2010 Academic Fellows Program

The Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism has announced the recipients of the inaugural 2010 Dart Center Academic Fellowships. The inaugural program is set for  June 17 to 19 at Columbia University.

For more than a decade, the Dart Center Ochberg Fellowships have provided intensive trauma training to career journalists, developing and strengthening their skills and abilities in covering violence and traumatic events. The Academic Fellowship offers similar in-depth training to journalism educators who are seeking to learn skills and develop curriculum that will better educate students on newsgathering, storytelling and self-care when reporting on human tragedy.

The selection team was impressed by the number and quality of all the applicants, says Meg Spratt, director of Dart Center West, located at the University of Washington Department of Communication. “The response shows us that many educators care deeply about preparing their students to report on traumatic events,” says Spratt, who is spearheading the academic fellows program.

With support from the University of Washington Center for Global Studies, the fellowship provides three days of seminars, training and discussion plus financial support for innovative curriculum development. 

The 2010 Dart Center Academic Fellows are (detailed biographies below):

• Randal Beam, University of Washington
  Associate Professor, Communication
• Celeste Gonzalez de Bustamante, University of Arizona
  Assistant Professor, Journalism
• Nancy McKenzie Dupont, University of Mississippi
  Associate Professor, Journalism and New Media
• Dawn Fallik, University of Delaware
  Assistant Professor, English
• Barbara Hans, Hamburg University
  Lecturer and Researcher
• Teresa Lamsam, University of Nebraska
  Associate Professor, Communication
• Yvonne Latty, New York University
  Director of Reporting New York and Reporting the Nation programs
• Cliff Lonsdale, University of Western Ontario
  Lecturer, Information and Media Studies
• Mark Masse, Ball State University, Indiana
  Professor, Journalism
• Elizabeth Mehren, Boston University
  Professor, Journalism
• Benjamin Ortiz, Harry Truman College, Chicago
  Assistant Professor, Journalism
• Ian Richards, University of South Australia
  Professor, Journalism
• Dan Williams, Lyndon State College, Vermont
  Associate Professor, English, Philosophy, Film Studies

THE 2010 DART CENTER ACADEMIC FELLOWS

Randal Beam is an associate professor at the University of Washington Department of Communication. He teaches courses on journalism and the mass media and is a co-author of “The American Journalist in the 21st Century: U.S. News People at the Dawn of a New Millennium.” The book, based on a national survey of about 1,300 newsmen and newswomen, examines the social characteristics, values, working conditions and ethical beliefs of U.S journalists. Beam also has co-authored an article about journalists and trauma. He is active in the Media Management and Economics Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC). He serves on the editorial boards of Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly and of the International Journal on Media Management.

Celeste Gonzalez de Bustamante is an assistant professor at the University of Arizona School of Journalism and an affiliated faculty member of the UA Center for Latin American Studies. Before joining the faculty, Gonzales de Bustamante reported, produced and anchored in commercial and public television for more than 15 years. Currently, she teaches journalism reporting courses that focus on the United States-Mexico borderlands. Her research concentrates on the history of news media in Mexico, Brazil, and the US-Mexico border region and has been published in Journalism, Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos and Revista Galáxia (PUC-São Paulo). Recently, she completed a book manuscript entitled, “‘Muy buenas noches,’ Mexico, Television and the Cold War.”

Nancy McKenzie Dupont is an associate professor at the Meek School of Journalism and New Media at the University of Mississippi. She teaches primarily broadcast journalism, but recently spent a year advising the campus newspaper, the Daily Mississippian. She has served as chair of the Radio-Television Journalism division of AEJMC as well as chair of the News division of the Broadcast Education Association. Her research interest is 19th century journalism, though she has recently has focused on the effectiveness of media hurricane warnings. She and her family are Hurricane Katrina survivors.

Dawn Fallik is an assistant professor at the University of Delaware, Department of English. Fallik has covered natural disasters, executions and a Nebraska prom in her 20 years of reporting. She began teaching journalism full-time at the University of Delaware in 2007 after leaving the Philadelphia Inquirer, where she spent a month in India covering the tsunami, wrote a series on medical errors that launched a formal investigation and followed a nursing student who overdosed a patient. She was co-director of the National Institute of Computer-Assisted Reporting and an Associated Press reporter in Baltimore, Philadelphia and Omaha.

Barbara Hans is a lecturer and researcher at Hamburg University. Hans worked as an editorial trainee with Spiegel Online and Der Speigel in 2006, and now works as an editor and a reporter for Speigel Online. Her stories have focused on poverty, violence, integration, addiction and sexual abuse. In 2009 Hans joined the faculty at the Chair in Journalism and Communication Studies at the University of Hamburg, Germany, and works for Professor Siegfried Weischenberg. She teaches courses varying from writing skills to communication theories and media ethics, and supervises students and conducts research for her doctoral thesis.

Teresa Lamsam is an associate professor at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, in the School of Communication and is the incoming director of the Native American Studies Program. She is a member of the curriculum development team and teaches courses in the “Working with Native Communities” track. She also served as editor of the Osage Nation News, a tribal newspaper. Her research areas include Native American tribal media, Native community development, and development communication. Her attitudinal and framing research has focused on perceptions and use of ICTs in Indian Country, tribal employees’ perceptions of development communication, and perceptions of Native American journalists toward tribal media.

Yvonne Latty is a journalism professor at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, where she directs two multimedia graduate concentrations, Reporting New York and Reporting the Nation. She is the author of “In Conflict: Iraq War Veterans Speak Out on Duty, Loss, and the Fight to Stay Alive” (Polipoint Press 2006), which became an Off-Broadway play, and the critically acclaimed “We Were There: Voices of African American Veterans, from World War II to the War in Iraq” (Harper Collins/Amistad 2004). She worked for the Philadelphia Daily News for 13 years where she was an award-winning reporter specializing in urban issues. She currently is producing and directing a documentary on uranium contamination on the Navajo reservation.

Cliff Lonsdale is a lecturer of information and media studies at the University of Western Ontario, and president of the Canadian Journalism Forum on Violence and Trauma, an educational charity. Lonsdale reported on the 1960 civil war in Congo and Zambia’s transition to independence in 1964, and worked in Rhodesia, now known as Zimbabwe, as the producer and host of a nightly radio program, Newreel. Lonsdale worked for many years as the Chief News Editor for CBC Television, the Head of Production in Europe, as well as the Head of Production for CBC News, Current Affairs and Newsworld. After leaving CBC in 1993, he made independent documentaries, filmed and distributed worldwide. In 2002 he began teaching journalism at the University of Western Ontario, in London, Ontario, where he currently chairs the Journalism Program Committee. He specializes in television and international reporting.

Mark Masse Mark Masse is a professor of journalism at Ball State University, Indiana, where he is also the director of the Journalism Writing Center and former news-editorial sequence coordinator. Masse has written for international, national and regional periodicals, including The New York Times, Ladies’ Home Journal, Hemispheres (United Airlines), Writer’s Digest, The Writer, Men’s Health, Golf Journal (U.S.G.A.), Catholic Digest, Midwest Living and Modern Short Stories, among others. Masse, author of a book on social activism and a novel, is writing a work of narrative nonfiction on trauma journalism for Continuum International Publishing. An excerpt, "Transformer: How Tragedy Shaped a Journalist's Mission," appeared in fall 2009 issue of River Teeth.

Elizabeth Mehren is a professor of journalism at Boston University. Before joining the BU faculty, Mehren was a national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. During more than 25 years at the paper, she was based in Los Angeles, Washington, New York and New England. She covered presidential, gubernatorial and congressional campaigns from 1980 to 2006, as well as major breaking news events such as Hurricane Katrina, 9/11, the Station Night Club fire in Rhode Island, the Worcester, Mass., warehouse fire that killed seven firefighters, and the Los Angeles riots of 1992, for which the newspaper won a Pulitzer Prize. Mehren, a former fellow at the Casey Journalism Center for Children and Families at the University of Maryland, also served as scholar-in-residence at the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia.

Benjamin Ortiz is an assistant professor of journalism at Harry Truman College, Chicago. Ortiz attended Loyola University Chicago, where he earned an honors degree in the study of English Literature and Philosophy. After graduate study at Stanford University, he worked as a journalist, performance poet, and non-profit arts organizer in San Antonio and Chicago. Benjamin currently teaches full-time at Truman College. His areas of focus include composition, creative writing, journalism, and literature. An active journalist, Benjamin writes for the Chicago Tribune and Café Latino Lifestyle Magazine, regularly contributing articles on music, the arts, and culture. He also has participated in a professors’ radio discussion and performed a news round-up on VOCALO Chicago public radio (89.5 FM).

Ian Richards is a professor of journalism at the University of South Australia in Adelaide, Australia. His research interests include journalism and media ethics, an area in which he has published widely. He is editor of Australian Journalism Review, Australia's leading journal in the academic field of journalism, and chairs his university’s human research ethics committee. A former newspaper journalist, his experience extends from general reporting to leader-writing and covering Australian indigenous affairs for a metropolitan daily newspaper.

Dan Williams is an assistant professor of journalism at Lyndon State College in Lyndonville, Vermont, where he created an innovative trauma training scenario. Williams entered teaching after a quarter century in print and broadcast news. He began his journalism career as a reporter for the Examiner-Enterprise in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, and subsequently worked for United Press International, Radio Free Europe-Radio Liberty, and CNN. He graduated from Kansas State University with a bachelor’s degree in journalism and received an M.A. from Ohio State University’s Kiplinger Program in Public Affairs Reporting.