Alice Foeller’s TEDx Talk was chosen as a TED Editor’s Pick in 2025, and she published a book this summer. Alice’s book, The Art of Compassion: Supporting Friends Through Dark Times, is a handbook for being helpful to someone who is grieving. Grief research is artful woven into Alice’s personal narrative of losing her husband to suicide in 2023.
Shannon Edwards (MSJ95)
AI is already shaping how children learn, play, and see the world, leaving many families feeling overwhelmed and uncertain about navigating this new digital reality. AI for Families provides the guidance families need to approach AI innovation with confidence and on their own terms.
The book isn’t about fearing AI or fighting against AI, but a guide providing practical support for the questions families are already wrestling with at home. From strengthening app privacy settings to helping kids think critically about AI-generated responses, AI for Families offers clear explanations, historical context, and actionable solutions that put families in control of decisions based on their individual values, beliefs, and needs.
Most importantly, AI for Families is about embracing the deeply human traits of curiosity, creativity, empathy, and connection that will serve children well into the future. The goal isn’t competing with AI, but raising kids who can work alongside new technology while owning and celebrating what makes us uniquely human.
Alice Foeller (BSJ98)
In this memoir of a liminal passage through grief, Alice Foeller shares compelling stories from the days and weeks following her husband’s suicide. Her sensible and actionable guidance serves as a handbook for anyone who seeks the courage and confidence to show up for someone who is grieving. Whether read as a resource for grief support or the gripping narrative of a resilient widow, The Art of Compassion will enlarge the reader’s capacity for compassion and caring through critical passages.
The book includes narrative descriptions of the author’s own experience, suggestions on how to move forward through the unique grief following suicide, and ways that communities of understanding may form to give support to those passing through one of the most difficult traumas in human experience.
This resource can be many things: autobiography, guidebook, and tutorial for those working with grieving persons. Though meant for individual reading and reflection, it also doubles as a text for those learning about suicide and its aftermath. Small study groups will find The Art of Compassion is the perfect size and format for lively discussions.
Bob Reiss (BSJ73)
Coming January 2026. Distraught 12 year old Abani Singh shows up at the office of Mark St. Johns, private detective and grandson of the legendary RKO Pictures detective “The Falcon”, claiming to have witnessed a self-driving car hit a man, back up, hit him again and drive off by itself. Mark assures her that this is impossible, but when he sees people targeting the girl when she leaves his Edgar Allan Poe street office in New York, he reconsiders, rushes to protect her, and finds himself facing a danger which threatens far more than one child. Film rights to RKO.
Sharon Yoo won a National Edward R. Murrow Award for KING 5 in Seattle. Sharon will travel to New York City next week to accept the award at the 2025 National Edward R. Murrow Awards Gala. The honor is for her 30-minute documentary, “The Buffalo Hunt,” in the category of Excellence in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, Large Market Television.
In the documentary, Sharon and a photojournalist follow the Kalispel Indian Tribe as members prepare for Indigenous People’s Day through their annual buffalo hunt. The tradition honors their ancestors, culture and is a vehicle to help heal wounds from the past.
Matthew Murray has joined Cozen O’Connor Public Strategies as a principal in Chicago, in its strategic communications practice, where he will help lead the firm’s expanding suite of communications offerings. Murray is an award-winning reporter and longtime communications strategist for Fortune 500 companies, nonprofits, and federal officials, where he has served as an executive speechwriter and editor, and has led AI initiatives across content, thought leadership, and social media functions.
Born Oct. 1, 1951, in Boise, Idaho, Christopher J. Harper passed away on July 23, 2025.
Harper graduated with a bachelor’s degree in journalism and English literature from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln in 1973. He earned a master’s degree in journalism in 1974 from Northwestern University.
He received many accolades during his time as a reporter. At Newsweek, he reported on Jonestown, Guyana, in November 1978 and was nominated for a National Magazine Award.
As the Beirut bureau chief for Newsweek from 1979 to 1980, Harper reported on the continuing Lebanese civil war and the Iran hostage crisis. He was expelled from Iraq in 1980 for his reporting about Saddam Hussein, whom Harper described as “The Butcher of Baghdad.”
Harper was the Cairo bureau chief for ABC News in 1981 and was expelled by Anwar Sadat in September of that year for interviewing a previously expelled correspondent in Beirut.
During his work in Rome, as a correspondent and then as bureau chief from 1981 to 1986, Harper reported on the 1981 plot to kill Pope John Paul II, Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, the marine barracks bombing of 1983 that left 241 soldiers and Navy seaman dead and the 1985 hijacking of TWA Flight 847—for which he and his team were nominated for five Emmy awards.
In 1986, Harper joined ABC News 20/20 and worked there until he left the news business to teach journalism at New York University in 1995. At Temple University, he headed the Multimedia Urban Reporting Lab and taught multiple classes within the journalism department, including Journalism and the Law, International Reporting and Ethics of Journalism.
Harper edited and wrote seven books, including one of the first about the digital age and its influence on journalism titled And That’s the Way It Will Be. His book Flyover Country was published in 2011 and documents the history of his high school graduation class of 1969 from Lincoln High School in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
In January 2013, Harper started a column on the journalism industry for The Washington Times. His last column was published in May 2015.
By Kaitlin Bender-Thomas
Medill Professor Kalyani Chadha’s new book, “Disrupting Mainstream Journalism in India,” explores how India’s mainstream media has historically excluded or misrepresented marginalized communities and how alternative journalism is pushing back against it. In this Q&A, Chadha reflects on how her scholarship has shaped her teaching and why it matters for the next generation of journalists.
Q. How has your research informed your teaching, and have you brought any of these themes into the classroom at Medill?
A. I have in a graduate classroom, not so much in an undergraduate classroom, mainly because of what I teach. But what I have tried to do is sensitize students to the coverage of marginalized communities, broadly speaking, in the United States. So that’s very much a part of the version of JOUR 202 that I developed. You know, how do we cover marginalized communities more sensitively?
In my graduate classes, of course, I’ve tried to talk a lot about the theoretical ideas of the book, which is how digital affordances allow different kinds of marginalized groups to create what are called counterpublics or counterpublic spheres — so, arenas in which they operate. And I just taught a PhD-level class where we had extensive discussion of these ideas.
Q. Why do you think it’s so important to teach students how to cover marginalized communities with sensitivity and care?
A. Here’s the thing. I think the best journalism is journalism that sort of looks at things from other people’s points of view. It’s easy to empathize with people like yourself. But as it turns out, a lot of people are not like oneself, whether it’s in a demographic sense or whether it’s in the sense of some kind of other issue.
So I feel like good journalism is empathetic journalism at some level, or at least journalism that provides — even if you can’t empathize — maybe journalism that enables you to develop perspective. It gives your audience some perspective on other people’s lives, other positions, other ways of looking at the world, or other ways of being. I think studying groups that have been marginalized really hopefully does that for students because, as I said, it’s very easy to do journalism and to feel empathetic when you focus on people like yourselves. It’s just infinitely harder when it’s people who are different from you, in whatever capacity.
Q. What advice would you give to journalists who are trying to cover communities that are different from their own and still produce good journalism?
A. Ask yourself, at some level at least, what are my own biases? How do I look at these things? People will say, ‘I don’t have biases.’ I would beg to differ. We all have these notions of how we think about people who are different from us. Try to go into a community and try to find people who have an understanding of the community. Don’t just rely on official sources. Don’t just rely
on what you think is happening. Try to get a sense from someone who’s a part of the community
— what is going on there? Be open about what you don’t know. Being a know-it-all does not help. Like, “I know how I’m gonna write this story.” Well, why bother to go to the neighborhood then?
And yes, it’s very difficult when you’re not a part of the community. Most marginalized communities have zero reason to trust the mainstream press. Their experiences in general do not lead them to do so, and you have to understand that.
Q. What do you hope students and journalists take away from your book?
A. I think they should question the nature of their practice. It’s very easy to write a story that runs according to some pre-existing template in your head or within your organization. It’s very easy to tell a story by calling the same sets of sources or taking whatever the official line is, or whatever some institutional person or official gives you.
I hope people will learn that stories are complex, with many perspectives that often go unexplored. They should be trying to look for those stories, look for those voices that don’t get represented. Be challenging. Is what seems to be the story really the story? What else could be going on there? Whose voice is being heard? What voices aren’t being heard? What kinds of stories are being covered? Who’s just not in the news for whatever reason?
By Kaitlin Bender-Thomas
In her new book, “Disrupting Mainstream Journalism in India,” Medill Professor Kalyani Chadha sheds light on the communities that the country’s growing media industry has long overlooked and the digital journalists working against the odds to change that.
Chadha, originally from India, has spent much of her academic career studying the country’s evolving media landscape. She had been thinking about how marginalized communities were beginning to use the Internet to push back against their exclusion from mainstream coverage when the editor of Routledge’s “Disrupting Journalism” series reached out with a timely proposal: Would she consider writing a book on India?
“I was thinking about these things already, and then this opportunity came along,” Chadha said. “And so then I was like, okay, so this is what I’m going to do it on.”
India’s media industry has undergone tremendous growth since the country liberalized its economy in the 1990s. Today, India has nearly 15,000 registered newspapers and 392 television news channels.
One might think this kind of expansion would lead to more inclusive or representative journalism. But, according to Chadha, the reality is quite the opposite.
“It didn’t necessarily mean that we were getting better journalism,” Chadha said. “There was a lot of infotainment. There was a lot of focus on crime, celebrities, and sports. Public interest journalism really wasn’t happening.”
What troubled her even more was the continued exclusion and misrepresentation of India’s most marginalized communities. Much like in the United States, these groups face deep-rooted structural discrimination. However, she notes that in India, the primary line of division is caste, as opposed to race.
From Chadha’s relatively brief time working in Indian newsrooms, she observed firsthand that those institutions were not representative of the country’s diversity.
“Newsrooms in India are incredibly undiverse — both in terms of caste and in terms of religion,” she said.
The impact of this lack of representation is evident in the stories being told — or more often, not told at all. Groups like Dalits (historically referred to as “untouchables”) and Muslims are rarely given a voice in the mainstream media, and when they are, they’re often covered in a negative context.
“You see this in the United States, too,” she said. “Either you get no coverage, or the coverage you get, you’re sort of the source of problems.”
In her book, Chadha draws on the concept of “epistemic injustice,” a term coined by philosopher Miranda Fricker. It refers to the idea that some communities are denied the opportunity to narrate their own experiences and to be seen as credible sources of knowledge about their own lives.
But her book also explores how marginalized communities are responding to this injustice. Many are launching their own digital media platforms and telling their stories on their own terms. She found that this form of alternative journalism doesn’t subscribe to the traditional notions of objectivity or neutrality. Instead, it prioritizes advocacy, transparency, and community-based sourcing. By shifting the focus, these journalists are actively challenging who gets to decide what is “newsworthy.”
“What these communities try to do is give a much more holistic picture of the lives of these groups, both the negatives and the positives. They try to create a sense of perspective on what’s going on,” Chadha said.
One example she highlights is the work of Dalit-run news organizations that produce counternarratives on caste-based violence. She recalls a particularly harrowing case from 2020, in which a lower-caste woman was gang-raped and murdered by upper-caste men in a rural part of northern India. While mainstream media downplayed the role of caste and framed the incident as a “love affair gone wrong,” Dalit-run news platforms confronted it as a source of ongoing oppression.
There was a real effort to push the caste angle aside,” Chadha said, “Very often, mainstream narratives will say, ‘Well, this really wasn’t about caste,’ just like sometimes they will say, ‘This really wasn’t about race.’”
Muslims face similar misrepresentation. Chadha found that mainstream coverage in India rarely portrays Muslims in an everyday context. Instead, they’re often depicted as extremists, fundamentalists, or jihadists. Alternative media outlets counter this bias by showing Muslims as professionals and individuals who lead normal lives.
Despite operating on tight budgets funded through donations and personal savings, Chadha says the journalists she interviewed were filled with hope.
“I was really awestruck by the journalists that I spoke with, and the outlets, and the work that they produce,” she said. “Because it just takes so much to keep these outlets going. Sort of a wing and a prayer, a lot of the time.”
While these alternative media outlets do not solve every problem, Chadha emphasizes that their presence matters because they give marginalized groups a sense of agency, provide holistic counternarratives, and challenge the agenda-setting power of mainstream media.
At Medill, Chadha incorporates her research into the classroom by encouraging students to confront their own biases, look beyond official sources, and strive for what she calls “empathetic journalism.”
“It’s very easy to do journalism and to feel empathetic and to focus on people like yourselves,” she said. “It’s infinitely harder when it’s people who are different from you.”
At a time when journalism around the world is facing political pressure and economic uncertainty, she hopes her work serves as a reminder of what’s at stake and to give a voice to those too often left out.
Join Dean Whitaker for the annual homecoming/reunions dean’s reception at Medill on Friday, Oct. 3 at 3:30 p.m.
Where: MFC Forum – 1870 Campus Drive.