News

By Barbara Wiedemann
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It’s back on campus!

The Carolina community welcomed Dean Raul Reis to Chapel Hill this summer, where he has been meeting with Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz, Provost Chris Clemens and his compatriot Carolina deans all across campus, and acclimating to summers in the South from his most-recent home in Boston.

When Peyton Launder ’23 left high school in Alamance County, North Carolina, he wasn’t sure exactly what he wanted to do. He thought a community college would be a great place to figure it out — while staying close to home and beefing up his GPA. Eventually, Alamance Community College led him to UNC Hussman through the Carolina Student Transfer Excellence Program (C-STEP), an innovative initiative that helps North Carolina community college graduates transition to UNC. Founded in 2006 with the support of the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, C-STEP fosters success by identifying talented low- to moderate-income students while they’re in high school or early in their community college careers. Selected students are guaranteed admission to Carolina after earning an associate degree and successfully completing the program. C-STEP students are offered mentorship and guidance while pursuing their degrees.

When the news of Roy Williams’ retirement broke on April 1, 2021, the team at Carolina Connection, UNC Hussman’s student-run radio show, went to work. They had just hours to piece together the story of the UNC men’s basketball coach’s illustrious career. But they did it — so well that the prestigious Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) recently honored the Williams-focused show, as well as Carolina Connection and its students, in the SPJ’s annual Mark of Excellence Awards recognizing collegiate work published or broadcast during 2021.

The sixth annual conference — the first held in person in two years — focused on the theme of mis- and disinformation, or how information spreads in a rapidly, increasingly global, communications landscape. Tori Ekstrand ’03 (Ph.D.) an associate professor in the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media, provided structure and insight for the trip. She is the Dr. Caroline H. and Thomas S. Royster Distinguished Professor for Graduate Education at Carolina. Hussman Associate Professor Deen Freelon, and Daniel Kreiss, Hussman’s Edgar Thomas Cato Distinguished Professor, also attended Royster Global and presented their own research and how it related to the conference topic. 

The UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media community of scholars left a deep footprint at the August 2022 conference of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication held in Detroit, Michigan. Five of the school’s graduate students earned top national honors for research papers, joining UNC Hussman faculty, alumni and administrators in extending the school’s tradition of leadership among its peers.

UNC Hussman master's student Samantha Corcoran’s first public affairs assignment for the U.S. Coast Guard? Documenting government officials as they surveyed hurricane damage in Haiti. Fresh out of college, she found herself taking photos as the Haitian president and a U.S. ambassador toured Hurricane Matthew’s damage to the Caribbean country in 2016 — not exactly the “first job” scenario she’d imagined as a high school student in landlocked Pennsylvania. But the Coast Guard has taken Corcoran many places she never thought she’d go, including UNC, where the military branch’s Advanced Education Program funds her graduate studies focusing on strategic communications.

by Barbara Wiedemann
A conversation with recent alumnus Daniel Johnson ’22 (M.A.), an incoming Ph.D. student at UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media. On June 8, Johnson published a story in Slate magazine about broken links, inoperable phone numbers and out-of-date information he found on websites related to suicide prevention and mental health resources at military bases around the country. Also in June, U.S. Representative Jahana Hayes (CT) and a bipartisan group of colleagues proposed an amendment to the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) related to the types of problems Johnson identified in his story. The amendment, which passed the House vote on July 14, will change the way every military installation in the country provides mental health information to members of the armed forces. We spoke after the NDAA was advanced.

Fourteen graduating and returning graduate students, six faculty members and various alumni are scheduled to represent the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media Aug. 3-6, 2022, at the 105th Annual Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication Conference, held in Detroit, Michigan.

By Beth Hatcher
This summer, UNC Hussman students are preparing to launch successful careers by honing professional skills and gaining new perspectives at internships across industries and across the country.