence America is in press at Rowman & Littlefield.
Winter 2020 Update

Last year offered wonderful opportunities, including a trip to Paris. I continue to enjoy teaching ethics, research methods and theories, magazine design and production, editing and design, and history. I enjoyed partnering with Brian Bowe to collaborate in providing an innovative approach to our Senior Seminar class, and am doubly gratified that we received a teaching award from AEJMC’s Mass Communication & Society Division for the project. For some time, I have been interested in internationalizing the curriculum, and as part of that, do a survey in my ethics class on the possibility of global ethics. It is this survey that I presented at the 5th World Journalism Education Congress in Paris. After the conference, I was privileged to be able to spend the following week there with my older daughter Claire. I lived in Paris for a year as a graduate student, and it’s always intriguing to see both changes and continuities. Especially moving was walking through the Tuileries Gardens to arrive at Shakespeare and Co. and to see the wounded Notre Dame across the Seine. One of my sabbatical projects, “The Delphian Society and Its Publications: A Historical and Cultural Analysis of a Primer for Middle-Class Women’s Education,” was published in Journalism History. This continues my engagement in the intersection of periodicals and social activism, especially as it involves gender. My service work primarily focused on my role as ACC Chair. Among those many duties is curriculum proposals. Last year, we approved 800! ACC also worked last year to respond to student concerns about equity and justice in the curriculum. ACC has charged the Committee on Undergraduate Education to examine the curriculum with that focus in mind and to make recommendations.
Winter 2019 Update

This past year was punctuated by medical leave in the spring for foot surgery. I would love to share a photo of me that a student snapped while I was rolling across campus on my scooter, but another time. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to get the surgery and for the support of the department.

I have become Chair of WWU’s Academic Coordinating Commission, which reviews curricular proposals. This committee is an integral part of faculty governance on campus. Last year, we approved over 600 proposals. Another service activity that is very meaningful to me is serving on the Student Publications Council. It is always an interesting process to interview and then hire the editors for all of the student publications. Their answers to our questions in the interview process reveal a sophisticated and considered approach toward the responsibilities of being a student editor.

I always enjoy participating in the AEJMC annual conference. This year it was in Washington, D.C., so that provided the opportunity to tuck in a visit or two to some national landmarks. I was especially taken with the official portraits of Michelle and Barak Obama at the National Gallery. Seeing these was a new museum experience, as people lined up behind a rope waiting their turn to take a selfie with the former president (or at least his image).

We continue to extend our curriculum. For example, the history class in the summer is done online. To engage the class, students participate in a robust discussion section on all of the readings. They also “hire” a dream team of important practitioners throughout eras from the Colonial Period to today. This allows them to go beyond a simple bio approach to propose a team that might, for example, cover the immigration debate or global warming. I continue to regularly teach Senior Seminar and Ethics. I redid the case examples to deal with the rush of new challenges the media face in the given political climate. I was pleased to see students grapple with coverage of burning issues, for example, an ethics audit of the coverage of the MeToo and Time’s Up movements.
Winter 2018 Update

This past year I was pleased to teach our mass media history class in the summer quarter. This innovative class, taught entirely online, leverages both the benefits and challenges of digital media to engage students and to create community among the participants. I also taught our, now permanent, Publications: Design & Production class. This class had generated such interest, we are now offering it during the regular year.

I was honored to receive the Covert Award for my monograph “Creating Life Magazine — ‘America’s Most Potent Editorial Force.’” This award is presented by the History Division of AEJMC to the author of the best mass communication history article or chapter in an edited collection published the previous year, nationwide.

I also continued my work on photography in “Radical Portrayals: Photojournalist Dickey Chapelle on the Front Lines in Algeria and Cuba,” published in American Periodicals. Another thread of my research is women’s publications and visuals surrounding suffrage, and I presented “The Spectacle of Suffrage: Visual & Cultural Representations of Suffragists in Popular Magazines,” at the AEJMC/AJHA Joint Journalism and Communication History Conference, New York City, March 2017.

My new service activities include becoming co-chair of the Academic Coordinating Committee. This committee serves a vital function in faculty governance, as it reviews all proposed new classes as well as broader curricular issues. I am also now serving on the Post Tenure Review Committee, which evaluates faculty contributions after receiving tenure, another important aspect in faculty governance.

Adjunct Faculty Updates

Instructor, The Front Advisor

Kie Relyea

Instructor, The Front Advisor

Kie Relyea Updates

Winter 2023 Update

I like to tell students that journalism is about relationships between journalists and the people we ask to trust us with their stories. I say this when I teach newswriting and when I teach The Front. It’s the one thing I hope they remember from the brief time I have with them.

As I enter my second winter as Front adviser — and after a week of meeting with students one-on-one to discuss their work at the halfway point of the quarter — I realize that the relationships I build now are with student reporters and editors at the start of their journey. They tell me The Front is stressful. They say it’s hard. Some say it pushes them outside their comfort zone.

But they also say they are proud of themselves, that they feel their confidence growing, that they enjoy interviewing people they might have never met otherwise.

When you’ve been a reporter and sometime editor in the newspaper industry for 30 years, as I was, it can be hard to step away.

But I continue to do so, knowing that a new generation of Front reporters and editors are ready to build their own relationships with the community they cover.
Winter 2022 Update

This is my first winter teaching full time at Western, having taken over the role of adviser to The Front from professor Betsy O’Donovan.

After 30 years as a reporter and sometime editor in the newspaper industry — nearly 23 of them at The Bellingham Herald — I left in June for a chance at a new career. I’ve taught newswriting at Western off and on over the years, but this was a big step for me to take away from familiar rhythms.

I’m learning the difference between knowing something and teaching it. My new colleagues and the student journalists at The Front are helping me find my way. I appreciate their help and grace every day as I seek new footing.

It’s hard work.

But it’s fun work to see students collaborating with each other, to see their growth, and to see their “aha” moments when what they’re learning clicks into place for them — all this as the pandemic rolls along and we wonder what’s next after omicron.

So, I do what I’ve always done. Shake off my worries and do what I can, this time while helping a new generation of student journalists do the work of informing their community.

Instructor

Jeff Shaw

Instructor

Jeff Shaw Updates

Winter 2025 Update

Do y’all listen to Of Montreal?

Let me assume you don’t, so I can give a little exposition, and those of you that do can feel hip and edgy. They’re an indie pop band with a theatrical bent, and they just released their 16th album. This track is the soundtrack to this faculty update: I’ve timed the word count so that the tune should be ending just as the average reader completes the listen. We’ll get back to it at the end.

The update is coming in late because of the critical question: Where to begin? The changes over the past year feel seismic. It’s a lot. I know you feel it, too. So let’s just dive right in.

I’m teaching J207 (Newswriting) and advising the Planet (ENVS413) this term. If you’re interested in environmental journalism, feature writing, or multimedia production, you might want to sign up for that next term. We have a great time.

Also great times: I returned to the South Pacific this year when Prof. O’Donovan and I, along with colleagues, went to Tonga to run a workshop about how to tell climate stories and address climate misinformation with young leaders from around the South Pacific. Okinawa and Palau are two of my favorite places in the world, so spending time in the region is always a plus, and Tonga – a multi-island monarchy — is a unique, spectacular place. Whenever I’m looking for inspiration, next generation indigenous leaders from around the world generally supply what I need. These folks did. We should put them in charge.

Leaders from more than a dozen pacific island nations, representatives from the U.S. State Department and NBC News joined WWU faculty at the Young Pacific Leaders conference in Tonga last year. // Photo by Jeff Shaw

I’m working on other grant projects as well, applying to take a small team to Nigeria to do workshops combating gender-based violence, and potentially taking a a few students on a reporting exchange trip to Singapore. Stay tuned.

Some colleagues and I will also be 7th World Journalism Education Congress Heads to San Francisco August 8-10, 2025. I’m hoping to present a paper there on media representations of jiu-jitsu around the turn of the last century. There’s a lot to unpack in the way this art was represented by newspapers at the time: The Seattle Star ran a series of five front-page cartoons just about this, and there are lots of race, class and gender elements that still resonate to this day.

I’ll also be teaching an Honors Seminar this coming winter quarter: It’s about the history and evolution of martial arts, and how fight culture is shaped by social forces. The way a culture fights is closely entwined with its historical and political context, as well as the identities and social roles of its practitioners. What do the battlefields of Sekigahara at the dawn of 17th century have in common with St. Andrew’s Hall in Glasgow in 1914, or the Berlin Olympics on the cusp of the Second World War? At each of these places, watershed historical events transformed entire societies – a conflict that brought Japan out of feudalism, a movement that helped British women win suffrage, a sporting event that staged the battle lines against fascism – and the martial arts played a critical role each time. Check out this cartoon from “Punch,” a British publication:

The history of modern martial arts, from 1600 to the present, examines intersectional identities, how cultural exchange occurs and the purpose the fighting arts play in societies. We’ve come a long way from samurai fighting a pivotal civil war to everyday people training for fitness, sport and recreation, while watching the Ultimate Fighting Championship for entertainment.

One example: the martial art we now call Brazilian jiu-jitsu emerged from Japan, played a pivotal role in the British struggle for universal voting rights, and flourished in Cuba’s fighting scene – all before captivating an Emirati sheik who built his nation’s physical education program around it, and finally coming to America, where it birthed the billion-dollar industry called mixed martial arts. Students will examine the dispersal of jiu-jitsu, judo and other arts throughout the world and see how those arts interacted with the economics, politics, norms, and existing martial culture of the places they landed. Among the questions this class will tackle: Where around the world did the Japanese diaspora take their martial arts? This question will take us to the United Kingdom at the dawn of the 20th century, pre-revolution Cuba, Brazil, the United Arab Emirates and throughout the United States of America. This class explores that history via text and performance. It’s called “This is Why We Fight.”

So: Why do we fight?

These are fierce and often cruel times. I don’t need to tell you that. But this work – all work – is about people. About making lives better. About understanding that there will always be setbacks, but the good folks win in the end. If we haven’t won yet … it just means it’s not the end. Which brings us back to Of Montreal. If I’ve timed this right, you’re right at the end, and there’s this refrain:

But don’t lose hope, no, no no no no
Don’t feel sad,
‘Cause it’s a violent world.
But there’s still beauty:
I’ll take care of you if you take care of me.

Here’s a Bellingham sunrise from this morning. It reminds me that there lots in this world worth fighting for – and so do those young Pacific leaders, and so do y’all. We’ll get there.

Taking in the beautiful morning sunrise from the Columbia neighborhood of Bellingham on Feb. 27, 2025. // Photo by Jeff Shaw
Spring 2024 Update

There’s a great poem by Naomi Shihab Nye called “Famous” that I always think of when people are interested in my work. Here’s an excerpt:

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,
but because it never forgot what it could do.

Before coming to Western, I worked extensively in environmental justice and climate justice communications, and I’m pleased to report that this work continues. I’m working with Prof. Betsy O’Donovan from the journalism department, Prof. David Sattler from the psychology department and other colleagues from across the globe on an exciting project in Tonga and Pasifika this September. The Young Pacific Leaders Regional Workshop on Media Literacy and Journalism will bring together 30 young leaders to expand knowledge regarding media literacy, journalism, and pressing issues facing the Pacific region.

I’m thrilled to get the chance to work with these leaders on growing journalism and strategic communication skills on issues including climate change and resilience. Our team will help build capacity in media literacy and journalistic practices and advance regionalism in the Pacific, a place that’s near and dear to my heart.

Another project that’s near and dear to me is Bellingham BJJ, the downtown jiu-jitsu academy where I’m head instructor. This year, we’ve been working with the WWU Judo team to expand our respective skills – and to help raise funds to send some of the judo team members to Japan in order to train at the Kodokan, where judo’s story began.

It continues to be rewarding getting the chance to educate the next generation of journalists, communicators and participants in democracy. My teaching approach emphasizes building a solid foundation of understanding first, and then paying particular attention to whatever animates the specific cohort of students I’m teaching. This term, I’m back teaching JOUR 207 (Newswriting). It’s always fun seeing where people go after that jumping-off point.

I also adapted the six-hour history of judo and jiu-jitsu series I did for YouTube into a class proposal for Western. Hopefully in the next few years, I’ll get to teach the fascinating story of how these martial arts played a pivotal role in the British struggle for women’s suffrage and flourished in Brazil’s no-rules fighting scene – all before captivating an Emirati sheik who built his nation’s physical education program around it, and coming to America, where it birthed the billion-dollar industry called mixed martial arts. The history of jiujitsu, from 1600 to the present, tells a fascinating story about intersectional identities, how cultural exchange occurs, and the purpose that martial arts play in human societies. I also have some planned academic research projects focusing on how information on self-defense martial arts is communicated to the public.

2024 has been great so far. The best is yet to come.
Winter 2023 Update

Hello from the Keflavik airport! It has been a busy season of research, travel, teaching and more. I’m just returning from a trip to Iceland — more on that below — and am excited to get back to teaching Journalism 307 this term.
Along with Prof. Betsy O’Donovan and Prof. Carolyn Nielsen, I was the third author on a paper published in Journalism Practice. The paper is called “Curious Citizens: Whose Voices Are Heard in “People-Powered” Public Media?,” and examines whether a new technology platform is causing more public radio outlets to feature sources with lived experience.
I’ve also been making Monday food runs to pick up nutritious items from the Miracle Food Network for the food pantry in the Journalism department. If you’re facing food insecurity or know someone who is, spread the word.
A poster adveritizing the Toro Cup, a jiujitsu match that will feature Jeff Shaw. The “superfight” will take place in North Carolina this March. // Photo courtesy of Jeff Shaw
Elsewhere at Western, I’m designing a course proposal for the university about the fascinating history of martial arts’ interconnection with geopolitics and personal identity. The martial art we now know as Brazilian jiujitsu emerged from Japan, played a pivotal role in the British struggle for women’s suffrage, and flourished in Brazil’s no-rules fighting scene – all before captivating an Emirati sheik who built his nation’s physical education program around it, and then coming to America, where it birthed the billion-dollar industry called mixed martial arts. The history of jiujitsu, from 1600 to the present, tells a fascinating story about intersectional identities, how cultural exchange occurs, and the purpose martial arts play in societies.
It was jiujitsu that brought me to Iceland. In addition to researching the art’s history, I’ve been teaching and attending seminars around the world. Here in Bellingham, we held a charity event that raised money for the LGBTQ+ outdoor non-profit Queer Nature. In March, I’ll be competing for the first time in three years, at a featured “superfight” event on a charity grappling card in North Carolina called Toro Cup.
The days are packed, but it’s great, as always, to be headed back to Bellingham.
Winter 2022 Update

Jeff Shaw during a 2014 visit to ‘The Burial of St. Lucy’ by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, a painting in Basilica Santa Lucia, Siracusa, Italy. //Photo courtesy of Jeff Shaw
It’s been a busy year, and this term is off to a busy and rewarding start. Teaching JOUR 190 is one my favorite things to do, and as of next week, we’ll return to campus for the first time in quite a while. This class is always inspiring, and I’m looking forward to getting together with people in person. When I’m not teaching at Western, I’m attending to my responsibilities as the Deputy Director of Communications at the national Sierra Club, where I do communications work on the club’s energy campaigns. We work to move America — and the world — beyond coal and other fossil fuels, powering our communities with 100% clean energy.

Teaching is a passion of mine, so I’ve also been teaching 12 Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu classes a week at our space downtown, Bellingham BJJ. Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is a grappling-based martial art that came from Japan to Brazil about 100 years ago. We’ve closed a few times due to the pandemic, and as I write this, we’re closed to wait out the omicron surge. When we’re open, I teach a dozen classes a week. This year when health conditions allowed, we took new competitors to various tournaments — and even won a few superfight events in North Carolina. You would think that teaching communications and journalism would be different than teaching a martial art (and it is!), but the core of the practice is the same: It’s all about conveying information in the most effective ways, so that the information can be recalled when it’s needed most.

Finally, I’m also helping to complete a few research studies with Western colleagues, and when time permits, I’d like to return to my own academic research. Prior to the shutdown, I was designing some studies of podcasts, and hopefully that’s what 2022 will bring — along with a return to good health for our communities and the world.

Instructor

Catherine Skrzypinski, MA

Instructor

Catherine Skrzypinski Updates

Winter 2025 Update

Catherine Skrzypinski pictured at Lafarge Lake in Vancouver, B.C. in January 2025.

While this is a turbulent era in journalism (not to mention around the world), this is not the time to shy away from the stories that could make a difference. I hope my current and former students take that to heart this year.

For the past year, I’ve focused on covering issues that impact people with disabilities in the United States and Canada, along with the 2024 election and its aftermath, for the Salish Current. I’ll be at the Invictus Games in Vancouver and Whistler in February to see and speak with inspiring athletes, and perhaps snag an interview with Prince Harry!

Some of my New Year’s resolutions are to keep up with learning German, finally start learning how to play piano in earnest, and to get back on the bicycle once the weather gets warmer — even if that’s on an e-bike.
Winter 2023 Update

After a two-year hiatus, I’m thrilled to be teaching newswriting again on the Western Washington University campus! I resumed the J207 tradition of having students tour the Western Gallery and write a news story based on the experience. It’s always fun to leave the classroom and be out in the field.
Catherine Skrzypinski soaks up the sun in October 2022 at Taylor Dock in Fairhaven. // Photo by Catherine Skrzypinski
My fall 2022 class wrote about timely events like reproductive rights in Washington state, the housing affordability crisis in Bellingham, and how students really feel about Aramark. I look forward to seeing their contributions to The Front and other WWU publications in the coming years!
During the summer, I reconnected with my mom here in Washington state for the first time since March 2020. She encountered wildfire smoke during her stay. I also went to the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia around my birthday, and was drenched with liquid sunshine.
Outside teaching, I delved into topics like accessibility and work-life balance issues in Canada for the Society for Human Resource Management. One story that generated a lot of buzz around the HR community was one I wrote about how Canada and the United States fight ageism in the workplace.
Spring 2024 Update

I always look forward to the spring quarter, as it reminds me of when I started teaching here at Western — this is now my sixth year here! That means many of you are now my colleagues in the writing world, and I hope you’re all having some success in your burgeoning careers.

I’ve returned to community journalism in 2023 writing for the Salish Current. This has given me the opportunity to collaborate writing and reporting a story with one of my JOUR 207 superstar students, Clifford Heberden, on a story that delved into cross-border cooperation on the second-year anniversary of the Nooksack River flood. With Cliff’s expertise in environmental journalism, it was definitely an instance where the student became the master.

In the past year, I covered the Sikh tradition of service to the community, which has helped pave the way for immigrants in both the United States and Canada to feel at home. I also reported how accessibility advocates on both sides of the border are removing barriers for people with disabilities.

I’ve also spent time in another classroom – I’ve been taking German through Western’s Employee Language Program for the past year to communicate with my spouse’s family in Germany.

Catherine Skrzypinski enjoying the cherry tree blossoms around Vancouver, BC.
Winter 2022 Update

Catherine Skrzypinski in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, during the holidays, December 2021.
// Photo by Catherine Skrzypinski

Two years into the pandemic, I am still teaching newswriting online for WWU and the University of Maryland Global Campus in Canada. I am hoping that we’re turning a corner now, and I’ll be able to return to Bellingham once border crossing restrictions ease.

Besides teaching, I have been writing for the Society for Human Resource Management for the past decade. One of my stories, about how the COVID-19 pandemic has set back working women in Canada, went viral during summer 2021.

I continue to explore Vancouver in a COVID-safe way, including going to immersive experiences featuring the artwork of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Pablo Picasso and Vincent van Gogh.
Winter 2021 Update

I have been teaching newswriting online for WWU and the University of Maryland Global Campus in Canada since March 2020. In the past year, I have explored previously undiscovered trails in the Metro Vancouver area, taken urban hikes around downtown Vancouver, and supported my neighborhood restaurants in Surrey, British Columbia.

When it was safe to travel in British Columbia last summer, I visited Bowen Island and took a road trip on Vancouver Island, checking out totem poles in Duncan, outdoor murals in Chemainus, hiking around the Kinsol Trestle in the Cowichan Valley, and relaxing at the beach in Ladysmith.

Instructor

Scott Terrell

Instructor

Scott Terrell Updates

Winter 2025 Update

Fall 2025 will mark year 14 working as an adjunct professor with the journalism department at Western. In fall 2011, I nervously walked into that first-ever teaching job in CF 202, wondering if I’d be able to clearly present the material for J305. Wondering if the 18 pairs of eyes looking to the front of class would slowly close, their owners drifting off towards thoughts of “get me outta here.” Fortunately for me, the students were engaged and interested, and willing to work. And I’m still here.

This year has been busy. I take multiple trips to Grove City, Pennsylvania, to visit my mother by way of Pittsburgh International. Thanks to a regularly scheduled nonstop flight on Alaska Airlines from SeaTac, it’s not a huge travel issue.

Marilyn in the cab of my pickup truck in August. // Photo by Scott Terrell

My oldest son, Andrew, his wife, Christina, and their daughter, Marilyn (our granddaughter named after my mom), spent the summer at our house in Bow. We celebrated Marilyn’s first birthday together in July. In June, they accompanied my wife and I for a visit to Pennsylvania to celebrate my mother’s 95th birthday. Andrew moved his family to Los Angeles in October, so Karen and I paid them a visit in December, after fall quarter but before Christmas. We all know what happened the following month. Fortunately, they had just moved to an area, Venice (two blocks from the beach), that was about six miles south of the Paradise fire.

Our youngest son, Alexander, who carries for the U.S. postal Service, and his wife, Kyla, bought a house in Sedro-Woolley. It’s small, but has a yard in a quiet, established neighborhood. On the weekend following Valentines Day, I planted a couple of apple trees in their backyard.

I have a lot to be thankful for: my family, the opportunity to hike in our Pacific Northwest, lots of rain, backyard fruit, and a teaching job at Western.
Spring 2024 Update

Personally, there have been significant changes to my family life since last year. My wife, Karen and I traveled to Australia to be with our son, Andrew, and his wife Christina, as they welcomed our grandchild, Marilyn, into the world. We stayed in the Sydney area, delt with a bout of Covid, and took in the Down Under culture. The baby arrived healthy and opinionated. Nine months later, we welcomed them to our home in Bow for the spring and summer. Now we are immersed in 9-month-old baby energy. Our other son, Alexander. and hid wife Kyla, live in the Ham. We are waiting for grandchild number two, but hey – no pressure, kids!

My back-yard apple/pear/plum/hardy kiwi/blueberry orchard continues to evolve. I swear – every year – that I won’t plant any more trees, but this spring I popped a Sweet Tree Pluerry into the ground. It’s a cross between a plum and sweet cherry. The fruit is supposed to look like a plum but has sweet cherry flavors. The tree was given to me through my membership with Northwest Fruit, a volunteer group that maintains a demonstration orchard on the grounds of the Washington State University research station in Mount Vernon, Washington (down I-5 in Skagit County). It’s open to the public and new members are always welcome.

I also continue to serve as a Bow Cemetery commissioner, a small cemetery located near Edison in Skagit County. Besides providing a final resting place for earthly human denizens, we host a Memorial Day service, to which all are welcome to attend. The cemetery will be decorated with rows of Old Glory, with small versions marking the graves of military veterans.

The classes I teach at Western, newswriting and photojournalism (J207 and J305), have kept me engaged with students since 2011. When I retired from the Skagit Valley Herald in 2019, I started teaching a class in fall, winter and spring. The experience continues to be rewarding, and it is so cool to see Western’s journalism grads flourish in the news field.

Any illusions that life would become simple after retiring from a full-time job have been shattered. I guess I’m OK with that.

Scott Terrell
Winter 2023 Update

Thank goodness we are back in the classroom. Online teaching is OK, and there are many advantages, but hanging out with the students in the classroom is more my style. Spring of 2022 was fun because the mask mandate was withdrawn. I was cautious. But speaking to the students without fabric over my lower face made a huge difference.

One of Scott Terrell’s apple trees, ripe for the picking. Terrell’s students often enjoyed the literal fruits of his labor by tasting the harvest. // Photo by Scott Terrell

I enjoy seeing the names of students who previously took newswriting or intro to photojournalism with me. Finn Wendt, who I had in spring J305, is interning at Cascadia Daily News. He is tearing up the sports coverage of the Western men’s and women’s basketball teams, writing stories and taking great photographs.

It’s terrific to see Jaya Flanary, a former photo J student designing the newspaper and editing digital content. Western alum Hailey Hoffman is a mainstay at Cascadia. Technically, I didn’t have her as a student, but she was a photo intern at the Skagit Valley Herald while I was photo editor there. And speaking of the Skagit Valley Herald, former Western student Oliver Hamlin has taken over photo duties there. He is giving their readers wonderful front-page and prep sports photographs to look at.

In a personal note, my life has gotten busier and busier during retirement. I am a cemetery commissioner in Bow, and I was drafted to serve on the board of Northwest Fruit (formerly known as the Western Washington Fruit Research Foundation, WWFRF), which is based at Washington State University’s research station in Mount Vernon. Between those duties and teaching at Western, I feel like my life is busier than ever. But the truth is, I’m slowing down and becoming a grumpy old man. And I love it!

Aside from the above-mentioned duties, I also have a big fruit orchard of my own to manage. I keep learning more every year as I interact with apple, pear, plum and cherry trees. (The same can be said about teaching and interacting with students – I keep learning.) The fall class I teach is a beneficiary of the fruits harvested.

Probably the most impactful, self-inflicted event during the past year was my partial knee replacement in summer. By the time fall quarter started, I was getting ready to retire my walking stick.

Within three months of surgery, I was biking and hiking. John Harris and I made a snowy foray to Lizard Lake on Blanchard Mountain. Joe Gosen, John and I took an urban stroll around Fairhaven and Marine Park. My youngest son, Alexander joined me for a hike to Fragrance Lake. I feel blessed to be active without knee pain, once again.

Scott Terrell and John Harris of Western Washington University’s journalism department pose for a selfie on the snowy trail. After recovering from knee surgery, Terrell was able to get back to outdoor recreation. // Photo by Scott Terrell

Fragrance lake reflects the sky on a sunny afternoon in December 2022. This is a popular destnation in the Chuckanuts, with access at Larrabee State Park. // Photo by Scott Terrell
Winter 2021 Update

After dipping my toes in the Canvas ocean during my adjunct career in the journalism department, I found myself body surfing as spring quarter 2020 got under way. Thankfully, experts on the Keep Teaching crew helped me along the way. After a summer of praying the coronavirus would disappear into the ether, and realizing that would not happen, I was able to prepare for fall and photojournalism 305.

The pandemic was bearable, in part, because of the outdoor opportunities a stone’s throw from my back door. Hiking in the Chuckanuts with friends in the journalism department provided a sense of camaraderie and escape from the long hours staring at a screen. But as the winter quarter progresses and spring online classes loom ahead, I pray by fall we are back in the classroom. Seeing students face to face will be a treat. And I know they will be served better.

Emeritus Faculty Updates

Joan Connell

Joan Connell, BA

Professor Emeritus

Joan Connell Updates

Spring 2024 Update

Dear Prof. Connell,

You probably don’t remember me, but I was one of your students ….

So begins the sort of note that often lands in my inbox, from alumni who want to ask a question, request a reference or just let me know what’s happening in their lives.

Of course I remember you! And I’m so pleased you reached out.

After 12 years of teaching journalism at Western Washington University – by my count that adds up to some 1500 students – it thrills me to hear what you’re up to and even more if I can offer professional help in any way. Western has made it easy for me to stay in touch – and to continue my own journalistic work from my perch here in Birch Bay, Washington.

As an emerita faculty, I have kept both my WWU email address (joan.connell@wwu.edu) and my access to Canvas, so I can refresh my memory of your brilliant ethics research papers or stories published in Klipsun, so as to write a proper recommendation for a fellowship or a job application. I also have library privileges to continue my research. Best of all, I have free parking, so I’ve been on campus quite a bit in the past year, attending lectures and public events that I never had time for when I was teaching.

The main focus of my research these days is artificial intelligence. AI promises to transform the news industry, our information environment, our laws, norms and ethics – and the creative process itself. And while large news organizations like the Associated Press, Reuters and Bloomberg are making big bets on AI to improve efficiency and introduce innovations into reporting methods, AI is still poorly understood – by the general public, but also by most journalists.

AI has been around in one form or another since the 1950s, creating a broad set of tools that have given us Siri, Alexa, Grammarly, Spellcheck, Zoom transcripts and Otter AI. But Generative AI – chatbot technology that generates predictive texts in response to human prompts – is a true game-changer. Chat GPT, Microsoft’s Bing Search Engine, Google’s Gemini are major players, but they represent only the tip of the AI iceberg.

I’ve found that journalists are having a hard time reporting on generative AI and the Large Language Models that provide training data for chatbots. They also have much work to do on responsibly using this technology in their reporting. They tend to easily fall for the Silicon Valley hype around Chat GPT, Google and Meta, and their attempts to explain the AI phenomenon are generally more oriented toward science fiction than toward rigorous inquiry. And very few newsrooms have a code of ethics specifically targeting the use of AI. Some of the most significant learnings have come from University of Washington linguist and computer scientist Emily Bender, a major critic of media misrepresentations of AI and MIT’s Joy Buolamwini of the Algorithmic Justice League. I’m especially grateful to the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s AI Pedagogy Project, which has conducted a series of Zoom-based seminars on media literacy in the age of AI.

I had a chance recently to share some of these learnings at the Society of Professional Journalists Region 10 Student Conference, held in Seattle in mid-April. It was wonderful to make contact with some of my former students and to learn how they are meeting the challenges of AI in the newsroom and in real life. Here’s a link to the slide deck for that presentation: Media Literacy, Media Ethics and Artificial Intelligence.

What are your experiences with AI? What questions do you have about the way this technology will transform our lives?

Send me an email. Connect with me on LinkedIn. I promise, I will remember you.
Winter 2022 Update

Winter 2022 Update: Joan Connell

The most gratifying lesson for me in this pandemic year is a fresh appreciation of the magic of the classroom: The thrill of engaging with actual students — In real life. Fully vaccinated. Fully masked.

Western Washington University is slowly coming to life. Only a small cohort of faculty returned to full-time, face-to-face instruction on campus fall and winter quarters. Most others were teaching either partial or fully remote classes — a smart move, given the proliferating virus. We hope to see more journalism faculty return to full-time, face-to-face learning by spring. But in the meantime, all those empty faculty parking spaces outside the Communications Facility have been opened up to those relegated in more remote lots. A real winter bonus for students and teachers.

For now, the halls are quieter than they were in the before-times. There are fewer in-person office hours and fewer open doors. But by and large the craft-related courses like newswriting, media law, visual journalism, public relations, The Front, Klipsun and Planet take place in the face-to-face environment that before COVID-19 we took for granted.

People are clearly at work here — the energy is palpable. There’s an interpersonal warmth that comes from the joy of finally no longer being home alone. There is a sense that we are back. Some students are understandably reluctant to join in-person classes, because of the highly contagious omicron variant and the vulnerability of loved ones. Most in-person instructors take special time to confer with these students via Zoom and make additional resources available. I have a supply of coronavirus tests and KN95 masks available to anyone wary of returning to the classroom.

Media Ethics and MLK

Ironically, one of the most exciting things to happen in our collective academic life occurred on Zoom Jan. 15, when WWU students had a chance to engage in a live Q&A with the noted historian Ibram X. Kendi, as part of WWU’s Martin Luther King Day Jr. observances.

More that 800 participants — including most of my Mass Media Ethics class — engaged in a one-on-one of sorts over Zoom with Kendi, who is the Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University and winner of a 2021 MacArthur Genius award. Kendi’s book, ”How to Be an Antiracist,” won the 2020 National Book Award. He is on the leading edge of current controversies over how American history is taught in our schools and the damage systemic racism has done to us all.

WWU’s King Day Observance was a remarkable gathering: Students from Northwest Indian College, Whatcom Community College, Bellingham Technical College and Bellingham Public Schools came together with WWU students to reflect on King’s legacy with Kendi and a variety of other speakers. I am so grateful that WWU had the vision to produce this valuable educational experience.

My class had just read Kendi’s 2019 essay in The Atlantic, “A Battle Between Two Souls of America.” By coincidence, the university announced the Kendi event. The result was a 30-minute conversation moderated by WWU’s amazing Dr. Sislena Ledbetter, executive director for counseling, health and wellness. It was an intellectually generous conversation with a brilliant, uncompromising and inspiring young historian, with an easy-going manner, a magnetic smile and a very sobering message.

Just one day before the WWU event, the U.S. Senate failed to pass a voting rights bill that would have safeguarded the 2024 election. The future of democracy is hard to read. At least 19 states have already passed laws making voting more difficult. Other laws seek to undermine the electoral college and threaten valid vote counts.

“There is a very likely possibility,” Kendi told our virtual gathering, “that the 2024 presidential election will be compromised. This nation very soon may be run by fascists.”

What do we do now, in light of these events? That depends on us, on our emerging awareness, and on our evolving understanding of the virtues and values that are the basis of our democracy.

Kendi was a busy person on MLK day, involved in a variety of media events. He conducted a similar conversation later in the day on the “Beyond the Scenes” podcast of The Daily Show, with Trevor Noah. If you’re curious about what Kendi’s work is all about, take a look.

Klipsun

Klipsun Spring 2021 cover

Klipsun magazine continues to publish award-winning work. Nearly two years of remote learning have not daunted the creative spirit of a series of talented editors and storytellers. Klipsun editors and writers continue to produce quarterly themed editions online and print editions in pdf format.

But sadly, only a limited number of these editions have seen ink kiss paper.

The problem is circulation. Because of pandemic concerns, the kiosks where we used to distribute the print edition of our magazine on campus have disappeared. In Bellingham, the coffee shops and gathering places where we would place free copies no longer are interested in having them due to transmissibility issues.

Nevertheless, we prevail. The Spring 2021 edition, edited by Jaya Flanary, was published and hand-distributed on campus and mailed to Klipsun staffers. It’s a beauty. The Student Publications Council, which provides funding for student publications, is exploring ways to mail more print editions to alumni and others who are Klipsun fans.

Meanwhile, you can see the various plans for print editions in the WWU CEDAR Archive.

WWU alumni, we treasure you and want to keep in touch. Let me know how you are doing: joan.connell@wwu.edu.
Winter 2021 Update

No sane person could say that they’ve actually enjoyed the altered universe of remote learning we’ve inhabited for more than a year now. But for all the heartache of COVID-19 has brought us – grief and sickness, isolation, lost jobs, derailed dreams – the multiple crises of this challenging time have also been a catalyst for creativity and an incubator of resilience.

They have shaken us out of complacency and opened our eyes to new ways of teaching, learning and coping with circumstances beyond our control.

Never have I seen Klipsun editors and writers more focused and productive. They have adapted to the constraints of reporting while observing social distancing. They have become even more agile and passionate multimedia storytellers, exploring themes of empathy, inequality, social and racial justice, ecological grief, BIPOC pride,  emotional self-care, the joy of cooking, transgender identity, and Whatcom County’s sorry history of white supremacy.

This was the year journalism confronted its own unwitting culpability in amplifying falsehood. In ethics class, we considered the value of the truth sandwich when reporting on presidential lies. We used the online game Harmony Square to understand how bad actors leverage social media to spread disinformation. A case study from Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the bogus documentary, #Plandemic shed light on how news organizations struggle to responsibly  cover conspiracy theories.

My biggest teaching challenge involved an Honors course in Religion, Ethics and Nature, a long-planned inquiry into the impact of virtues and values of religion on the evolution of ecological ethics, from Coast Salish creation stories to Buddhist and Confucian philosophy,  the emerging principles of African-American Eco-Womanism and religious naturalism. I had planned to teach this class in Sehome Arboretum with various experts in religion, science and evolutionary theory sharing their insights in a forest setting. When the closure of campus in Fall 2020 forced us out of the forest, we pivoted to a different exploration of nature and spirituality: The Japanese practice of forest bathing.

Our mission was to each spend an hour weekly detached from technology and immersed in a solitary encounter with nature. To document these weekly forest forays, we built a giant Google slide deck, titled The Understory, a reference to the 25 feet of botanical life above the forest floor crucial to maintaining the forest ecosystem.

We each documented our weekly nature experiences on a slide featuring reflections in  prose, poetry, photos, videos and music, then shared them in our twice-weekly Zoom seminars.  We grew to love these nature immersions; the process of creative collaboration was energizing and illuminating.

The Understory project united 16 geographically scattered individuals in an intimate experience of the unleafing autumnal forest that transcended the distance between us. It gave us experiences of inspiration and singular beauty. But most of all, in this season of sickness and isolation, it was an unexpected gift: a way for us to be alone, together.
Winter 2020 Update

Climate crisis, ecological ethics, vaping, artificial intelligence whistleblowers of all sorts, social media’s impact on our elections, the Trump impeachment: what’s happening right now in America and the world means there’s no shortage of dilemmas to contemplate in my Mass Media Ethics class. I continue to be impressed by the quality of thought our students bring to these topics. At a time when it is easy to become weary, cynical or downright alarmed about the state of the world, the creative intelligence our students apply to these formidable issues gives me reason to believe that the future is in good hands.

Klipsun celebrated its 50th anniversary this year, marking the moment in 1979 when Klipsun emerged from a decades-long cocoon as a Western Washington University yearbook to a fully realized and independent student magazine. The Journalism Department celebrated with a party in October that drew former students and faculty from the 70s, 80s, 90s and beyond. It was a true homecoming event as Klipsun alumni connected with former classmates and reminisced with the original faculty adviser, Ted Stannard and longtime Klipsun advisers Carolyn Dale, Tim Pilgrim, Stephen Howie and Peggy Watt.

Klipsun continues its evolution as a digital-first magazine and a deluxe print edition distributed at the beginning of each quarter. Its mission is multimedia narrative storytelling, an ambitious goal realized with the guidance of a different editorial leadership team each quarter. Expert advice and support from Western’s Student Technology Center provides access to recording equipment, studio space and technical support to our budding podcasters and multimedia storytellers. Check out our growing archive of podcasts and videos.

On a personal note, I’m pleased to report that my book, Healing All Creation: Genesis, the Gospel of Mark and the Story of the Universe (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019) has received favorable reviews from Publishers Weekly and an array of religion scholars. Its first edition is designed specifically for libraries; so far this book has found a home on the shelves of a diverse array of college, university and seminary libraries and in public libraries in the U.S., Canada, Australia, the U.K, Germany and Switzerland.

And here’s a message to all those former students who receive this newsletter: This is my eighth year teaching at Wester Washington University and by my rough calculation that means that I’ve taught 1,200 of you in ethics, news writing and narrative journalism classes. It’s both heart-warming and humbling to have had the opportunity to teach you — and to learn from you. Wherever you may be, know how grateful I am for the opportunity to be your teacher Drop me a line, if you’re inclined, and let me know how you are and what you are doing.
Winter 2019 Update

It’s a tough world out there for professional communicators. Social media continues to alter the way news is produced and consumed. And our current chaotic political and cultural landscape has provided news editorial, public relations, and visual journalism majors in my Mass Media Ethics classes with no shortage of topics to grapple with in the 2018-19 academic year.

Our students are embracing the challenges with original and compelling research on a wide range of subjects, from the ethics of vaping and the marketing of Juul to teens. to the ethics of presidential press secretaries and the impact of activist student journalists from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, on the gun control debate.

I continue to be impressed with the passion, discipline and focus of our students as they chart the gray areas of our shifting media landscape. We’ve devoted much attention to how journalists report on political leaders who misrepresent the truth, how to ethically and effectively cover climate change and how to report on the Me Too movement, which has revealed sexual misconduct in high places (including the news media.)

Revelations of how easily Russian operatives gamed Facebook in the 2016 election, the mounting evidence that shows how anger drives engagement on social media and the ethics (or lack thereof) of online influencers all have contributed to robust classroom discussion and debate about the new challenges journalists, public relations professionals and the architects of social media platforms all face.

Over at Klipsun magazine, where I serve as writing coach and faculty advisor, our award-winning student editors, photographers, writers and designers continue to produce compelling narrative journalism in print and online. Take a look at And Then They Came for Your Family, on how local people are providing financial aid and moral support to undocumented members of our community who have been arrested, detained and deported by ICE agents. Help From Above, profiles mountain search and rescue worker Joe Edmark. Genuinely Good at Soccer traces Andrea Pelogi’s amazing journey from a Brazilian orphanage to being a star athlete at Western.

Finally, a personal note: Reaching back to my professional roots as a writer and editor specializing in religion, ethics and moral issues, I’ve co-authored a new book with scripture scholar Adam Bartholomew: Healing All Creation: Genesis, the Gospel of Mark and the Story of the Universe, will be published in April by Rowman & Littlefield. Aimed at a general audience, with particular emphasis on millennials, the book popularizes an ongoing conversation between theologians and scientists about the spiritual dimension of evolution and offers fresh insights on how people of good will respond to a wounded world. Find it on Amazon, beginning in April.
Winter 2018 Update

An ethically challenged president castigates journalists as “liars” and “enemies of the people.” With mounting incivility, a divided society finds it hard to agree on even the most basic verifiable truths. Social media, that firehouse of information that most people rely on as a source of news, has become weaponized by political partisans, hostile governments and click-bait entrepreneurs in search of a quick buck. It’s getting very hard to tell the real news from the fake.

In this turbulent media environment, never has it been more important for journalists and other professional communicators to tell true stories that reflect the real issues we face: war and peace, economic inequality, environmental degradation, hatred and discrimination. Never has it been more important for citizens to be literate consumers of verifiable news. Never has there been a greater need for news media—and the social media that feed our growing appetite for digital content in all its forms—to be guided by a code of ethics that values the truth, respects all stakeholders, is transparent in its methods and is accountable for its actions.

It is a bleak media landscape. But the good news is that our classrooms at Western Washington University are full of students who are idealistic, highly engaged and eager to make this broken world a better place. This idealism is manifest in the students enrolled in courses I’m teaching this academic year: Introduction to News Writing, Mass Media Ethics and and the long-form narrative journalism of Klipsun magazine.

I see emerging multimedia storytellers who are developing the curiosity, empathy and critical thinking to bear witness to the challenging circumstances on this campus and in the world: They are exploring the hopes and fears of hundreds of undocumented WWU students who face the very real possibility of deportation if Congress does not take action to protect them. They are considering the challenges faced by 33 percent of Western students who are the first in their families to attend college and the 26 percent of our students who rely on Pell Grants, which the Trump administration is seeking to eliminate. They are seeking to understand the challenges faced by large numbers of veterans and other non-traditional students returning to school. Not surprisingly, they are telling personal stories about the increasing numbers of students for whom anxiety is a fact of life.

It may sound grim, but it’s inspiring, actually. I see our students rising to confront the issues of our day and responding to them according to the ethical code that guides us as journalists: Seek the truth and report it fully, fairly and courageously. Minimize harm. Bear witness to issues and events independently, without bias. Be transparent and accountable in our actions.

This is an important time to be a professional communicator; it’s an important time for higher education to stand up for the values that bring out our best, as citizens of our country and of the world. It is going to be a challenging year. And we’re on it.

Professor Emeritus

Carolyn Dale, MA

Professor Emeritus

Carolyn Dale Updates

Winter 2023 Update

In the last several years, I’ve published two novels. The first, Second Rising, is contemporary environmental fiction set in an imaginary town close to Mount Baker. The next one, Sylvie’s Chance, is historical fiction set in 1830s Illinois and Texas. That was based on researching family history, and I mainly intended it for a family audience — which was fortunate, with the Covid pandemic pretty much shutting down bookstore readings and other possibilities.

We continued to do traveling during Covid, though, as my husband, Tim Pilgrim, and I packed up the car and drove over much of the West. We’ve stayed in southern Utah several times for hiking in canyons, mesas, and deserts, and have visited our children and grandchildren — and a new great-granddaughter — who live in Idaho and Colorado. We also have five grand-dogs, at last count, and have fun seeing the families’ half dozen cats and pygmy goats.

Currently I’m working on a cycle of related short stories set in Montana, where we also visit family and spend time in the summers. We’re in the midst of planning a trip to France for spring, and it feels great to have the chance to travel abroad again. Like everyone else, I hope coming times will bring greater health, prosperity and peace.
2020 Update

My main adventure this year is publishing my first novel, “Second Rising.” It has strong environmental themes and is set here in Whatcom County. It combines a mystery, a love story, and a fight against injustice, and—unusual for this genre—a fairly hopeful ending.
The book comes out in February (2020) from Cairn Shadow Press. I ended up going the self-publishing route after it had been with a national publisher and our agreement fell apart when production problems arose. So it’s been great, and challenging, to learn the tasks beyond writing and editing—like creating a business, designing the book’s cover and interior, and working with the printer and distributor. And then comes the marketing. More information about the book is available at: www.carolyndale.com
I’m still pursuing journalism by working with a local group that plans to start a public, nonprofit, online news site. Though our area is not quite in a “news desert,” local media are facing tough times, and I’m intrigued by the approaches other communities are taking around the country.
The other big adventure this year was a 4,000-mile drive in May that my husband Tim and I called our Great American West Road Trip. Highlights included impressive places we hadn’t visited before in Utah, from Snow Canyon near St. George, to Capitol Reef National Park farther north, with Zion and Bryce canyons in between.
I continue to enjoy gardening, cooking, and hiking, and we took our snowshoes up to Mount Baker a few times, too.

Professor Emeritus

Tim Pilgrim, PhD

Professor Emeritus

Tim Pilgrim Updates

Spring 2024 Update

Since my Winter 2023 update, I’ve continued writing and publishing poetry, with 31 poems picked up by 15 different publications in 2023 and another eight accepted by mid-April in 2024.

My total is now 623 poems (450 of them since I retired in early June in 2013) in over 120 different journals, books and other publications.

One poem, “Slick — to Exxon then and BP now,” first published in 2010 by Poets for Living Waters, was featured in September 2023 as a part of Apokalypsis, an oratorium by British composer James Wood that was performed by singers and musicians in European cathedrals in Ghent and Amsterdam.

(The poem was first selected by Wood just as the pandemic was beginning. Apokalypsis takes its lyrics from the book of the Bible in which St. John describes in a vision how seven angels predict seven catastrophes with their trumpets.)

Also, Carolyn Dale and I have begun traveling more since Covid has eased. We went to Paris and Lyon (also in France) in March 2023, to Canada a number of times, to the Zion and Red Cliffs area of southern Utah for hiking, and to Colorado, Maryland, Montana and Idaho for family visits.

Otherwise, retirement life continues to be a mixture of snowshoeing, yoga, hiking and other exercise, home repair, volunteer work and an occasional turn around the dance floor.

Oh, and my website, TimothyPilgrim.org, still provides information I provided as a journalism prof about mass communication, along with an up-to-date list of links to trustworthy alternative media and documentation of the rich getting richer and richer.
Winter 2023 Update
It’s been three Covid-ridden years since my last update — and I’ve escaped it to this point.

I am still spending much time writing and sending out poetry, and Carolyn Dale and I still travel — soon to France — in the last years (late fall or late winter) to hike in the Southwest.

Otherwise, life consists mostly of good food, lots of exercise (hiking, dancing, walking, yoga) and work maintaining our 95-year-old house.

Here are the bullet points:

In 2021, I published 33 poems ( (spread among 20 or so journals in the U.S., Canada and Australia);

In 2022, 53 poems (spread among 20 or so journals in the same countries);

In 2023, seven poems thus far;

I still provide mass media information at TimothyPilgrim.org — including an evolving list of trustworthy alternative media. I also still track information about the rich getting richer, and the rest of us, well, you know.
Winter 2022 Update

I’ve kept busy during the second year of COVID-19 by publishing poetry, exercising, doing house repair and traveling.
I still spend time keeping up a mass media information site, which is used by students from different universities who are looking for essential media material or alternative media sources — it’s located at www.timothypilgrim.org.
In March 2021, our press, Cairn Shadow Press (cairnshadow.com), gathered 400 of my published poems for a book called “Seduced by metaphor: Timothy Pilgrim collected published poems.” It is available at the usual outlets.
Also, during 2021, I published 33 poems in 15 different journals, anthologies and other publications such as HighonAdventure.com.
Carolyn Dale and I gambled and successfully avoided COVID-19 when we traveled to St. George, Utah, to hike and to visit family in other places within driving distance.
Of course, we also hiked and snowshoed in Bellingham and at Mt. Baker — and we even danced a couple times during the summer at The Beach in Birch Bay
Winter 2021 Update

Tim Pilgrim and Carolyn Dale hiking in southern Utah. // Photo courtesy of Tim Pilgrim
After retiring in 2013, I still keep J190 (mass media) information, alternative media links and a rich-get-richer page on my website: www.timothypilgrim.org

A collection of 400 of my published poems called “Seduced by metaphor,” was published in March 2021 and is available at Village Books and other independent bookstores, as well as Amazon and Barnes & Noble and other online sites.

As noted on the book’s back cover, my poems “gain enough grace to repaint souls, eat bitter hearts, force-feed geese, put gray doves of peace to sleep — with luck, make each day a blessing, joyful chance to explode mosquitos, count ravens, zigzag mow, herd flies, do gravestone math, vacuum cats, circle ruins on a map — and, at sunset, six nightmares late, fence in darkness, recite night sky, dream all the blackness back to light.”

I no longer run marathons, but even in the times of Covid I enjoy hiking and snowshoeing with Carolyn Dale, who is the author of two novels, “Second Rising” (2019) and “Sylvie’s Chance” (2020). Read about them at CairnShadow.com and find them at the places mentioned above.
Winter 2020 Update

I’ve been busy over the past year by working on poetry, traveling and initiating a publishing venture. In August, I started a publishing company called Cairn Shadow Press (see it at cairnshadow.com), with a mission dedicated to publishing literary works that explore the environment of the Pacific Northwest, its people and stories.
In the evolutionary stage, the press is presenting an environmental novel with a hopeful ending, called “Second Rising,” written by Carolyn Dale. We were fortunate to be able to publish it, since it had originally been contracted to Harvard Square Editions before it became available again. A “Second Rising” video trailer produced by Stephen Howie and Maria McLeod is available at https://youtu.be/1SZBFIv0wQQ

I still spend time keeping up a mass media information site, which is used by students looking for essential media material or alternative media sources — it’s located at www.timothypilgrim.org

Also, during 2019, I published 31 poems in 19 different journals, anthologies and publications, and Carolyn and I traveled in the spring by hybrid through eight western and southwestern states — what we called our Great American Road Trip. In addition, we spent the normal amount of time hiking, tending our cat, Brio, in his 17th year — and keeping up the yard and the house, which will turn 100 during this decade. My new hip works fine with a shovel and rake!
Winter 2019 Update

Tim Pilgrim (retired 2013) is still writing and publishing poetry (see www.timothypilgrim.org for several hundred published poems — and unpublished ones too).
In addition, he has moved mass media-related information from the journalism department server, Hope, which has been shut down. The material was receiving over 3 million visits a year at Hope and is core information for the Journalism 190 course.
Click on the mass media link at www.timothypilgrim.org to find it. Also included are links to over 125 alternative media websites, along with a documentation of the rich getting richer.
Tim has a nondigital life too — with a new titanium hip, he no longer runs marathons, but he does enjoy hiking, dancing and traveling with Carolyn Dale, feeding blue jays and being a servant to their 15-year-old black cat.

Faculty Updates Archive