Research

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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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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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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#A.I.Anchors

Ellie Chase — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 16:13:32 +0000

#A.I.Anchors Ellie Chase Tue, 09/29/2026 - 10:13

Joe Arney

Illustration by Dana Heimes

Muhammad Ali still remembers the first time he saw what he called “a completely A.I. newsroom” in the United States.

In 2024, television reporters and production crews at Los Angeles-based Channel 1 became generated by artificial intelligence, with humans replaced by scans of people that read the news.

“They are producing, disseminating and gathering news content through A.I.,” said Ali, a PhD student in journalism. “You could see it if you looked closely at the anchors’ mouths, and some of their gestures.”

It’s the sort of thing Ali had never seen in American journalism before, but A.I. anchors have been in use throughout Asia and the Middle East, including his
native Pakistan, for years, and are quickly getting better at mimicking human speaking behaviors.

“What’s really unknown, especially in the U.S., is how audiences will react to these changes, and whether they will accept A.I. news presenters,” he said.

Even if you have been following the rise of A.I. journalists and anchors, you may not be aware that stations have required anchors to sign deals giving media companies the rights to their faces. That allows those companies to build avatar anchors that are available day and night; don’t require holidays, health insurance or sick time; and don’t have long commutes.

Ali’s advisor, Patrick Ferrucci, a professor and chair of the journalism department, said because of the economic elegy in editorial, “you can absolutely see A.I. anchors coming to journalism.”

“But understanding how to use these technologies without making yourself irrelevant is something we talk to our students about,” Ferrucci said, “and Ali’s research is really important, especially as the topic is so understudied
outside of Asia.”

Ali is somewhat more optimistic about A.I.’s potential to create new kinds of journalism jobs. But there are many ethical considerations to moves like this—and given the speed at which artificial intelligence is rolling out in news and elsewhere, research like Ali’s is critical to understanding how this technology could change our relationship with the news.

“If something goes wrong, who will be responsible?” he said. “The organization is requiring the journalist to give his face, but that face doesn’t come with his integrity and objectivity and beliefs. There is real potential for misuse.”

He’s finding examples of that already, including authoritarian regimes and terrorist groups using A.I. anchors to convincingly disseminate misinformation and propaganda. The tech industry’s growing influence on information, in general, is a concern of his.

“The influence of technology companies on the news is much more than what we ever expected, which means we have to answer for new kinds of biases or hallucinations in the data that aren’t being fact-checked,” Ali said. “And like we’ve heard about in other industries, editorial decisions are being affected by these technologies.”

Ali is committed to using his PhD to teach future generations of students to work with these technologies and become smart consumers of journalism who are aware of A.I.’s inroads into the nightly news.

“These A.I. videos are generating views on social media, they’re making money on social media—and the business managers will be paying close attention to that,” he said.

Joe Arney covers research and general news for the college.

Is it a journalist, or is it A.I.? How the advent of digital anchors is poised to change the way we get our news.

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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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The persistence of memory

Joe Arney — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 17:55:31 +0000

The persistence of memory Joe Arney Mon, 09/28/2026 - 11:55

The clothing worn by victims of the Rwandan genocide on display at the Nyamata Genocide Memorial Center. A new book from a CMDI expert combines thoughts on remembering and reconciliation in understanding how media influence the way we interpret such horrors.

Joe Arney

Like many people growing up in the 1990s, Andrew Young remembers the violence of the Rwandan genocide playing out on nightly newscasts, with anchors warning viewers of the violent imagery they were about to encounter.

It was only when he went back to study media coverage of the atrocity as a graduate student that he found memory and history were out of alignment.

“Things did not happen exactly as I remembered them. The U.S. media didn’t even have reporters based in Rwanda when the genocide started,” said Young (Film, Hist’08), an assistant professor of media production at the College of Communication, Media, Design and Information.

What he found, in studying network nightly news segments from the time, was “shocking discourse and ill-informed analysis going on by journalists—though they were doing the best they could with what they had.”

That sense of misremembering has fueled Young’s creative and scholarly interests. That includes a documentary, Kigali100, completed as a student, and two publications this year—including a book, Identity and Discourse in Contemporary Rwandan Media: Rethinking Reconciliation, that came out in the spring. It also might characterize Disavowed, a game he created in 2021 to explore the idea of recall and identity against misremembering a historical event.

The book and article, which was published in the Journal of 20th Century Media History, draws on the work he started while creating the documentary. Young analyzed news broadcasts to examine kinds of coverage, the attitudes of media toward the atrocity and the ideological content of those broadcasts. The terminology used by anchors and reporters, he said, reveals a racialized and exoticized posture of those broadcasters that he said should challenge us to think critically about news reporting in general.

Something Young became curious about during the course of his work were the “reconciliation villages” that made neighbors of Tutsi victims and Hutu perpetrators after the atrocity—something that caught his attention while visiting Rwanda to make the film.

Critical thinking around reconciliation

“Everything I do starts with a question—something I don’t understand, something I’m trying to grasp, and usually it revolves around my own limitations as a human being,” Young said. “I wanted to understand how people in that context could forgive one another—like, if you orphaned your neighbor’s children, then adopted those children in order to atone for that—I struggle to rationalize that.

“There’s a lot of scholarship, particularly out of journalism, that’s asking what reconciliation actually means in Rwanda, when people have had to erase their core ethnic identities in this sort of post-ethnic state,” Young said. “Who doesn’t love forgiveness, right — but what are the actual implications of that? Because there is this sort of underbelly to it.”

Andrew Young

The hybrid approach of creative practices and critical studies-meets-journalism is something special about CMDI, which combines different, but related, perspectives in ways that prepare students to become critical thinkers who search for ideas and answers in the places where disciplines intersect.

In fact, Meghan Sobel Cohen (Jour’09), who joined the journalism faculty this fall as an associate professor, is familiar with Young’s work from her own research interests into media systems in authoritarian contexts. She said Young’s work helps people understand how Rwanda’s carefully cultivated image was built—“through decades of deliberate media discourse that fused forgiveness, unity and loyalty to the state into a single, difficult-to-question ideology.”

“Understanding Rwanda’s media architecture is essential for anyone trying to make sense of how ‘reconciliation’ gets defined, marketed and enforced,” Cohen said, “especially amid ongoing global conflicts; A.I. use; and the rapid, borderless spread of state-driven narratives across digital platforms.”

Young’s contribution in the face of the geopolitical landscape is a major point of pride for him. The country’s free speech protections are weak, limiting Rwandan scholars from speaking and publishing as candidly as he was able to.

“The deeper I went into my research, the more I realized the incredible risk that Rwandan scholars take in writing about their country. I don’t know if my contributions will ever open up a space for Rwandan scholars to be able to do this kind of work, but I hope they do.”

Joe Arney covers research and general news for the college.

A CMDI expert’s reflections on the Rwandan genocide come from his interest in misremembering—as well as reconciliation.

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