Medill News Highlights – May 2020

Northwestern’s 2020 Commencement will be Virtual with Student Option to Return for On-Site Ceremony Next Year

Read the announcement by President Schapiro.

Presentation of the John Bartlow Martin award for public interest magazine journalism and conversation with winner

Join us as Medill’s Helen Gurley Brown Magazine Professor Patti Wolter presents the 2020 John Bartlow Martin Award to Lizzie Presser  of ProPublica for her story “The Dispossessed.” A conversation with Presser will follow. Presser is a journalist writing about inequality and how social policy is experienced. She was previously a contributing writer at The California Sunday Magazine. “The Dispossessed,” published in partnership with ProPublica and The New Yorker, is an investigation into the unjust repossession of African American-owned property through three different legal mechanisms in North Carolina. It won a George Polk Award for Magazine Reporting in 2020. Presser has twice been a finalist for a National Magazine Award and a Livingston Award.

Register for the 5/27 Zoom presentation.

Medill team wins Best Article Award from American Academy of Advertising

Online retailers must strike a balance between recommending relevant items to users and providing sponsored recommendations from advertisers. Recognizing this problem, a team at Medill IMC’s Spiegel Research Center developed an algorithm that improves user utility while reducing ad revenue by a small amount. The team consisting of Professor Ed Malthouse, postdoctoral fellows Khadija Ali Vakeel and Yasaman Kamyab Hessary, research fellow Morana Fudurić and Professor Robin Burke from University of Colorado Boulder were recently recognized for their work, receiving the 2019 Best Article Award in the Journal of Advertising from the American Academy of Advertising. The award was instituted in 1988 to honor the best article published each year.

Read the abstract

NNN Wins SPJ Award

The Northwestern News Network (NNN)  took first place in Best Newscast category of the Region 5 SPJ student contest and will now move on to the national SPJ competition. Joey took first place General News Reporting category for a story she did as a reporter, not as an intern,  for the NBC affiliate in Bakersfield, California last summer. Region 5 comprises chapters in Illinois, Indiana and Kentucky.

Prof. Jack Doppelt Co-Produces Election Report

What began as “Can American Democracy Survive the 2020 Elections? The Role of Media, Law, Norms, and Technology in Assuring Acceptance of Election Results,” evolved to “Fair Elections During a Crisis: Urgent Recommendations in Law, Media, Politics and Tech to Advance the Legitimacy of, and the Public’s Confidence in, the November 2020 U.S. Elections.  Read a New Yorker article about the report. Read the report.

Participate in the Medill Centennial Alumni Photo Gallery          

We plan to feature testimonials and photos from 100+ alumni on our Centennial website, launching this summer.  If you want to participate, please submit your quote and photo using this form! We would love to include you.

Lightfoot photo: WBEZ