faculty

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.

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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.

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Envisioning a strong future for a broken world

Joe Arney — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 16:11:49 +0000

Envisioning a strong future for a broken world Joe Arney Mon, 10/05/2026 - 10:11

Iris Serrano

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed right now—the climate crisis, violence against immigrants, wars, social and economic inequality, and countless other catastrophes have left communities in need of spaces where people can digest information and imagine a stronger future.

If you go

What: Why We Come Together: Media, Religion, and Community.

When: Oct. 21 to Oct. 23. A welcome reception will take place Wednesday, Oct. 21, 5 to 6:30 p.m. in Eaton Humanities 1B50. A closing reception Friday, Oct. 23, will run from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Koenig Alumni Center.

Where: With the exception of the opening and closing receptions, all programming takes place at the Williams Village Conference Center.

Who: Students, faculty, staff and the university and Boulder communities are invited.

Notable: The Center for Media, Religion and Culture, which is hosting the event, is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year.

The conference is free to attend.

Learn more

The Center for Media, Religion and Culture will create that space at its upcoming conference, Why We Come Together.

“This is a moment to really ask radical questions about what we do and how to do it better,” said Nabil Echchaibi, director of the center and associate dean of scholarly and creative work at the College of Communication, Media, Design and Information at ��ñ��. “CMDI is a platform for that kind of reflection.”

The purpose of the conference isn’t to go over the endless list of tragedies society is facing. Instead, it’s to uplift, by creating a space for scholars, educators and activists to rethink how communities come together and how industries can reorganize for the greater good.

“Academia thrives on assessment, but we wanted to figure out what’s on the other side of assessing the world,” said Echchaibi, also a professor of media studies at CMDI. “The idea is to go beyond that—to ask tough questions in order to think through them, and then figure out a more humane response to the moment in which we live.”

The conference will include talks from three featured speakers:

Fred Moten, professor of performance studies and comparative literature, New York University. His teaching and writing focus on poetics, aesthetics, Black studies and critical theory.
Nichole M. Flores, associate professor of religious studies, University of Virginia. She researches the relationship between aesthetics and democracy, with emphasis on the Catholic and Latine theological and ethical traditions.
Jen Deerinwater, an award-winning journalist and organizer. Deerinwater is the founding executive director of Crushing Colonialism, an indigenous storytelling, arts, and media nonprofit.

Nabil Echchaibi

Moten’s talk will open the conference; Echchaibi said his work on the Black radical tradition and spaces of study make him a natural fit for the event.

“Fred Moten has always said that you have to live in the brokenness of the moment, because the brokenness of the moment is what really produces something that we don't necessarily recognize,” Echchaibi said. “He's a jazz musician, a poet, a scholar. He's the kind of eclectic thinker who you really want for a conference like this.”

This year’s conference is the center’s 12th, and takes place as it celebrates its 20th anniversary. To mark the milestone, a reception will be held on Friday, Oct. 23, recognizing the work faculty and fellows have done to explore the intersection of media and religion.

Beyond that reflection, Echchaibi hopes the event prompts people to reflect deeply and boldly on the world around them.

“It’s a moment for people to stop, pause, and acknowledge the brokenness of the world, and to acknowledge the fact that we live in this brokenness,” he said. “Whether we live here in Boulder or we live in the Congo, we are all implicated and we need to assume that responsibility.”

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

In its 20th year, CMDI’s Center for Media, Religion and Culture asks why we come together and how that can help us respond to global crises.

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Sight unseen

Jayden Fortner — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 03:34:03 +0000

Sight unseen Jayden Fortner Sun, 10/04/2026 - 21:34

Jonathan Zong is trying to help designers think about how blind and low-vision people interact with technology—including challenging the idea that access alone is a sufficient goal. Photo by Kimberly Coffin.

Joe Arney

A question guiding technology designers—especially in the age of generative artificial intelligence—is whether their products and services are accessible to all.

Jonathan Zong has a bigger question: Is access enough?

Zong, an assistant professor of information science, has worked with blind and low-vision people to understand how technology can benefit them, as well as the limitations they face in trying to use it. It’s why the work he did as a PhD student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology is such a point of pride for him.

“We did all this work to create better, more accessible interfaces for data—but then we asked people why they felt it was important to have access to this data,” he said. “And we heard a lot about agency—people being participatory, as opposed to depending on others to do the analysis for them.”

That was when Zong began to think about how to shift power in ways that invite more people to participate in knowledge creation.

“That project turned into finding ways to not prioritize the visual output—so rather than first designing visualization, then making it accessible, we treated visualization as just one output,” he said.

He experimented with presenting data through text, nonspeech audio and tactile charts, allowing those who are blind or have low vision to interpret data without an intermediary.

Zong is a computer scientist and a visual artist who brings those different perspectives to bear in reimagining sociotechnical systems, such as large technology platforms, which he fears have created small, massively influential groups of people that decide what technologies should be put into society. It’s work he continues as founder of the Data and Design Group at the college.

“We need to be preparing the next generation of engineers and designers to think in these modes of the social and technical.”

Jonathan Zong, assistant professor, information science

“We shouldn’t just be asking how things work, but thinking about their effects on society,” he said. “Are we creating equitable spaces online where everyone is invited to participate equally? Or are we serving the very few at the expense of public interest?”

His focus on including people with disabilities into conversations around data, access and agency started during the COVID-19 pandemic, when elected leaders and health agencies used visualizations to share information about infections, hospitalizations, mortality and vaccinations.

“These graphics were telling really important stories in the public discourse, like flattening the curve,” Zong said. “And there weren’t always good alternatives. Think about describing a chart to someone: You might not capture the important takeaways of how that person might make better decisions.”

A.I. as a game changer

While his work has brought attention to the lack of agency many blind or low-vision people feel on a visual internet, generative A.I. has the potential to change how these users experience information online, such as automatically describing an image when a sighted person isn’t available.

“But they’re also aware of the downsides—that people don’t upload image descriptions, that the A.I. will make mistakes, that A.I. descriptions can be really biased,” Zong said. “And again, there’s that loss of agency, because now they’re reliant on a fallible A.I. to be the interpreter.”

That critical perspective on technology’s potential is why he was excited to arrive at CMDI’s information science department, which is positioned at the intersection of computer science, the humanities and social sciences. Increasingly, design is being recognized as an important discipline for thinking through these problems.

That multidisciplinary viewpoint is crucial to reimagining technology as a force that works for people.

“We need to be preparing the next generation of engineers and designers to think in these modes of the social and technical,” Zong said. “Thinking about design as a way to intervene in situations and create better alternatives is really important to me as both a researcher and an educator.”

Joe Arney covers research and general news for the college.

Internet users with low vision don't want the world described to them—they want to actively participate. One researcher is out to change how we think about accessibility.

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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.

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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.

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#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.

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Strokes of genius

Jayden Fortner — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 19:40:46 +0000

Strokes of genius Jayden Fortner Tue, 09/29/2026 - 13:40

CMDI’s environmental design department curated a collection of work by Ping Xu and her students that was unveiled during a ceremony celebrating her impact as a teacher and researcher. Photo by Jack Moody.

Joe Arney

When it was time to register for her design studio course, Sophie Burke was a woman on a mission: to do whatever it took to get into Ping Xu’s class.

“It was like buying concert tickets,” Burke (EnvDes’25) recalled with a laugh. “Everyone wanted to be in her studio.”

In retrospect, getting into that studio course was even sweeter, as it turned out to be the last one Xu taught: In the spring, she retired from teaching architecture after 36 years at the University of Colorado, her home since completing advanced degrees from Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania. She is now professor emeritus of environmental design at CMDI.

And while her design studio course emphasized what Xu called “step by step, slow technology”—sketching and model building by hand—it wasn’t the only course where she brought different perspectives to generations of architects. She also taught popular courses on watercolor and feng shui; in all her classes, she emphasized experiential learning as a way of inspiring students’ creativity and critical thinking skills.

One of the best pieces of advice Sophie Burke got from Ping Xu was to not lose a great idea when it enters your head. ‘It doesn’t need to be perfect; you just need to get it out’ before you lose it,’ she said. Burke, right, poses with Xu after graduating in 2025. Photo courtesy Sophie Burke.

“She taught us about feng shui as a type of systems thinking,” said Burke, who recently left her role as an architectural designer with Boulder-based Coburn Architects to pursue work in New York.

“Ping taught us to see feng shui as a set of rules to base a design premise on, a starting point for your creativity. I think about it all the time in my work.”

Xu, a well-known consultant and prolific researcher on feng shui, published a plethora of papers on the ancient Chinese practice, often tying it to broader themes like how Indigenous peoples chose where to build or explaining wildfires and other disasters.

Doing well in her watercolor classes, meanwhile, meant mastering concepts like sketching, color, Impressionist theory, even using the brush correctly. Mackinzi Taylor (EnvDes’17) became a teaching assistant to Xu after completing the course, which she described as “less about art technique, and so much more about developing an eye for the world.”

“Her watercolor technique trained you to be an observer who looks for patterns and connections,” said Taylor, a project manager at the nonprofit Community Builders, in Glenwood Springs. “It forced you to become thoughtful and careful, and develop an attention to detail that every design professional needs.”

Xu also taught not to let that attention to detail stifle early-stage creativity.

“We can all relate to having a creative thought but losing it before you can express it,” Burke said. “Ping taught us to just sketch it—it doesn’t have to be perfect; you just need to get it out.”

Students said Xu recognized the difficulty of intense studio courses, and worked to create friendships in the class—Burke recalled a site visit where Xu asked passing hikers to take photos of the group. It was one way Xu balanced the demanding nature of the work with empathy for the challenges of succeeding in what she called “a moody and difficult major.”

“She demanded excellence, but with a warmth and a humor that made you want to do the hard work and grow,” Taylor said. “She asks something extra of you—and when you find out you can give it, it’s incredibly rewarding.”

Joe Arney covers research and general news for the college.

Her classes were nontraditional, but Ping Xu’s techniques—forged from her expertise in feng shui, watercolor and tai chi—have inspired students as architects and creators.

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#Deepfakes

Ellie Chase — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 19:20:14 +0000

#Deepfakes Ellie Chase Tue, 09/29/2026 - 13:20

Joe Arney

Illustration by Dana Heimes

Public outcry following the deaths of Renée Good and Alex Pretti earlier this year at the hands of immigration agents was swift. So, too, was the flood of content altered and generated by artificial intelligence that purported to show the victims as aggressors.

The idea of media manipulation in support of a government narrative is chilling—especially when two people were killed. But if there is a sliver of a silver lining to these tragedies, Sandra Ristovska sees it in how most Americans rejected deepfakes and A.I. content as they spent time with, and tried to make sense of, footage from police body cameras and bystanders’ smartphones.

“People heard the official narratives and statements, saw multiple videos from different angles and perspectives, and arrived at their own interpretations,” said Ristovska, an associate professor of media studies and an expert on visual evidence in the age of generative A.I.; she also holds an affiliate position on the faculty of the university’s law school.

Ristovska just completed a yearlong fellowship with the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, at Stanford University, where she had the opportunity to “dream again, as an adult” as she developed new perspectives on her research work, which has strong legal and ethical overtones. At the same time, she was highly sought by journalists for her perspectives on how courtrooms, newsrooms and classrooms need to rethink our relationship with visual media, including A.I.

Though we need to develop better verification and detection tools around A.I., “the solution is not just a technical fix,” Ristovska said.

“There is this kind of long-standing desire to outsource human judgment to technology, which has never played out well for us,” she said. “We are better off looking at evidence and putting together the story, rather than just blindly trusting any one technology.”

“The evidentiary challenges A.I. poses are neither entirely unprecedented nor primarily technical,”

Sandra Ristovska,

In fact, another high-profile case from Minneapolis followed just this course. When Derek Chauvin was tried in connection with George Floyd’s murder, “prosecutors showed video, but at the same time, they were carefully bringing in other witnesses. They had forensic reports. They had multiple videos—from bystanders, police body cameras, dashboard cameras, surveillance cameras,” Ristovska said. “The way they crafted the case shows they very much understood that no single video speaks for itself.”

Ristovska’s work, which includes her role as director of the college’s Visual Evidence Lab and a planned book, challenges us to be critical thinkers who understand both our own fallibility and the limitations of video and photography.

“The evidentiary challenges A.I. poses are neither entirely unprecedented nor primarily technical,” she said. “In terms of our court system, we need to think about safeguards that empower judges and jurors with research-based instructions that help mitigate some of the challenges with video."

“To me, it’s just as important that we ensure rigorous visual interpretation of the evidence as it is that we worry about whether the image is real or not.”

Is the answer to A.I.-generated deepfakes better technology that makes it clear when an image was created or altered by these tools? Yes—but one expert says it’s not the full answer.

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Street smart

Joe Arney — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 21:55:22 +0000

Street smart Joe Arney Mon, 09/28/2026 - 15:55

Joe Arney

Illustrations by Dana Heimes

When your car crawls through a stretch of road where a crash is being investigated, you may think about your own driving behavior in the moments before you were forced to slow down. Were you speeding? Aware of the cars around you? Distracted by a phone?

“It shouldn’t just go back to normal—because normal, for whatever reason, just killed somebody.”

Kevin J. Krizek, professor, environmental design

But chances are, your self-reflection ends when the gridlock does.

Now, the city of Spokane, Washington, is trying to change that, with an assist from faculty and students in CMDI’s environmental design department.

Last spring, students in an interdisciplinary design studio course created plans to roll out a proposed solution, Emergency Streets, on a pilot basis in the city.

Under Emergency Streets, when a crash occurs, workers set up traffic-calming devices like drums, cones and panels that force motorists to drive at or below the speed limit in the miles around the site of a fatal wreck. The installations remain in place for two weeks, drawing attention to a systemic failure in the planning process that led to a death.

“If you reduce the speed at which a crash occurs, the outcome will probably be better,” said Kevin J. Krizek, a professor of environmental design and a former senior advisor to the U.S. Department of State. “And you’re changing expectations about what the road should look like after a crash. It shouldn’t just go back to normal—because normal, for whatever reason, just killed somebody.”

Krizek’s academic and government work led him to conclude that crashes are a failure of infrastructure planning and a public health crisis.

“In my architecture classes, I learned about urban planning principles and how cars have taken over American cities,” he said. “Then, my civil engineering classes would teach you how to move more of those cars across a city at higher speeds. And this dichotomy is baked into our policy, legislation, modeling—everything.”

A matter of physics, not blame

Krizek co-taught the studio course with Tila Duhaime, an instructor, lawyer and former chair of Boulder’s transportation advisory board. What she most emphasizes about Emergency Streets is its focus on the simplest contributing factor.

“This is about reducing the kinetic energy in the system—reducing the potential of harmful energy being released on human bodies, whether on a bike, in a stroller, on a bus, using a walker, or in a car or motorcycle,” Duhaime said.

“If you set aside blame and say, it’s just physics—well, we can do something tomorrow to address the physics involved in a crash and improve outcomes.”

For Spokane, Emergency Streets was intriguing, but the city needed communication plans to notify residents of what they were about to encounter.

Nick Haseman (InfoSci’26), who graduated with a minor in environmental design, worked as a design lead, tightening up presentations to different stakeholder groups—a skill he honed in two internships.

“My information science classes taught me a lot about user experience and user interface design,” he said. “When we started telling personal stories of crashes in our presentations, and connecting them to how Emergency Streets could help address this challenge, it really helped our audiences understand the problem and our proposal.”

Students working on public outreach designed infographics, door hangers, digital materials and more to introduce residents to Emergency Streets. Leighton Warner, a senior majoring in sustainable planning and urban design, said the course challenged students to approach the problem like entrepreneurs.

“This is a hard problem we’re trying to solve, and you could tell from their work that the students really took it to heart.”

Jon Snyder, director of transportation and sustainability, city of Spokane

“In a lot of studio courses, the professor kind of holds your hand, to make sure you’re on the right path,” Warner said. “There was more freedom to take chances in this studio. And the realism of the project—having a partnership with a real city—was incredibly motivating.”

At the conclusion of the course, Jon Snyder, director of transportation and sustainability for Spokane, visited the class to meet with students, who ran a simulated field test and demonstrated communication strategies showing how experts might deploy Emergency Streets.

“I was pleased that it’s not just conceptual. We will adapt some of these creative ideas and use them directly,” said Snyder, who helped secure a grant to develop and implement Emergency Streets. “This is a hard problem we’re trying to solve, and you could tell from their work that the students really took it to heart.”

By the end of the class, the seriousness the students brought to the work was on full display, and not just in their presentations. Duhaime created a sign counting the days since the last “accident” in the course, but it’s not what you think: She set the counter to zero every time someone referred to a car crash as an accident. By the time of Snyder’s visit, it had been two weeks since an accident.

“‘Accident’ is a loaded, weighted term, implying that this event was unavoidable,” she said. “If we are responsible, we talk about crashes, collisions or incidents.”

Joe Arney covers research and general news for the college.

The city of Spokane is piloting a low-tech roadway safety initiative that was developed by CMDI faculty experts and students.

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