Seventy-year-old Northwestern journalism professor Loren Ghiglione and two twenty-something Northwestern journalism students, Alyssa Karas and Dan Tham, climbed into a minivan and embarked on a three-month, twenty-eight state, 14,063-mile road trip in search of America’s identity. After interviewing 150 Americans about contemporary identity issues, they compiled this collection, which is part oral history, part shoe-leather reporting, part search for America’s future, part memoir, and part travel journal.
The Book of Dares is grounded both in practical parenting strategies and 20 years of A Call to Men’s work with men and boys to promote healthy manhood, authenticity, and gender equity. This collection of 100 original dares will help boys expand their worldview, inspire more respect toward girls and non-binary kids, and generally develop a healthier idea of manhood. The book features a voicey intro to draw readers in, plus an afterword that’s both a call to action and a resource for parents and educators. Inspired by A Call to Men’s tried-and-tested curriculum, this is a way of guiding boys to being their most authentic selves, and a direct answer to parents’ cries for building healthy manhood, respect, and emotional literacy in their sons.
Photo: Images (left to right) correspond with ordered listing.
Debbie Cenziper
Debbie Cenziper is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter. She will serve as associate professor and director of investigative reporting. She will also lead the Medill Investigative Lab. Cenziper has been working at The Washington Post and as an assistant professor of journalism at The George Washington University School of Media and Public Affairs.
Helen Chun
Helen Chun is an associate professor for the IMC program. Chun’s research focuses on managing and enhancing consumer experience. Her ongoing work examines technology-driven consumer insights and explores how an evolving high-tech interface disrupts traditional marketing communications. Her research papers have been published in leading marketing and services journals. She also has a courtesy appointment at Northwestern Kellogg School of Management. Chun has a Ph.D. in marketing from the University of Southern California.
Kelly Cutler
Kelly Cutler is a lecturer and director of the IMC Part-Time and Online programs. She is also the founder and CEO of Kona Company, a digital strategy firm. Cutler has more than 20 years of experience in digital marketing. Prior to founding Kona Company, she co-founded and led a Chicago-based search engine marketing firm for 11 years. She began her career working for Classified Ventures, Cars.com and AOL.
Greg Green
Greg Green joins our faculty as a Lecturer for the IMC program. Green’s background includes leadership roles in Marketing Analytics, Research and Consumer Insights focused on Digital Media and Marketing with companies such as PwC, Publicis, and Google. He specializes in extracting the untapped value in research and corporate data, focused on creating data driven decisioning cultures at the intersection of creativity and analytics. Green has a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Claremont Graduate University in California.
Eunhee Emily Ko
Eunhee (Emily) Ko is an assistant professor of IMC. Her research interests span online marketing and user-generated content as well as applications of machine learning and econometric methods. She earned her master’s in analytics from Northwestern McCormick School of Engineering, and her Ph.D. in marketing from Emory University.
Arionne Nettles
Arionne Nettles will be responsible for Medill’s publishing platform, Medill Reports, and serve as a lecturer. Nettles has been a digital producer for WBEZ, Chicago’s NPR affiliate, as well as an adjunct lecturer at Medill. Before her work at WBEZ, Nettles was a multiplatform editor for the Associated Press and the digital editor for the Chicago Defender.
Matthew Orr
Matthew Orr joined the faculty as assistant professor in January. Based in Washington, D.C., he will support Medill’s video and broadcast productions. Orr serves as the director of multimedia and creative at STAT News and is an award-winning journalist and filmmaker with nearly 20 years of experience in the industry. Before joining STAT, he worked at The New York Times for 13 years as a senior video producer and reporter.
Steven Thrasher
Steven Thrasher is the inaugural Daniel H. Renberg Chair and an assistant professor of journalism. He will focus on social justice reporting and issues relevant to the LGBTQ community. Thrasher has worked as writer-at-large at The Guardian, staff writer at the Village Voice and facilitator for the NPR StoryCorps project. His articles are regularly published in The New York Times, BuzzFeed News, Esquire, The Nation, The Atlantic, The Guardian and The Daily Beast. He has a Ph.D. in American studies from New York University.
Yu Xu
Yu Xu is an assistant professor in IMC. He specializes in the intersection of organizational communication, networks, technology, strategy and computational social science. His current research investigates ecological and evolutionary foundations of behavioral and network change, especially in the context of digitally mediated communities. Xu has a Ph.D. in communications from the University of Southern California.
Prof. David Abrahamson Retires
The founder of Medill’s Literary Journalism seminar, Abrahamson celebrated his retirement from Medill after 26 years on the faculty at a full-house send off on Jan. 29, 2020 at the McCormick Foundation Center in Evanson. Abrahamson taught long-form writing and magazine editing and was the co-director of the graduate Magazine Publishing Project.
While at Medill, Abrahamson was the general editor of a 40-volume historical series, “Visions of the American Press,” published under the Medill imprint by the Northwestern University Press. With more than 20 years of experience as a magazine writer, editor and management consultant, Abrahamson’s background includes senior editorial positions at a number of national consumer magazines, including Car and Driver and PC/Computing. He is the author of “Magazine-Made America: The Cultural Transformation of the Postwar Periodical,” an interpretive history of the magazine profession in the last half of the 20th century, and editor and co-editor of two definitive anthologies of magazine scholarship, “The American Magazine: Research Perspectives and Prospects” and “The Routledge Handbook of Magazine Research: The Future of the Magazine Form” (forthcoming). Raised in Annapolis, Maryland, Abrahamson holds a B.A. in History from Johns Hopkins University (1969), a Master’s degree in Journalism from the University of California, Berkeley (1973) and a Ph.D. in American Civilization from New York University (1992).
NPR’s Antonia Cereijido named inaugural Cecilia Vaisman award winner by Medill, NAHJ
Audio journalist Antonia Cereijido (BSJ14) has been selected as the first recipient of the Cecilia Vaisman Award for Multimedia Reporters. The award is a partnership between Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.
Cerejido visited Medill Nov. 5, 2019 and spoke to Medill students, faculty and the NU community at Harris Hall.
Cereijido is an award-winning producer at NPR’s Latino USA where her coverage has included a profile of the Mexican-American man who became wealthy by building controversial shelters housing migrant children, a meditation on whether Latinos cry more on average, and a historical and feminist analysis of Mattel’s Frida Kahlo “Barbie.”
Members of the award selection committee, which included NAHJ Chicago and student chapter members, along with Medill representatives, selected Cereijido based on her body of work, as well as her willingness to mentor students, speak in classes and serve as a role model. The award, which will be given annually, includes a $5,000 cash prize. Cereijido will visit Medill in November to talk about her audio journalism work with students, faculty and the community.
The award is named in memory of Vaisman, a Medill associate professor who was a leader in audio journalism and a member of NAHJ. The award recognizes Latinx and Hispanic audio and video journalists who bring light to the issues that affect the Latinx and Hispanic communities in the U.S. and around the world.
Cereijido is an alumna of Medill where she had Vaisman as a professor. “Through Cecilia’s guidance, I learned of stories that rejected tropes that portray immigrants as one dimensional and showed how immigrants could make art of their lives by daring to envision new futures. She was a fierce advocate for quality and thoughtfulness,” said Cereijido. “At the editing phase of every story I produce, I wonder what she could take issue with or what other sources she would suggest … I am deeply honored to be given this award and am very grateful to both Medill and NAHJ.”
Cereijido was a USC California Health and Institute for Justice and Journalism Fellow. She was the co-host of The Payoff, a podcast about personal finance for millennials from Mic.com, a guest on Buzzfeed’s Another Round and on Slate’s Represent. She also hosted a Twitter exclusive video for the History Channel. She has interpreted for This American Life and Love + Radio.
Mark Trahant (Shoshone-Bannock) is the winner of the 2019 NAJA-Medill Milestone Achievement Award
The Native American Journalists Association (NAJA) and Northwestern University’s Medill School named Mark Trahant (Shoshone-Bannock) the 2019 NAJA-Medill Milestone Achievement Award recipient.
The award honors an individual who has had a lasting effect on media to the benefit of Indigenous communities. The award is given jointly by the Native American Journalists Association and the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications. The award celebrates responsible storytelling and journalism in Indian Country.
Trahant is editor of Indian Country Today. He reflected on the first tribal editor, Elias Boudinot (Cherokee), the namesake for another of NAJA’s top awards, when reflecting on the standard for Indigenous journalism.
“[Boudinot] described his paper as ‘a vehicle of Indian intelligence.’ Even though ink has been replaced by pixels; the task remains the same – to publish an informative daily account that’s comprehensive and adds context to the stories missing from the mainstream media.
“We have so many stories to tell. Our mission is simple but important: Solid, factual reporting. Great writing. Photography that inspires and records. Provide a real service to readers across Indian Country’s digital landscape,” Trahant said.
Trahant previously served as editorial page editor of The Seattle Post-Intelligencer and worked for the Arizona Republic, Salt Lake Tribune, Seattle Times, Navajo Times Today and Sho-Ban News.
He has been a reporter for PBS Frontline, publishing “The Silence,” which detailed sexual abuse by priests in an Alaska Native village.
Trahant is known for his election reporting in Indian Country, developing the first comprehensive database of American Indians and Alaska Natives running for office. His research has been cited in publications ranging from The New York Times to The Economist to Teen Vogue.
During the 2018 election, Trahant launched a journalism initiative and as a result, more than 40 Native media professionals conducted the first ever live coverage of election night. Six hours of TV programming was produced at the First Nations Experience | FNX studios in California and viewers were able to get reports about the dozens of Native candidates running for office during this election, which included the first two Native American women voted into Congress.
Trahant was recently elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has been a professor at the University of North Dakota, the University of Alaska Anchorage, the University of Idaho and the University of Colorado.
The award includes a $5,000 cash prize and an invitation to the recipient to speak with Medill students and faculty on campus in Evanston, Illinois, to further advance the representation of Indigenous journalists in mainstream media.
New fellowship from Medill and The Garage aims to increase diversity among media entrepreneurs
Student working at the Garage
A new fellowship for entrepreneurs working on media and media-related endeavors is being launched by Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications in partnership with The Garage, NU’s entrepreneurial incubator.
The one-year fellowship will identify and support entrepreneurs from underrepresented groups—with an emphasis on women and people of color—who are working on innovation in the media industry.
The fellow will receive an $80,000 stipend for the year, and access to a variety of resources across Northwestern. The fellow also will be able to participate in select classes at Medill and in other areas of the University, and will be an active participant in both the Medill and The Garage communities.
The Garage is an 11,000 square foot space that brings together a cross-disciplinary community of students, faculty, staff and alumni who share a passion for developing ideas. Currently home to more than 60 student-founded startups and projects, the co-working space provides cutting edge technology resources, special programming and mentorship from accomplished entrepreneurs.
María Inés Zamudio is the recipient of the 2020 Cecilia Vaisman Award from Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. Zamudio covers immigration for WBEZ, the Chicago NPR affiliate.
The Vaisman award honors an individual working in audio or video journalism who works every day to shed light on the various issues affecting Hispanic and Latinx communities inside and outside the United States and is an active member of the NAJH. It is given jointly by NAJH and Medill, and includes a $5,000 cash prize. The award is named for Medill faculty member Cecilia Vaisman who died in 2015.
“María Inés’ reporting brings to her listeners a greater understanding of the challenges faced by the Latinx and other immigrant communities in Chicago,” said Medill Dean Charles Whitaker. “These are critically important stories to bring attention to as our city and nation grapple with what it means to be a diverse and inclusive society. I’m delighted we get to honor María Inés’ work with this award that is so meaningful to Medill.”
Zamudio’s nomination was reviewed and selected by a jury of Medill and NAHJ representatives, including members of the NAHJ Chicago chapter. The award criteria was determined by the jury.
“I am honored to receive this award, and to represent the communities I report on in doing so. I love the work that I do and having that work recognized by Medill and the NAHJ is humbling,” said Zamudio. “I hope more Hispanic and Latinx communities and journalists get the recognition they deserve.”
Zamudio is an investigative journalist and part of the race, class and communities team at WBEZ, Chicago’s NPR news source. Prior to her time at WBEZ, Zamudio worked for American Public Media’s investigative team.
In 2015, Zamudio and a team of reporters from NPR’s Latino USA received a Peabody National Award for their coverage of Central American migrants. Zamudio’s story was reported from the Mexico-Guatemala border and it focused on the danger women from Central American while traveling through Mexico as they try to reach the United States.
She’s also worked for the Memphis Commercial Appeal and Chicago Reporter magazine as an investigative reporter. Zamudio’s work has appeared in The Associated Press, New York Times, National Public Radio, NBC 5 Chicago, Telemundo and Univision among others.
“NAHJ is elated to celebrate María Inés Zamudio as the 2020 Vaisman award recipient,” said Hugo Balta, two-time NAHJ President. “Her service in media honors the work and legacy of Cecilia Vaisman to ensure representation of Hispanic and Latino communities in the news does not remain a monolith.”
Zamudio’s contributions will be highlighted during a virtual award ceremony hosted by Medill Nov. 11 in partnership with NAHJ.
Fr. Matthew T. Gamber S.J., age 61, passed away Friday, October 16, 2020, in Cincinnati, Ohio. Matt was a graduate of Loyola Academy, and received a bachelor’s in political science from Marquette University, a master’s in philosophy from Loyola University, a master’s of divinity from Weston Jesuit School of Theology, and a master’s in journalism from Northwestern University. Father Matt was a gifted journalist, and was published in the National Catholic Register, Catholic World Report and Catholic Herald. He was most recently appointed chaplain and director of youth ministry at St. Xavier High School. Previously, he was associate pastor at St. Francis Xavier Church in Cincinnati, and he enjoyed a lifelong career in the religious order including positions in Chicago, Gonzaga University in Washington, Xavier University in Cincinnati, and in the Vatican Radio and Catholic News Service in Rome, Italy.
Father Matt loved being a priest, and a channel of God’s healing graces and love for the people he served. He led a profoundly spiritual life, dedicated to his faith, his family, the Society of Jesus, and his many friends. Known for his hearty laugh and inquisitive spirit, Father Matt was beloved by many and enjoyed connecting with people wherever he went.
Matt was preceded in death by his father Mark J. and brother Lawrence M. Gamber. He is survived by his mother Ruth Ann (nee Henneman) Gamber; siblings Mark (MaryJo), William (Linda), Mary Margaret, and Robert (Suzan) Gamber; sister-in-law Carol Gamber; nieces and nephews Matthew (Alexandra), Casey, Charlie, Jamie, Mary Kate and Luke Gamber; and great nephew Benjamin.
Annie-Kate Carpenter, 96, passed away Wednesday, October 14, 2020. Born in Tampa, Florida, on May 31, 1924, she was the daughter of John Selby Brengle and Mary Margaret Monroe Brengle. She graduated from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in 1945.
After working with the Associated Press and the Chicago Tribune, she returned to Tampa to teach elementary school, high school and college students. She attended Hyde Park Presbyterian Church and was a member of Kappa Alpha Theta, DAR, the St. Andrew’s Society, the Florida Genealogical Society and the Huguenot Society of Florida.
Annie-Kate was preceded in death by her parents and by her daughter, Mary-Phyllis Dolcimascolo Harvey. She is survived by her son, Samuel B. Dolcimascolo (Mary Margaret); son-in-law, John W. Harvey; grandchildren, Paul S. Dolcimascolo (Jessica), Mollie Dolcimascolo, Caroline Elizabeth Harvey, and Mary Kate Harvey; and three great-grandchildren.
Casey Newton (BSJ02) is a leading voice in tech journalism and a finalist for the 2020 Ellie Award for Reporting. He’s best known for writing daily newsletter The Interface for The Verge since 2017. Now he’s stepping out on his own, releasing a new newsletter, Platformer, on Substack. I talked with him about his Medill experience, how he fell in love with tech journalism and what the future holds for his career.
How did your education and your experience at Northwestern help prepare you for your career?
There were sort of two phases of me getting into journalism at college. I’d been the editor of my high school paper, and then liked it enough that when I asked my guidance counselor where I should go to college, she said, “Well, if you want to be a journalist, you should go to Medill.” And that was basically it for me. So I visited the school, I loved it, applied, got in and showed up to campus.
All my friends who worked at The Daily Northwestern talked about it as this all-consuming cult. And I thought, “Well, I don’t know if I’m ready to join a cult, I kind of want to enjoy college a little.” So I didn’t start working at The Daily until I was a sophomore, but I completely fell in love with it. I mean, the people who were working there at the time were just the best, most patient teachers. And I really feel like most of the journalism education that I got that I still use to this day, I learned from the other editors at The Daily who would sit down next to me when I, you know, wrote my terrible story about some event, and would just go through it line by line and fix it and teach me that way. So I had a great experience at Medill and Northwestern generally, but it was really The Daily that was at the center of it for me.
Now you’re a pretty prolific tech journalist. What led to your interest in tech journalism? Was that always your intended field?
My first job was covering state and local politics, and I kind of bounced around. I worked for a couple of newspapers. I was hopping from beat to beat. I worked in Arizona for like six and a half years. And then a couple of my friends moved to San Francisco and I visited, and it was just a love at first sight thing where I felt like, “Oh, this is where I should have been the whole time. This is the greatest city in the world.” And so my initial interest had actually just been moving to San Francisco. I spent about two years looking for a job here.
While I was here, I stopped in and saw some old friends who were working at the San Francisco Chronicle, two of whom had been my former editors in Arizona. Two months after that, one of the editors at the Chronicle called me and said, “Hey, have you ever thought about being a tech reporter?” And I was like, “No, but what would that be?” And he said, “Well, you know, you just move here and write all about Apple and Google and Facebook and whatever seems interesting.” I was like, “That sounds like the greatest job in the world. Like, can I do that?” So they hired me to do it, and it really was the best thing that ever happened to me.
Wow, it’s really amazing how that just fell into your lap almost, and then changed the trajectory of your whole career.
It’s honestly terrifying! I’m more impressed with people who are very intentional about their careers. But this was definitely a happy accident.
So you started at The Verge in 2013, and while there you started a daily tech newsletter, The Interface. Now you’re leaving The Verge to produce your own newsletter with Substack — what influenced your decision to make that move?
I loved doing the newsletter. I wanted to figure out if there was a way where I could do it forever, and it seemed like the best way to do that was to just totally control my own destiny. I felt like the thing I was doing was valuable. People would email me sometimes saying, “I can’t believe this is free. I wish I could pay for this.” And at some point, I thought, “Maybe I should let them.”
And how is Platformer different from The Interface? How is it the same?
Right now, it looks almost identical to The Interface in content. Each day, I’m still bringing you a column about today’s biggest news and platforms, and I’m bringing you the best links about that subject from the best journalists in the world. And I think that format is going to endure for a while.
Where I hope that I can start to separate it from The Interface is that there’s just going to be more original reporting in it. In the past, if I had a scoop, I would just put that on The Verge and then the newsletter would be a separate thing. Now, the newsletter itself could be the scoop.
The hope is that over time Platformer starts to grow in people’s imaginations as, hopefully, the smartest site on the internet about platforms in particular and, you know, maybe a few other things along the way.
Do you have anything to say to your fellow Medill alumni?
I just have so much admiration for people who have stayed in journalism. Journalism is a really hard business to stay in. It tends to attract the most idealistic people that I’ve ever met. And unfortunately, once folks leave college, you’re just met with the cold realities of it being an extremely difficult business where the business models are very shaky, and where your fate is often controlled by a private equity firm, or, you know, someone with no editorial values. And it sucks! And so people leave. And so as a result, we don’t have nearly enough watchdogs for our democracy. And so the cool thing about having gone to a journalism school where there are so many great alumni and so many great students there now is just being part of a community of people who believe in that as an ideal and something worth fighting for.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Kenneth M. Wylie, Jr. (J 51, MSJ 52) died on June 1, 2020, at his home in Evanston following a long illness. He is survived by his wife of 66 years, the former Sarah Hibbard, and three daughters: Clarissa Wylie Youngberg, Mary Barr Wylie and Jennifer Sundy Fallon.
Ken was born 93 years ago in southwestern Pennsylvania. He moved as a child to the Chicago area and later to Tidewater Virginia. He served in the army from 1945 to 1947, spending 1946 in the U.S. zone of Germany as a radio technician/operator.
After graduating from Medill, Ken’s work was in magazine editing and reporting, university publications work (Northwestern and IIT), freelance editorial work, industrial technical writing, public relations and advertising. He was devoted to his church (First Presbyterian Church of Evanston) and to his community, serving frequently as an officer of the Kiwanis Club of Evanston Breakfast. During the 1960s he was among the founders of the Evanston Ecumenical Action Council, now known as Interfaith Action of Evanston. He published his novel, “Driving to Mercer,” in 2017.
Michael Patrick Kelley passed away on Tuesday, October 27, 2020, at Kingston General Hospital in Ontario, Canada.
He was born in Milton, Florida, on October 22, 1958, to Patricia O’Donnell Kelley Cronin and the late John E. Kelley.
He grew up in Erie, Pennsylvania, and graduated from Cathedral Preparatory High School and Northwestern University with a degree in journalism.
Michael was a loving son and brother, travelling much of the world through his work as a journalist. He worked for Bloomberg News in Amsterdam, Holland, and London, England, covering European stories. He then worked for the National Press in Dubai and Abu Dhabi and the United Nations out of Geneva, Switzerland. Michael spent several years teaching journalism in Morrisville, New York, before moving to Canada. He loved golfing and playing tennis. Michael enjoyed movies, reading, being in nature and Formula One racing, which he also covered for Bloomberg News throughout Europe and the United States.
Michael was preceded in death by his father.
He is survived by his mother, Patricia of Erie; a brother, Mark Kelley (Sussana) of Austin, Texas; and a sister, Maureen Allen (Keith) of Columbus, Ohio; and their children, Jack and Claire of Cincinnati, Ohio.
Stephanie Edgerly, associate professor of journalism, has been named the 19th recipient of the Martin E. and Gertrude G. Walder Award for Research Excellence. Edgerly is a pioneer within her field, conducting research on how features of new media alter the way audiences consume news and impact political engagement.
The award, which recognizes excellence in research at Northwestern, was established in 2002 by alumnus Dr. Joseph A. Walder and is gifted annually by the University provost.
“The Walder Award recognizes the excellent research of Stephanie Edgerly,” said Provost Kathleen Hagerty. “I am pleased to present this award to such an outstanding faculty member.”
“To be included among the impressive researchers who have won the Walder Award is truly an honor,” Edgerly said. “It’s additionally meaningful to be the first journalism professor to receive the award.”
In addition to her appointment in Medill, Edgerly is a faculty associate at Northwestern’s Institute for Policy Research.
Edgerly’s current research focuses on how people make decisions about what is news and their strategies for verifying information on social media. Working with the U.S. Department of State, she has presented her research to government officials, journalism organizations and the public through six speaking opportunities across the world.
In past research, Edgerly has identified and made sense of “news avoiders,” a group that largely engages with alternate forms of new media, in an effort to implement strategies to engage different individuals and help them better understand the news landscape. Her findings shed light on political and civic participation among U.S. adults.
Past projects have examined the impact of funny news talk shows (like “The Daily Show”), YouTube video activism in political movements (i.e., the Occupy movement) and online news searching behavior.
Edgerly earned her master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication. She received a B.A. in communication and political science from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Edgerly identifies the urgency to stay current and actionable as an advantage to researching media in Medill.
“What I love about being a media researcher is being able to observe a contemporary trend or behavior and saying, ‘I want to know more about that, how can I design a study about that trend?’” Edgerly said.
Edgerly is a speaker in the U.S. State Department’s International Information Program and a fellow in the Lillian Lodge Kopenhaver Center for the Advancement of Women in Communication. She also is a member of several professional associations including the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communications and the International Communication Association.
Joseph Walder earned his master’s degree in chemistry from Northwestern in 1972, as well as a doctoral degree in 1975. He also has established a permanently endowed professorship at Northwestern, the Irving M. Klotz Research Professorship. The complete list of award recipients can be found on the Office of the Provost website.
