APRD

Feeding ad-diction

Joe Arney — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 15:03:22 +0000

Feeding ad-diction Joe Arney Thu, 10/15/2026 - 09:03

An ad for BetMGM served up in a social media feed. In a new paper, expert Chris Vargo says the real signal for the growth of sports betting seems to be when the advertising goes into high gear, with power users seeing up to 100 or more ads a week.

Joe Arney

Chris Vargo didn’t need to write a paper about online gambling to illustrate its ubiquity. But it is a reason the advertising expert has become interested in it.

“Sports betting ads are everywhere—they’re inescapable,” said Vargo, an associate professor at the College of Communication, Media, Design and Information at the ��ñ��. “And we have a saying in advertising—if you’re seeing a lot of ads for a certain service, they’re raking it in.”

Rather than fixate on the omnipresence of online gambling, Vargo used a blend of Google Trends analytics and individual user data to understand how exposure to online gambling ads influenced user behavior, including the resumption of betting activity after a pause and searches for addiction treatment resources. Sports betting may be the most widely advertised form of online gambling, but he also looked at casino games, lotteries, skill-based games and financial betting. Some of the most visible non-sports examples are the prediction market platforms Polymarket and Kalshi.

The resulting paper was published in Policy & Internet this month—a different direction for Vargo, who typically submits his work to communication and advertising journals.

Chris Vargo

“This paper is really looking at advertising in a critical way,” he said. “A lot of studies in marketing or advertising journals focus on how to make advertising more effective. Here, we’re saying that this advertising is associated with gambling engagement and help-seeking searches.”

In 2020, Colorado became the 10th state to legalize sports betting; today, nearly 40 states have legalized some form of wagering on athletics. The uneven rollout across the country meant Vargo and his co-authors—Toby Hopp, also of CMDI, and Harsha Gangadharbatla, formerly of the college and now with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—could see the same pattern of help-seeking behavior repeated each time the industry rolled out advertising in a state.

“We thought it might be like marijuana—it becomes legalized, it takes a little time and then takes off,” Vargo said. “And while that’s true here, it’s really the introduction of advertising in each of these states that clearly signals the growth of sports betting.”

100-plus ads a week

The individualized data that Vargo and his co-authors analyzed for this paper comes from a YouGov/RealityMine survey and passive digital trace data, which he narrowed to 419 users. That dataset includes website and app visits, video plays, searches, social media activity—and, of course, the advertising they saw.

While gamblers see more gambling ads—an easy feat for advertisers with digital retargeting tools at their disposal—Vargo found higher exposure to these ads appeared to represent a higher risk for gamblers. While the research does not identify a “safe” threshold for online gambling ads, “some of our people in the survey were served 50, 100 or more gambling ads a week,” Vargo said.

More worrisome, he said, is the activity sportsbooks took to guide gamblers back to their apps and websites. The study’s authors looked for “clean” exposures—24-hour periods without gambling activity showing up in a user’s history.

“It’s really the introduction of advertising in each of these states that clearly signals the growth of sports betting.”

Chris Vargo, associate professor, advertising

“Once they hit that threshold, we watched to see if a gambling advertisement would precede their immediate visit to a gambling property,” Vargo said. “The answer is yes.”

According to the team’s findings, 8.3% of clean gambling-ad exposures were followed by some gambling touchpoint by the user within 24 hours.

“These sites are targeting these gamblers who’ve stepped away, to nudge them back in,” Vargo said. If you have alcoholism, for instance, social media platforms will allow you to hide ads that might trigger your addiction, “but I don’t know of any that allow you to hide gambling.

Establishing limits

Vargo hopes his paper helps change the conversation around online gambling—such as requiring advertisers to adopt limits, including rules around free bets and other enticements, or stronger platform oversight. For addiction support, he said, “the strategy is to meet people at the activation moment,” through counter-messaging on search and social media, links to self-exclusion and counseling, and partnerships or pressure on platforms to show support resources when betting ads appear.

While Vargo said he doesn’t have any issues with gambling, “I do find it interesting to look at different problems in society and try to understand them a little bit better.” As a professor, he said he’s seen students who have been sucked into these apps—especially amid widely watched World Cup and NBA Finals games, not to mention prediction market platforms that have dramatically expanded ways they can wager.

“I get it—it does make things more exciting, so you can imagine how young people become addicted by chasing that dopamine high,” he said.

The long-term behavior of gamblers is Vargo’s next project. He’s parsing Reddit to understand whether gambling correlates to an increased likelihood of getting divorced, developing bad habits or becoming more incivil.

“We’ve got around 4,000 or 5,000 people who say they gamble, and have been talking about it for at least three years,” he said, including some users who appear to be encouraging others to not give up the habit. “It’s an interesting dataset, all right.”

Joe Arney covers research and general news for the college.

New research from CMDI experts demonstrates how digital sportsbooks and gambling services identify bettors—and retarget them when they try to leave.

Off

Traditional

White

Mean machine

Ellie Chase — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 16:59:38 +0000

Mean machine Ellie Chase Wed, 10/07/2026 - 10:59

Joe Arney

Illustrations by Dana Heimes

“What are you doing about A.I.?”

Outside of where to find a good cup of coffee or what the Wi-Fi password is, there’s perhaps no question you’re more likely to hear on a campus than how
generative artificial intelligence is changing the college experience.

Mostly, you’ll hear how professors are teaching students to use it like a tool, not a magic trick, or to think critically about it. But that’s exactly what they said about Wikipedia a generation ago. What’s really happening around A.I.?

We asked people across CMDI to tell us how they’re actually studying and using—or not—A.I., whether in teaching, practice, research or creativity. (And for fun, we asked each person to describe A.I. in one word.) Here are their stories.

‘Apocaloptimist’

“Move fast and break things” is the mantra of the tech industry. In his A.I.-infused art and teaching, Christopher Carruth instead embraces what he calls “a slow, contemplative resistance.”

“My practice is about using technology to interrupt, interrogate and agitate conventional systems,” said Carruth, an assistant teaching professor of information science.

An example from his creative practice is american made machines, in which he took algorithmically curated digital spaces—Facebook feeds, recommender engines, inboxes—and used code to disrupt their underlying visual logic, rendering them as abstract shapes.

“These systems are increasingly shaped by A.I. and predictive algorithms to capture attention,” Carruth said. “This work interrupts that rhythm. Rather than extracting attention, it creates a space where viewers can become conscious of how their attention is being shaped in the first place.”

Notably, his work is not about rejecting A.I.: In his classes, he encourages students to debate ethical issues—self-driving taxis, predictive policing, facial recognition—to get them to slow down, too. He enjoys when students disagree and challenge their own ideas about technology.

“For a student who is focused on how to build a large language model, I hope to shift the thought process to how the data will be collected, and what consideration they have for copyright,” he said. “And having that dialogue without making it about right-vs.-wrong.”

‘Paradoxical’

Pooja Iyer likes experimenting with technology, so it’s no surprise she was among ChatGPT’s early adopters. “I remember immediately thinking this was search on steroids—so, personalized ads on steroids,” she said.

Iyer, an assistant professor of advertising, studies the interplay of data, privacy and personalized marketing. As A.I. platforms embrace ads, it’s clear we’re not going back on the ad-supported model of the internet.

“But how do we build this balance of being ethical and mindful about the data I, as an advertiser, use to sell my product?” Iyer said. “Because we’ve never asked the public what data they’re OK with advertisers using.”

Her research is trying to answer that question.

“Can I use your demographic data to show you a personalized ad—your behavioral data, health data, voting behavior data?” she said. “Research has consistently found that people like personalized ads, but there are ethical questions about how deep in the data we should go.”

Iyer typically opens her classes with a project where she doesn’t offer guidance on whether, or how, A.I. can be used.

“I wind up with 10 projects where I cannot tell one from the other,” she said. “And these students are competing for the same jobs. So, if this is your output, and it all looks the same, why should I hire you? Why not just plug it into A.I. myself?”

‘Overrated’

Ask Greta Kerkhoff (Jour’26) where the CU Independent stands on A.I., and she’ll point you to a very concise, one-word statement forbidding staffers from using it in their work.

“We pretty much have a zero-tolerance policy,” Kerkhoff, who served as editor-in-chief of the CUI last year, said.

“If we don’t set some parameters around it, we’re going to live in this world of increasing digital murkiness.”

Greta Kerkhoff (Jour’26)

Kerkhoff completed internships at KGNU and the Denver Gazette; she also published a report on regulatory shortcomings around A.I. in The Colorado Sun late last year.

She isn’t a Luddite—she recognizes these tools can be helpful for brainstorming, for instance. But she doesn’t buy the hype that it makes journalists more efficient.

“Even if there was a way to ethically use it, it creates more work for reporters because you can’t trust it’s telling you what’s right,” she said. “And the models are trained on existing information. If you rely on an algorithm to suggest sources, it will just regurgitate what’s already been done.”

Before Kerkhoff became its editor, the CUI briefly published a piece that the staff eventually determined to be written by A.I. It included multiple hallucinations and led to the dismissal of a writer and an editor.

“There are such ethical dilemmas around this technology,” she said. “If we don’t set some parameters around it, we’re going to live in this world of increasing digital murkiness.”

‘Unavoidable’

Chris Vargo calls himself a lifelong computer nerd but someone who “barely spoke the language of the country he was in”—until he discovered ChatGPT.

“Now, I can climb Mount Everest, with software,” said Vargo, an associate professor of advertising who specializes in analytics.

Vargo has published plenty of papers that rely on A.I. to uncover insights in datasets from Reddit, YouGov and others. A recent paper co-authored with Toby Hopp, also an associate professor of advertising, and PhD student Shahed Rahman examined the different customer journeys of people who use large language models, or LLMs.

“This dataset is two years old, but even then, one-third of the people were using LLMs,” Vargo said. “Yet advertisers haven’t updated their thinking beyond the traditional customer journey funnel.”

That funnel, which guides consumers from awareness to action, is collapsing—LLM users tend to make faster buying decisions, cutting out the middle—and business hasn’t responded.

“Ten years ago, to generate leads, you put a white paper behind a gate and made people sign up with their email,” Vargo said. “But if the agent can’t access that information, it can’t suggest you to users.”

He recommends companies put relevant information in easy-to-scrape text files—something he’s done with his own work, so A.I. agents will extend its reach.

“If marketers make it hard for agents to get the right data, they make it hard for their own products to be found,” Vargo said.

‘Hopeful’

Don’t think A.I. has its eyes on religion? Tell it to Jesus. Specifically, an A.I.-generated messiah that hears confessions in a Lucerne, Switzerland, church.

“I don’t have all the answers, because it’s moving so fast,” said Nesrine Mansour, assistant professor of architecture. “But A.I. is affecting how people are interpreting religion and thinking about architecture, authority and spirituality.”

Mansour studies spaces in digital religion—like games, televised services and apps—and the interplay of sacred architecture, religion and digital media. She’s developed guidelines for virtual sacred buildings to support architects, artists and game designers.

“I surveyed these virtual churches in game environments, and found most of them were replicas of real ones,” she said. “In a virtual realm, where they aren’t restricted by budget—or gravity—why do people re-create real churches?”

A book she edited, Religion in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, explores how A.I. shapes our day-to-day and spiritual lives, so that we might engage with it more thoughtfully. And A.I. is key to her teaching: Mansour incorporated diffusion models and LLMs into classes when the technology was just months old, and constantly tinkers with how to use A.I. in class.

“In architecture, we care a lot about how the building or rendering looks in the end,” she said. “But in terms of learning, I really think ethical workflow processes and prompt engineering deserve more attention.”

‘Beware’

A.I. is not all bad, Mehak Sawhney tells her students, but nor should we be all in on the technology. Instead, she advises A.I. be small scale and for special purposes.

Sawhney, an assistant professor of media studies, studies the environmental—especially water—costs of A.I., surveillance and other topics.

“A.I. needs to be understood across scales: global, regional, national and hyperlocal,” she said. “It is only through a combination of these scales that a nuanced understanding of A.I.’s role in financial bubbles, its varied adoption and its environmental impact can be understood.”

It’s the sort of humanities-focused approach she’s brought to a new graduate course on A.I. and the environment that she’s teaching.

“From an ethnographic perspective, it is important to see what A.I. means in different contexts,” Sawhney said.

For instance, people in developing nations might approach A.I. as an equalizing tool, especially for non-English speakers, while those living under authoritarian rule might see it as a progressive research field.

“However, this points more toward the colonial hegemony of English, ethnic and religious supremacy, and lack of resources in many parts of the world, rather than A.I.’s ability to solve structural problems,” she said.

‘Transformational’

By day, Priscilla Rain Hopper is a teacher who specializes in A.I. By night, she is … also a teacher who specializes in A.I.

Hopper (InfoSci’22; MS’23) is a lecturer of information science who works for an A.I. company—“which I said I would never do,” she admitted—that provides teachers and K-12 school districts with tools that allow them to more effectively plan lessons and provide support to students.

What drew her to MagicSchool AI, where she is a senior LLM quality analyst, “is that it’s A.I. for good.”

“My students want to fight the bad,” Hopper said, noting their concerns about ethics, environmental impact and employment prospects. “But you can’t do that from the sidelines. So, my message to them is: If you believe the rest of the world has the same ideas, intentions and solutions as you, fine. But I don’t think that’s the reality; otherwise we wouldn’t be here.”

At CMDI, her focus is teaching students to see the ways different A.I. tools can be used together to improve productivity—so, to be conductors of the orchestra, instead of experts in a single instrument. She also created a website for students that prepares them to position themselves in a competitive job market where the A.I. skills core to the information science major can prove a differentiating factor.

‘Repulsive’

It’s not wholesale A.I. that upsets Lori Emerson. Rather, it’s how far we’ve landed from the idealism of the 1940s and ’50s, when A.I. was first theorized.

“This shift we’re living through—where corporate A.I. is embedded into every piece of software and every platform—is not inevitable,” said Emerson, a media historian and professor of media studies. “This is being foisted on us by corporations trying to make as much money as possible.”

“Thinking, writing, producing, researching on their own terms—without it being done for them—is maybe the heart of what it means to be a human.”

Lori Emerson, professor

Last year, Emerson published Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook, which pushes back on the idea of inevitability—“that every change rolled out by technology companies is for the best, and makes things easier and more efficient.” She challenges students to question the narrative that they will be irrelevant if they object to A.I., and encourages them to think about older, analog technologies—like books, pen and paper, and typewriters—that enable creativity and invention, without conceiving of the user as purely a worker striving for efficiency.

“Partway through the semester, students begin to understand that thinking, writing, producing, researching on their own terms—without it being done for them—is maybe the heart of what it means to be a human,” Emerson said. “That’s why they come to college.”

Joe Arney covers research and general news for the college.

Let’s get past the platitudes on artificial intelligence. We asked students, alumni and faculty how they’re really using A.I. to work, teach, learn and create.

Off

Traditional

White

Offering advice

Ellie Chase — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 20:13:17 +0000

Offering advice Ellie Chase Sat, 10/03/2026 - 14:13

Members of the Boulder creative community—such as Nancy Perales, left, a senior director at Comcast—visited creative services agency 11 Dollar Bill to help students build local professional connections. Photo by Hannah Howell.

Joe Arney

The job market is a special challenge right now—but advertising students at CMDI said they have an edge.

“Many of my professors still work in the industry,” said Michael Robinson (StComm’26). “And they’re willing to help find connections for you in their networks in Denver and Boulder—and beyond.”

Robinson, who completed an internship with Ad Council over the summer, was among more than a dozen students who spent a Saturday at the Boulder offices of creative services agency 11 Dollar Bill, where they had the chance to be mentored by industry pros who’ve done work for Nike, Verizon, Pepsi, LinkedIn and more.

Jolene Fisher, associate chair of the advertising, public relations and media department, as well as an associate professor, said it’s just one way students are encouraged to connect with professionals.

“You’re not building a network so someone will give you a job,” she said. “You’re building a network because through that network, you learn what you can do and what you want to do.”

One mentor said he most appreciates CMDI students’ curiosity and courage.

“One of the most important things you can do as a young professional is to say ‘I don’t know,’” said Christopher Chapman, co-founder of Denver-based Imaginology. “Do they come to a conversation prepared? Do they ask questions? I love to see that enthusiasm.”

A meeting with Chapman helped Ansley Edelbrock, a senior majoring in strategic communication, give her resume a refresh.

“It’s so meaningful to meet with people who remember what it’s like being a student, looking for connections who can help you,” she said. “It gives me confidence and demonstrates how CMDI is supporting me as I build that network of professionals.”

Those connections have never been more important, said John Polk, 11 Dollar Bill founder and CEO; twice each year, he invites CMDI students to his agency, which works with Netflix, CVS, Manchester United and other global brands.

“The industry is dramatically changing, especially due to A.I.,” Polk said. “What I’m looking to do through this event is find mentors at companies where these students could potentially apply, to give them a leg up.”

“Oftentimes, I see their work and wish we had made something like that.”

Mickey Citarella (Bus, Span'11)

Mona Hasan, creative director of Boulder-based Fortnight Collective, said the students she met “had a swagger about them, and personality in their work.”

“The Boulder creative community is a unique place—partly because of the professionals here, but also because of CU students, who help nurture that creativity,” she said.

The students’ creativity also impressed Mickey Citarella, partner and head of account services at Sterling-Rice Group.

“Oftentimes, I see their work and wish we had made something like that,” said Citarella (Bus, Span’11). “It’s provocative, fun, exciting—it’s creativity in the best way possible.”

Joe Arney covers research and general news for the college.

Strategic communication students get access to an impressive network of creative pros who’ve worked on the world’s biggest brands.

Off

Traditional

White

Positive influence

Ellie Chase — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 18:47:42 +0000

Positive influence Ellie Chase Fri, 10/02/2026 - 12:47

Iris Serrano

Connor Houston remembers the first time he was recognized for a post he made on social media. He was in seventh grade and had just bought his first drone with his brother. They filmed a video of their neighborhood and uploaded it to YouTube; before he knew it, he was receiving compliments from neighborhood parents.

“Looking back on it, I can understand that what we were doing was much different than a lot of the other kids in our neighborhood,” said Houston (StComm’26). “It felt like we were famous for a brief moment.”

Since then, he has gained significant traction on social media for his content, with more than half a million likes on TikTok and partnerships with brands like Mountainsmith and Monster Brewing.

Influencers sometimes get a bad rap for spreading disinformation or promoting unattainable lifestyles. But Houston and other CMDI students say learning to influence in college teaches them the skills they’ll need in advertising, journalism, communication and more.

The work influencers do is more nuanced than what’s seen on the surface, said Erin Willis, an associate professor in the advertising, public relations and design department.

“We’re not just teaching students how to be influencers. We’re teaching them the skills that go into that and what companies are hiring for, like content creation and community management,” said Willis, whose research examines so-called “patient influencers”—those with diseases or disabilities whose messaging can influence others’ behaviors. “It’s ironic that we fear influencers, yet rely on them. That’s just the world we’re living in.”

Strategy, not slop

Willis prepares students in her capstone course to learn the difference between slop and strategy– thinking through content to ensure it reaches audiences and achieves goals. This is a skill that influencers like Tatum Merrill, who is majoring in strategic communication, can use to their advantage.

“My courses in strategic writing and software applications have built my confidence in designing and writing more professionally,” said Merrill, who plans to graduate in the spring of 2027.

Being an influencer has given Merrill opportunities outside of partnerships and brand deals.

Her first viral video—about a funny interaction with a Starbucks barista—racked up 13.3 million views on TikTok. Despite getting substantial attention, Merrill said her lifestyle content is solely for fun. She’s more interested in working as an account executive or brand manager, which involves a set of strategic skills she’s developing as a student; over the summer, she completed an internship at the public relations agency Clyde, as part of the Heidi L. Wagner CMDI in D.C. program.

Angelica Kalika (MJour’12; PhD’19), an assistant teaching professor of journalism, said learning how these skills fit together helps students speed through early-career growing pains.

“Employers are hungry to find people who are hungry as well,” she said. “Becoming an influencer means becoming a business owner, essentially. And so there’s so much less that employers have to teach you to get you on board.”

A matter of trust

Kalika is teaching a new course this fall on influence journalism, which focuses on preparing students to become credible news influencers—whether they work in legacy media or at an emerging digital platform. The course includes lessons on media literacy, audience engagement and artificial intelligence.

“My courses in strategic writing and software applications are the two classes that have built my confidence in designing and writing more professionally.”

Tatum Merrill, strategic communication

“We have all been taught to trust in legacy media. So when something new comes along, we are going to be skeptical,” Kalika said. “Teaching Gen Z to become ethical news content creators—to counter the disinformation we see on digital platforms—represents a huge opportunity for the future of journalism and hyper-local news.”

Houston’s experience reflects many of the skills both Kalika and Willis want students to develop through CMDI: His studies and years of experience as an influencer led him to launch UV9 Studio, a full-service advertising agency, with his brother.

In other words, yes, the brothers are still making content together.

“I definitely learned the most from the relationships that I built with my professors,” Houston said. “I have confidence in my work because I asked for their guidance on assignments, and sought feedback when I turned in a project I was proud of.”

Iris Serrano graduated from CMDI in 2026 with degrees in strategic communication and journalism. She covers student news and events for the college.

Student influencers at CMDI are no stranger to large followings and brand deals, but they said the college prepares them to think beyond content creation through lessons in strategy and community management.

Off

Traditional

White

#Crisis

Ellie Chase — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 18:29:37 +0000

#Crisis Ellie Chase Fri, 10/02/2026 - 12:29

Joe Arney

Illustration from Dana Heimes

It seems we have reached a moment where everything feels like a crisis, as unpredictable economic, defense, environmental and technology disruptions send us staggering from one disaster to another.

But though the temperature around geopolitical events has been rising for years, scholarly research hasn’t considered the role of culture in how organizations navigate crises. That’s now changing, thanks to Krishnamurthy Sriramesh, who is publishing a collection of global cases aimed at examining the impact of sociocultural variables on crisis communication.

Sriramesh, a professor of public relations, previously applied a framework of five cultures—political, economic, media, activist and societal influences—to address how organizations conduct PR. When the pandemic hit, “I realized there was an opportunity to explore culture as a key variable in the way crises are created and resolved,” he said.

That idea has resulted in a book, Global Cases in Crisis Communication: A Socio-Cultural Approach, published earlier this year; he also co-edited a volume of crisis cases from Asia and is working on a case study book from Africa. He intends to finish the series with a book of 10 cases from Latin America.

When completed, he’ll have published nearly 55 cases from 45 countries, and while COVID was the genesis for the project, Sriramesh considered it too dated for this series.

While a couple of cases focus on the pandemic, the rest address a variety of crises in business, religion, politics—and, oftentimes, the interplay among these larger forces.

“Look at digital media and A.I.—they are having significant impacts on culture even as we speak,” Sriramesh said. “If you’re looking at a case that’s six, seven years old, and your focus is on socio-cultural variables—well, your society has changed substantially during that time. Crisis communication scholarship needs to be current and holistic.”

In his books—both on PR and crisis communication—Sriramesh contends all five cultures are interrelated. The political ideology of a country, for example, determines its economic and media environment. So, to effectively respond to crises, leaders must understand these five cultures and how they combine in the organizational environment.

In tapping his extensive global network to find authors, Sriramesh made clear he was looking for insights that would help societal and organizational leaders respond to crises more effectively.

“I tell the contributors they have to link scholarship and practice, to include takeaways that challenge professionals to look back, to reflect and to apply what they learn here to their future actions,” he said.

One example: Sriramesh co-authored a chapter with consultant Mark Dillen, a former senior official at the U.S. Department of State, analyzing support for Ukraine during the Biden and Trump administrations leading up to the 2024 presidential election.

Sriramesh said their analysis showcases how public diplomacy and rhetoric often overshadow geo-strategic realities.

“In crisis situations, you start at the top,” Sriramesh said. “Biden appeared physically and ideologically tired. Trump exploited that to effectively stifle help to Ukraine, which previously had bipartisan support.”

Joe Arney covers research and general news for the college.

It’s never been easier for an organization to find itself amid a crisis. New research is trying to equip practitioners for a complex set of challenges.

Off

Traditional

White

‘I love it here’: CMDI’s Class of 2030 eager to turn creative passions into careers

Ellie Chase — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 13:21:55 +0000

‘I love it here’: CMDI’s Class of 2030 eager to turn creative passions into careers Ellie Chase Thu, 09/24/2026 - 07:21

Ellie Chase

When it came time for Nolan Vuldy to choose a university, he thought back to the lights, lasers and sounds that captivated his childhood.

The chance to dive deeper into production effects, and build a network and career path that will allow him to further explore his interests, led him directly to ��ñ��’s College of Communication, Media, Design and Information.

“I hope to start a production company someday,” Vuldy said. “CMDI stood out the most to me—I think this is a place that can help me with my career goals.”

Originally from France, Vuldy’s family moved to Colorado when he was a child to pursue opportunity. Now, he joins CMDI’s Class of 2030, one of 516 new first-year students eager to make their mark on ��ñ��.

Though new-student enrollment is slightly down from last year—following years of growth after the pandemic—students in CMDI’s Class of 2030 are among the high-achieving undergraduates in the college’s history. Here are some highlights:

54% of students enrolled were in the top 25% of their high school class.
The average SAT score among enrolled students rose to 1243, from 1230 last year.
CMDI also welcomes 62 new transfer students and 50 new graduate students.

“Each opportunity I’ve had to speak with our new first-year students—whether during their orientation or seeing them around campus over the last few weeks—has left me impressed with both their intellectual curiosity and their passion for creativity,” said Lori Bergen, founding dean of the college. “I’m really excited about the potential this group has to shape CMDI and, with what they’ll learn here, the world.”

Chris Bell (PhDMediaSt'09), speaks with new CMDI students after his speech for CMDI Go. (Kimberly Coffin)

Vuldy, a media production major, is a self proclaimed DJ and producer who hopes his peers can influence his future projects.

“I’m a very creative person, so being around other creative people is something that really excites me,” he said.

Dawson Justus, a Texas native who is studying architecture at CMDI, is also pursuing his degree based on an early fascination. In his case, it’s design.

Justus has family in the architecture industry who introduced him to the discipline. His dream is to design an aquarium or a zoo—both of which were among his favorite places as a child.

“I’ve always been drawn here, mostly by the architecture and environmental design department,” Justus said. “I really appreciate how we get to diversify our studies, learning about product design, urban planning and landscape architecture in our first year.”

The family trade is no stranger to Charlotte Callahan, who draws inspiration from her mom, formerly a traveling journalist for Inside Edition. Callahan grew up admiring her career and adventures abroad.

With a passion for speaking with people and sharing their stories, Callahan will be pursuing a journalism degree from CMDI. Her interest in the environment is what drew her to Boulder, and she’s considering environmental science as a second major.

Her dream job? Working for National Geographic.

“Journalism is so important, especially now,” she said. “We really need good journalism and better access to information.”

Callahan’s recognition of Boulder’s remarkable environment is not lost on other new students. The campus’ beauty and vibrant student life brought Elizabeth Lockhart from California to CMDI.

“I toured campus and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I love it here.’ When I got accepted, I almost cried,” she said.

Lockhart is majoring in strategic communication, with an emphasis in public relations.

Her goals in public relations offer a perfect intersection of youthful passions with career—she wants to work for Disney. She also has interest in PR for Formula One drivers, seeing an opportunity to bridge the gap in gender representation in motorsports.

“There’s not many women in F1—and it’s detrimental because a lot of their fan base is women, but you don’t see representation,” Lockhart said.

“I just love the campus and the people—everyone is so friendly. It feels good knowing I’ve already found my people.”

Violet Valentin

Violet Valentin shares Lockhart’s enthusiasm for public relations. Valentin is a strategic communication major, as well, and spent part of her summer with the Pathways to Excellence program. The summer bridge program introduces incoming students to CMDI’s majors and builds community before school starts.

“I just love the campus and the people—everyone is so friendly,” Valentin said. “It feels good knowing I’ve already found my people.”

Information science is the smallest major in the incoming class, but its unique blend of computing, social science and the humanities interested Heidi Welsh, who is curious about hospital technology, which involves studying data to create preventative technology.

“I want to be hands on,” she said. “I want to go out in the world and apply what I know to help people. I’m so excited for all of my classes—I think it’s going to be so different from anything I’ve ever done.”

Ellie Chase is studying journalism at CMDI, with a minor in business. She covers students and student news at the college.

CMDI welcomes its Class of 2030, an academically accomplished group with big dreams for the future.

Off

Traditional

White

Heads of the class

Joe Arney — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 18:39:27 +0000

Heads of the class Joe Arney Tue, 08/18/2026 - 12:39

Joe Arney

Meghan Sobel Cohen

One of Meghan Sobel Cohen’s most lasting memories of studying journalism at ��ñ�� was Cokes with Voakes—office hours that then-Dean Paul S. Voakes would host to get to know students outside of class over sodas.

It’s a tradition she carried forward in her time as chair of the communication department at Regis University, in Denver, and is excited to bring back to the College of Communication, Media, Design and Information as an associate professor of journalism.

“Coming back to CU feels like such a full-circle moment for me,” she said. “So, maybe we’ll start coffee with Cohen, or cookies with Cohen, in the fall.”

Cohen (Jour’09), an expert on media systems in authoritarian contexts and journalism’s role in peacekeeping, is among 13 new faculty—three of them alumni—joining CMDI this fall, with another set to begin in the spring.

“I am so excited by the wealth of experience that our new faculty will bring to CMDI,” said Lori Bergen, founding dean of the college. “The perspectives, knowledge and curiosity they will bring to our teaching, research and creative work will continue to enrich our students and community.”

Cohen said she’s especially excited to return to what she called “a truly inspiring campus.”

“I feel really excited and grateful to be back in Boulder,” she said. “I was here when it was a school of journalism—and it’s inspiring to see the evolution of CU alongside the changes in journalism and communication. I’m excited to become a part of that, to encourage that evolution and help change the way our students think about communication, media and journalism more broadly.”

In addition to Cohen, the following faculty will join CMDI this academic year.

Advertising, Public Relations and Design

Hyun Seung Jin, associate professor. Jin joins the college from the business school of Queensland University of Technology, in Australia. His work explores psychology, creativity and technology.

Richard Khleif (PhDMediaSt’07), assistant teaching professor. Khleif brings decades of global technology industry experience to the college. He also is an emeritus founding member of CMDI’s advisory board, and completed the integrated marketing communication program from the former School of Journalism and Mass Communication in 1999.

Communication

Lamiyah Bahrainwala, assistant professor. Bahrainwala was previously chair of the communication studies department at Southwestern University. She studies anti-Muslim sentiment through surveillance, race, the environment and more.

Alicen Rushevics, assistant professor. Key themes in Rushevics’ research include discourses of reparation and apology, indigenous human rights and U.S. imperialism in the Pacific. She completed her PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2026.

Environmental Design

Sophie Weston Chien, assistant professor. After completing two master’s degrees in landscape architecture and planning from Harvard University, Chien joined CMDI as a chancellor’s postdoctoral fellow. Her research involves organizing in design, participatory textile research and fabrication, and theorizing contemporary design practice.

Pol Fité Matamoros, assistant professor. Fité Matamoros completed his PhD at the University of California–Berkeley, where he has been a designer in residence since 2025. He examines connections between visual culture, the spatial production of social and racial difference, and regime building.

Priyanka Sen, assistant professor. Sen will join CMDI in the spring after completing her PhD from Cornell University. She studies the intertwined histories of the built environment and agricultural practices tied to South Asian migration.

Nettie Skievaski (EnvDes’22), assistant teaching professor. In addition to her career in graphic design, Skievaski has been an instructor at CMDI since 2022.

Information Science

Jason Lucas, assistant professor. Lucas earned his PhD from Pennsylvania State University. He develops multilingual A.I. systems across underserved languages to advance safe, equitable technology.

Aspen K.B. Omapang, assistant professor. Another Cornell scholar, Omapang researches political relations between Indigenous peoples and settlers in managing natural resources.

Katlyn Turner, assistant professor. Turner has been a research affiliate and instructor with CMDI since 2023. Her work focuses on environmental and climate justice, technology, policy, systems, and self-determination.

Media Studies

Susan Abbott, assistant teaching professor. Abbott brings more than two decades of experience in media development, digital democracy and civil society to her teaching. She was previously a lecturer at CMDI.

Journalism

Meagan Doll, assistant professor. Doll has held postdoctoral roles at the universities of Minnesota and Washington. She studies news consumption and production, with particular interest in perceptions of news in nondemocratic contexts.

Jason Lucas

Interdisciplinary importance

New faculty called the interdisciplinary nature of the college and its work a key factor in their decisions to come here. Cohen, whose work experience includes the U.S. State Department—where she observed the disconnect between the needs of human rights organizations and the limitations of journalists who cover them, leading her to her research niche—said the changing nature of the news business is a call for educators to combine related disciplines, to better prepare students for the challenges that await them after graduation.

Jason Lucas, of information science, said the department’s values and culture of collaboration were major draws to him—though also important is that his wife, Umniya Najaer, has been a postdoctoral fellow at ��ñ�� since July 2025. His work studies artificial intelligence from the lens of language.

“There are 7,000 languages spoken in the world. And only about 20 of them have sufficient digital footprints to train robust models that can be useful for end users,” Lucas said.

It’s a safety concern, not just a usability issue, he said, as models can be attacked based on the data used to train them, leaving certain communities more vulnerable to the spread of disinformation or cybercrime. “And even with reinforcement learning, we cannot solve that basic security issue,” he said. “So we have to concern ourselves with both equity and safety.”

Lucas hopes to engage with these problems through SEAL, the Secure and Ethical A.I. Research Lab, which he’ll direct at CMDI.

Pol Fité Matamoros

Pol Fité Matamoros’ education spanned design disciplines like architecture, urban design and landscape architecture, which drew him to an environmental design department that brings all these areas under one roof. His research interest—which considers the advancement of fascist movements as expressed through visual and spatial culture—draws on these disciplines, plus humanities and social sciences.

“It’s easy to fall into this trap of saying the global rise of nationalist movements we see today is the same as it was in the 1920s. And it’s not,” Fité Matamoros said. “But there are similarities, and I think understanding how fascist movements in the ’20s and ’30s operated gives us a clue as to how they operate today.”

He studies the phenomenon through the lens of his native Spain, which watched its American colonial empire fall apart following war with the United States. The country’s attention turned to Africa, seen as a bountiful land of riches that could offset Spain’s decline—a concept Franco exploited in his rise to power.

He sees some of that today in the United States, where the Trump administration has pushed to rename the Gulf of Mexico and speak of colonizing Greenland and Canada.

Renaming, he said, is not just changing a label, “it repositions a space within a broader narrative of national rebirth. These spatial moves are not only moments of rhetorical excess, they create an appealing spatial argument for a violent nationalist narrative.”

Joe Arney covers research and general news for the college.

CMDI is welcoming 14 new faculty with expertise in journalism, business, surveillance, technology and more.

Off

Traditional

White

Eight is enough: CMDI piles up top paper awards at influential conference

Jayden Fortner — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 20:12:06 +0000

Eight is enough: CMDI piles up top paper awards at influential conference Jayden Fortner Wed, 08/12/2026 - 14:12

Iris Serrano (Jour , StComm’26)

After working as a journalist in Bangladesh for 17 years, Ershad Khan noticed a common theme that continued to drive his work as he entered academia.

Journalism’s most influential theories have been developed through a Western lens. And while these frameworks have shaped decades of research, Khan doesn’t believe they fully capture the reality of journalism in countries with different political systems, languages and cultural settings.

Now, the journalism PhD student in the College of Communication, Media, Design and Information is working to broaden perspectives.

Journalism PhD student Ershad Khan, left, won a best student paper award for his work on how A.I. is reshaping the news outside of Western contexts, as well as a research award. Here, he poses with the award alongside Beverly Horvit, of the University of Missouri.

“There’s a tendency to interpret press systems outside of the West as authoritarian, but there are nuances and other factors researchers miss,” Khan said. “I want to make things more inclusive from my own experiences and from my own cultural proximity.”

His paper, Artificial Intelligence and the Journalistic Field: Reconfiguring Capital, Legitimacy and Professional Authority in Bangladesh, examined how artificial intelligence is reshaping journalism in Bangladesh and affecting the workflow of newsrooms and journalists’ perception of their work.

One of the study’s biggest findings was that A.I.’s effectiveness relies heavily on language. English-language news organizations in Bangladesh can more easily integrate A.I. tools because large language models have been trained extensively in English. A lack of training data in Bengali means native-language newsrooms struggle to integrate these tools.

“The language these tools generate in a local language is something similar to seventh graders’ standard when they want to give output for their readers,” Khan said. “So they need to heavily edit those outputs. That’s not efficient for their newsrooms.”

This work earned Khan a first-place student paper award from the international communication division at the annual conference of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, which took place earlier this month in New Orleans.

He was among dozens of CMDI students and faculty to be recognized, bringing home a total of eight top paper awards and contributing 47 peer-reviewed papers. Khan also won a student research grant award for his proposal, Overt and Covert Control: How Competitive Authoritarian Regimes Restrict Journalistic Autonomy. The study aims to understand state mechanisms for controlling the press in the Global South based on data collected from Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Uganda.

Founded in 1912, AEJMC is the oldest and largest alliance of journalism and mass communication educators and administrators at the college level. Today, the nonprofit organization includes thousands of educators and students from around the globe.

“It is such an honor for the work of our faculty and students to earn recognition from a prestigious organization like AEJMC,” said Patrick Ferrucci, professor and chair of the journalism department at CMDI. “To see the incredible work coming out of all the schools who attend the conference, and to then watch so much of CMDI’s work be recognized, is incredibly humbling. It’s a testament to all the great work from faculty and grad students in journalism and APRD.”

Angie Chuang, an associate professor of journalism, also received recognition at the conference for her book, American Otherness in Journalism. She was presented with the Frank Luther/Kappa Tau Alpha Research Award, given to the best book on journalism and mass communication based on original research. She was also a finalist for the Tankard Book Award.

Angie Chuang, left, with the Frank Luther/Kappa Tau Alpha Research Award she won for her book, American Otherness in Journalism. She is pictured with Raluca Cozma, outgoing Kappa Tau Alpha president and a professor of media and communication at Kansas State University.

Her book examines how the news has historically represented different communities and how political rhetoric has influenced who gets designated, as she said, “American with an asterisk.”

While writing the book, Chuang was surprised by just how quickly political landscapes and conversations about identity can change.

“How did we go from the summer of Black Lives Matter and really examining structural racism to banning DEI and questioning birthright citizenship in just a few years?” Chuang said. “When information is so fast-paced, and you have all of these new ways of communicating, things can change fast.”

Chuang said allowing people to limit what it means to be American will create a less-inclusive society. As the news industry evolves through social media, Substack, podcasts and other outlets, she said journalists have a greater responsibility to ensure voices are represented fairly.

“Whoever the news media is going to be, whether it’s traditional journalists or new media journalists, let’s remember what our values are,” Chuang said. “It’s not biased to say we would like to include all Americans’ voices in the news.”

Chuang’s work is defined by her experience working in the newsroom as a reporter, including coverage of issues related to race and ethnicity at The Oregonian. She called the award especially meaningful because it comes from peers who have also worked in the industry.

“To have journalists-turned-academics say this is a book that feels real, and has potential use in a newsroom today—that is a really nice compliment,” Chuang said.

A full list of CMDI presentations at AEJMC follows. Names in bold are CMDI faculty and students. In addition, many CMCI faculty and students in the journalism, media studies, and advertising, public relations and design departments moderated or served on panels, or led workshops, in addition to serving as heads of different divisions.

Advertising Division

Designing LLM Chatbots to Drive Webtoon Engagement: From Attention to Retention. Won-Ki Moon (University of Florida) and Sangwook Lee (assistant professor, APRD).

Broadcast and Mobile Journalism Division

Gatekeeping in Mobile Journalism: A Comparative Framework for Autonomous and Constrained Media Environments. Mamunor Rashid (PhD student, journalism).

Journalistic Authority as Epistemic Power: Framing and Ideology in Partisan News Talk. Manwar Hossain (PhD student, journalism).

Commission on Graduate Education

Making Asynchronous as Synchronous as Possible: Designing an Isolated Website for Summer Semester Online Journalism Course Engagement. Carl Knauf (PhD student, journalism).

Realities, Challenges, and Hopes in Career Building Toward Academia, Communication, and Journalism: Insights from Faculty and Graduate Student Perspectives. Mamunor Rashid (PhD student, journalism).

Commission on LGBTQIA+ Communities

The Professional Backstaging of LGBTQ+ Identity in Sports Journalism. Ashley Carter (assistant teaching professor, journalism). Top faculty paper, third place.

Commission on the Status of Minorities

Journalistic Objectivity, Epistemic Contests, and American (U.S.) Journalism: Audience Metajournalistic Discourse in Post-George Floyd Racial Reckoning. Dennis Okeke (PhD student, journalism). Top student paper, first place.

Commission on the Status of Women

I'm Worried ��ñ�� Sexual Assault. I'm Worried ��ñ�� Dying’: An Intersectional Analysis of How US Women Photojournalists Experience Occupational Safety Threats. Dinfin Mulupi (assistant professor, journalism).

Intersectional Analysis of Global Menstrual Leave News for Informal Labor. Shreyoshi Ghosh (PhD student, journalism).

Communicating Science, Health, Environment, Risk Division

Message Format and Influencer Roles in Sustainability Persuasion: Evidence for Format-Source Alignment in Climate Communication on Social Media. Vaibhav Diwanji (University of Kansas), Hong Vu (associate professor, journalism), Nhung Nguyen (University of South Alabama) and Nazra Izhar (University of Kansas).

We’re Leading the Transition: How Oil Companies Use Climate-Delay Discourses to Frame Their Responsibility on Social Media. Dien Luong (University of Michigan), (Frank) Hechen Ding (University of Kansas) and Hong Vu (associate professor, journalism).

Communication Technology Division

Assessing Relationships between Higher Education Institutions and the Public on Social Media: A Quantitative Content Analysis. Bachchu Shekh (PhD student, APRD).

Exploring How A.I. Technology Impacts Students’ Learning Outcomes and Self-Efficacy. Md Sazzad Hossain (University of Iowa), Shah Jahan Shuvo (University of Alabama), Bachchu Shekh (PhD student, APRD) and Jamil Marques (University of Iowa).

Community Journalism Interest Group

Vanishing Voices: Policy Failure and the Decline of Diaspora Journalism. Manwar Hossain (PhD student, journalism). Top student paper, first place.

Cultural and Critical Studies Division

At Least It Will Be 24 Hours Without Fake News’: A Thematic Analysis of Online Comments on Newsroom Strikes. Qiongye Chen (PhD student, journalism) and Ever Figueroa (assistant professor, journalism).

Journalism at the Crossroads of Culture and Climate: Journalists and Indigenous Perspectives on Environmental Reporting. Shitemi Khamadi (University of Indiana) and Dinfin Mulufi (assistant professor, journalism).

Navigating Hierarchies in Communication Journal Publishing: African Scholars’ Experiences and Strategies. Success Osayi (PhD student, journalism).

The Public Investment Fund and Saudi Sports Investment: Western Media and the Struggle for Legitimacy. Mohammed Abu Alqas (PhD student, journalism) and Huda Asiri (PhD student, journalism).

Racialized Stigma as Preoccupation or Site of Resistance: Comparative Critical Discourse Analysis of Mainstream and Chinese-Language News Media Coverage of the Atlanta Spa Shootings. Wen Lei (PhD student, journalism), Angie Chuang (associate professor, journalism) and Shreyoshi Ghosh (PhD student, journalism).

Risk Without Recognition: Power, Labor and Safety in Global Conflict Reporting. Mushfique Wadud (PhD student, journalism).

International Communication Division

Artificial Intelligence and the Journalistic Field: Reconfiguring Capital, Legitimacy and Professional Authority in Bangladesh. Ershad Khan (PhD student, journalism). Top student paper, first place.

Beyond the Threat-Efficacy Gap: A Longitudinal EPPM Analysis of Climate Journalism in Bangladesh Across Crisis Events (2020–2024). Mamunor Rashid (PhD student, journalism).

Climate Change Frame-setting on Audience Emotions and Engagement: A Comparative Study of Vietnam, the Philippines and Singapore’s News Media. Hong Vu (associate professor, journalism), Le Thanh Trieu (Vietnam National University), Thin Van Dang (Vietnam National University) and Tham Thi Nguyen (RMIT Vietnam).

Competing Threats, Competing Enemies: Gulf and Egyptian Elite Discourse, Blame Attribution, and the Politics of Meaning in the 2026 Gulf Escalation. Mohammed Abu Alqas (PhD student, journalism).

Media Sources and Public Perceptions: Survey from High-Risk Areas in Peshawar. Hina Ali (PhD student, journalism).

Outward-Facing Legitimacy in Saudi English-Language News: Narrating Sport Diplomacy and Managing Sportswashing Critique After the FIFA 2034 Decision. Mohammed Abu Alqas (PhD student, journalism).

Power, Profit and the Press: A Comparative Political Economy of Media Ownership and Advertising Influence in Pakistan and Bangladesh. Muhammad Ali (PhD student, journalism) and Ershad Khan (PhD student, journalism).

Role Conceptions of Journalists and NGO Practitioners: Perspectives on Covering Humanitarian News in Crisis and Disaster Zones. Rania Al Namara (postdoctoral researcher, media studies).

Mass Communication and Society Division

Framing Dissent in South Asia: A Thematic and Discourse Analysis of Al Jazeera’s Coverage of Youth-Led Movements in Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka. Mamunor Rashid (PhD student, journalism) and Md. Sajedul Islam (Southern Mississippi).

Media Ethics Division

Seeing and Not Seeing: Gen A.I., Professional Identity and Moral Perception Among Advertising Creatives. Jianhua Lu (PhD student, APRD). Top student paper, second place.

Paradigm Destruction: How Journalism Casually Contributes to Its Own Credibility Debacle: Patrick Ferrucci (professor, journalism).

Minorities and Communication Division

Beyond the Headlines: Arab Students’ Perceived Social and Personal Effects of U.S. Press Coverage of Gaza. Mohammed Abu Alqas (PhD student, journalism).

Introducing Racialized Metajournalistic Discourse: American Journalism and Racialized Violence in Digitized Metajournalistic Discursive Sites: Dennis Okeke (PhD student, journalism).

Newspaper and Online News Division

Disseminator or Advocate? Role-Toggling in Professional Practices Among Environmental Journalists. Patrick Ferrucci (professor, journalism) and Hong Vu (associate professor, journalism).

Evaluating Texting as a Strategy for Audience Engagement: A Chicago Sun-Times Case Study. Meagan Doll (assistant professor, journalism) and Benjamin Toff (University of Minnesota).

Revisiting the Protest Paradigm: Thematic Framing and Protest Legitimacy Across Liberal and Semi-Authoritarian Media Systems. Mamunor Rashid (PhD student, journalism).

Telling The Story of a Newsroom: Organizational Narrative and The Field of Journalism. Patrick Ferrucci (professor, journalism).

Participatory Journalism Interest Group

Examining Volunteer-Newsroom Collaboration in Community Radio: A Case Study on Community Radio in the Boulder and Denver Areas. Rania Al Namara (postdoctoral researcher, media studies) and Patrick Ferrucci (professor, journalism). Top faculty paper, first place.

Disrupting the Profession: Participatory Journalism and the Audience Turn: Fahad Humayun (Ball State University) and Muhammad Ali (PhD student, journalism).

Political Communication Division

Framing Democracy After Authoritarianism: How Bangladesh’s Media Covers Established vs. Uprising-Born Parties in the 2026 Election. Mamunor Rashid (PhD student, journalism).

Qatar’s Mediation Role Under Pressure: Comparative Framing and Strategic Narratives in U.S. and Qatari Coverage of the 2025 Doha Strike. Mohammed Abu Alqas (PhD student, journalism).

Religion as a Connective Communicative Social Technology: A Theoretical Framework. Lorcan Neill (University of North Carolina), Daniel Kreiss (University of North Carolina) and Jordan Morehouse (assistant professor, APRD).

Voices Unsilenced: A.I.-Generated Political Communication in Constrained Democracies. Muhammad Ali (PhD student, journalism) and Hina Ali (PhD student, journalism).

Public Relations Division

To DEI or Not To DEI: A Multi-Source Analysis of Corporate Social Advocacy. Teresa Tackett (University of Arkansas, Fayetteville), Andrea Lorenz (Kent State University) and Bridget Barrett (assistant professor, APRD). Top faculty paper, third place.

The Dialectical Tensions of Neoliberal Narratives and Field Logic in Public Relations AI Practices: Kyle Harris (PhD student, APRD).

Sports Communication Interest Group

Peripheral Mending at the Edges of Sports Journalism: Metajournalistic Discourse of the Terry Rozier Sports Gambling Scandal. Ever Figueroa (assistant professor, journalism) and Patrick Ferrucci (professor, journalism)

Visual Communication Division

Violence, Suffering and Courage: Pulitzer Prize Winning Photographs, 2003 to 2025: Lisa Krantz (University of Missouri) and Ross Taylor (associate professor, journalism). Top faculty paper, third place.

Iris Serrano graduated from CMDI in 2026 with degrees in Journalism and Strategic Communication. She covers student news and events for the college.

Faculty and student research into topics like A.I. and community journalism were recognized at this year’s AEJMC conference in New Orleans.

Off

Traditional

White

2 minutes with: TEDxCU

Ellie Chase — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 04:37:10 +0000

2 minutes with: TEDxCU Ellie Chase Mon, 04/27/2026 - 22:37

Student speaker Leo Heuring delivers his talk in Macky Auditorium in early April. Heuring is studying creative technology and design, and was accompanied by his robotic dog, Corndog, for his speech. In his talk, Heuring explored the meaning humans convey to their robots and the positive outcomes of these meaningful connections. Photo by Jack Moody.

Ellie Chase

Learn more about TEDxCU, one of the oldest and largest university organized TEDx events in the country

Kalen Sieja, a co-curator of the 2026 TEDxCU event, speaks at the reception following the main event, On the Contrary. Sieja, who is graduating this year with a double major in political science and ecology and evolutionary biology, used his time in the spotlight to thank TEDxCU and toast to another successful year. Photo by Hannah Howell.

TEDxCU, which focuses on featuring independently licensed TED Talks, is among the oldest and largest university-organized events of its kind in the country. The student-led TEDxCU team hosts events in which talks are filmed in front of a live audience in Macky Auditorium. Students select six to nine speakers per year and work together to finance and plan the event, and coach the speakers. We’re here with Kalen Sieja, the TEDxCU co-curator, to discuss the ins and outs of the program.

Responses edited for length and clarity.

Tell me about TEDxCU.

The purpose of TED is to showcase ideas that aren’t always highlighted in dominant narratives. I think that the purpose of college and the mission of TED are the same—to get exposure to ideas worth spreading.

How do you choose speakers?

We usually get about a hundred applications from potential speakers. We select about half of our speakers from that pool. One of our speakers is always the winner of our Student Voices Speaking competition, hosted in the fall. For the remaining speakers, we reach out to folks in the community or familiar faces from TV that we think are doing cool things.

What have been some of your favorite speakers or topics?

It’s so hard to choose! Last year I coached Felony Misdemeanor, a drag queen, who talked about the history of drag and her drag household in Denver. It was so cool to get to know her through that process. We also had the world record holder in Olympic speed climbing do a talk with his coach, which was also really cool.

Best reason to join?

It is by far, the best opportunity for professional growth and development that I have had access to in college. We have a team of 60 people and a budget of more than $50,000, so you are essentially participating in a small production company—you learn skills that you can’t learn in a classroom. It is also the No. 1 thing employers will ask about on your resume.

So, help me understand: If I were to join, what work would I be doing?

We work pretty much year round to put on the event. Our members are split into 12 teams, all working on different aspects of the organization—from finance to community outreach. That’s one of the coolest things about TEDxCU—whatever major you are, we have a job tailored for your skill set.

That's amazing that so many majors are valued at TEDxCU. What CMDI-specific skills does the club help students to develop?

There’s a lot of marketing, PR and engagement. Endless communication with organizations in the community, trying to get them to participate, promote our program or even sponsor us financially. We also love folks who are good at public speaking, or want to grow their public speaking skills.

Tell me the most chaotic thing that’s ever happened during a show.

Two years ago we had some videos embedded in our slide deck. The video worked on rehearsal day, the video worked day of—and as soon as the event started, the lights dimmed and the video would not play! That was a disaster—it was video problem after video problem at that event.

If you could pick one person to speak at CU—dead or alive—who would it be?

I’m a political science nerd, so I would love to get a really iconic Supreme Court justice. Like, Ruth Bader Ginsburg or Ketanji Brown Jackson. I’d love to hear RBG talk about being a woman on the Supreme Court in a pioneering time, and her experiences and outlook on cases.

Interested in joining TEDxCU? For more information check out tedxcu.com, and follow @tedxcu on Instagram for event updates and more.

Ellie Chase is studying journalism at CMDI, with a minor in business. She covers students and student news at the college.

TEDxCU Co-curator Kalen Sieja discusses how students bring "ideas worth spreading" to life through TEDx talks.

Off

Traditional

White

Trust the process

Joe Arney — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 17:02:14 +0000

Trust the process Joe Arney Fri, 04/24/2026 - 11:02

Henry Ugwu was managing communications for the Nigerian government’s pandemic response when he realized he needed more experience. That led him to CMDI and its PhD in strategic communication. Photo by Kimberly Coffin.

Joe Arney

It was while managing the Nigerian government’s pandemic-related communication campaign that Henry Ugwu realized he needed more experience.

“I was all of 25 years old, running meetings with ministers and governors, and trying to guide them on what to do,” said Ugwu, who was the technical communications lead on the project. “That’s when I realized I had to up my game.”

To be fair, Ugwu’s game was already highly leveled when he arrived at ��ñ��. Most notably, he was a senior communications specialist with Credo Advisory—with offices in Nigeria and Washington, D.C.—where he worked on clients such as World Bank and the US Agency for International Development; he also was a youth fellow at the International Monetary Fund.

But coming to the College of Communication, Media, Design and Information for his PhD in strategic communication gave him a theoretical grounding that he said has dovetailed nicely with the practical skills he developed in his professional career. It was still an adjustment for Ugwu to find himself in a classroom, though.

“The industry is all about immediate results—you run a campaign, you see the data in real time, you see the impact of the work you’re doing and behaviors you’re helping to change,” he said. “Now, I apply theories to explain the phenomena of what happens in the field.

“My first semester was a bit of a learning curve, with a lot of reading to do. But I love the academic research side of things, where I explore varying topics, make a hypothesis, test it and try to publish it.”

An early advisor connection

Ugwu credited his advisor, Jolene Fisher, with helping his maturation as a student and researcher. In fact, he already knew of Fisher—an expert in strategic communication for development work and social change—from his career.

“My first introduction to Jolene was through her incredible work, and when I reached out to her to learn more, she could not have been more encouraging and personable,” he said. “I came here with all these broad ideas, and Jolene really helped me narrow things down. She has been extremely instrumental in my success as a researcher.”

Jolene Fisher

Fisher still remembers the Zoom call she took with Ugwu as he was exploring doctoral programs.

“I couldn’t believe, after doing so much research in international development and communication, that I might finally have a student who was just as into this work,” she said.

Ugwu’s work is tailor-made for the crisis development organizations are navigating. His broad interests encompass public relations, health communications and development communications; his dissertation explores issues of trust that multilateral development organizations like USAID and the United Nations are facing at a time of cutbacks and intense scrutiny of their work.

“The legitimacy of organizations like the World Bank and the UN is coming from critics who say that, since they’ve been established, they haven’t met their missions of driving development and eradicating poverty,” Ugwu said, noting the significant positive impact such organizations have had in addressing the world’s most complex issues. “But it’s important to examine the impact and relevance of these organizations from the perspective of communications professionals who are managing this emerging crisis.”

One thing he’s interested in, for instance, is localization—involving stakeholders in a solution, rather than prescribing answers from faraway places.

“It’s listening to what the needs are and having people at the grassroots lead in identifying and working toward solutions,” Ugwu said. “This kind of work is important to anyone working on communications in global health or in international development.”

There is extensive scholarly work on development communication, but Fisher said Ugwu’s work represents a novel approach in thinking about how these kinds of relationships are created and managed through the lens of public relations.

As seismic shifts test those partnerships and strain resources, “it’s more important than ever to understand how we think about who holds the power to make decisions about development projects,” she said. “And his fieldwork really helps him see these challenges and bring them to life for the students in his classes, who may not appreciate the different places their strategic communication education can take them.”

Combining work experience, research insights

The chance to bring the observations from his life and work in Nigeria to the field was a key reason Ugwu was excited about doing a PhD.

“I think it’s a great opportunity to contribute to revisiting, and maybe improving, some existing theories—or potentially developing a new one,” he said.

Henry Ugwu’s work in the field ‘really helps him see these challenges and bring them to life for the students in his classes,’ says his advisor, Jolene Fisher. Photo by Kimberly Coffin.

Ugwu hopes to research and teach in academia—he recently won a Graduate Part-Time Instructors Teaching Excellence award from the Graduate School and a research and academic achievement award from CMDI—but plans to keep active in industry so that he’s able to bring trends and insights to his students. He shared the story of fueling up his car during the worst of COVID and overhearing a conversation where a woman claimed the disease wasn’t real, in spite of all Ugwu and his team were doing to change behavior and ensure positive health outcomes for residents.

“That was hard to hear—despite being aware of such skeptics from our polling data—but it forced us to change our approach, which had been really high-level communications,” he said. “We realized we needed more grassroots engagement to complement what we were doing on radio, television and social media.

“Conducting research that helps people better understand the scale of the problem was fulfilling. And that’s something I want to be able to offer to students—because there are some lessons that you can really only learn from being out there and doing the work.”

Joe Arney covers research and general news for the college.

Celebrating the Class of 2026

The transition from industry to PhD work was an adjustment for Henry Ugwu when he arrived at CMDI. Learning new perspectives helped him create novel research on trust.

Off

Traditional

2026 Graduation Celebration

White