Skloot is author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

Photos: Mike DiBari

Produced by Pittsburgh resident Ken Love, the documentary is scheduled to appear on PBS stations throughout the country. Love is a former long-time filmmaker for National Geographic magazine.

This is the second PBS television documentary that I have been an historical consultant and appeared in. The first was "The Black Press: Soldiers without Swords," which came out in 1999 and won a lot of awards.

They have been chosen as the spring 2010 Miss USA interns. This was a very competitive pool of applicants and Tina Stewart thanks you all for your patience.

Interviews will be scheduled for selected students for the Miss Universe summer internship within the next 2 weeks.

Furrow entered the graduate program in 2009.

With just $17 in startup costs, two Ohio University journalism students have launched the College News Network, an Associated Press-style wire service for college and university newspapers.

Graduate student, Aisha Mohammed, has found her niche at Scripps in the Institute for International Journalism.

The IIJ is designed to prepare international journalism students for the job market. It also serves as a support system for students doing research and creates opportunities for students to network with journalists who work abroad.

“The reason I chose OU was because of the Institute for International Journalism,” according to Mohammed.

Mohammed’s goal is to become a foreign correspondent and one of the opportunities offered by the IIJ is the opportunity to work abroad.

After graduating from UC Berkley where she studied peace and conflict studies, she went on to work for several non-profit organizations such as The Salvation Army, doing development and fund raising. She also spent a year in Trinidad doing research on Chutney music, which is music native to Trinidad and Tobago.

Her most recent research project will be conducted in Pakistan this winter. She will spend three weeks researching the local media coverage of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.

The method is not yet set in stone but she may include focus groups, containing primary Pakistani journalists, coupled with a content analysis of news coverage. She credits Professor Yusuf Kalyango, Director of IIJ with locating people for the focus groups.

After she gets her master’s she wants to do independent work as a foreign correspondent. “I’m thinking I will probably end up working independently, or work for an NGO like Human Rights Watch as a researcher and reporter.”

Like many graduate students she is still unsure of what her thesis will be, but she is considering a few options. “I am thinking of doing a professional project.”

She may expand on her research of the media coverage of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto or she may write a series of magazine articles, which she hopes will be instrumental in developing a professional portfolio.

Scripps graduate student, Colleen Kiphart, has come back to Athens to work as the new writer/editor at University Communications and Marketing (UCM).

Colleen, a self proclaimed magazine nut, is thrilled to be doing exactly what she loves. She pitches, writes and edit stories for the news section of the Ohio University website.

During her time at Scripps, Kiphart noticed the depth that the magazine format has. “I was noticing that magazines offer, a personalized, niche market publication where, the writers and editors can inject personality into the work.”

It comes as no surprise to her professors that her thesis looks at how magazines relate to online resources. “The best way to determine this, I think, would be a source study which means I would be pulling a sample of magazines and seeing how they use online sources.”

Right now this idea is in the early stages, as Kiphart was mainly focused on finding a good job after the program ended. She quickly learned it is difficult to write a thesis while job hunting.

“It’s impossible to do both. I just focused on my job hunt. There was no way that I think I could have done quality thesis work during the 4 months I was intensely hunting.”

Her job hunt was a full time, even overtime endeavor. “A 60 hour/week job.”

Her advice for graduate students is to take a four-pronged approach. First, start looking over spring break. Second, get your resume together and show it to your professors. “Run your cover letters by people in the industry.” Third, is keep at it and to stay up that extra hour and send out more resumes.

“You just need to be persistent and live in hope.” And last but certainly not least, “save your pennies.”

Kiphart says her time at Scripps made her an extremely desirable candidate. And her job-hunt as a master’s student was a far cry from her job hunt as an undergraduate student.

“This time I had confidence in my skills. The biggest thing OU gave me was a professional confidence and assurance that I didn’t have before.”

That confidence has carried her back to Athens and into a wonderful new position.

The answers to these and other questions are explored in "Brain: The Complete Mind -- How It Develops, How It Works, and How to Keep It Sharp" by E.W. Scripps School of Journalism Professor Michael S. Sweeney, with a foreword by Dr. Richard Restak.

The National Geographic Press publication hits bookshelves this week.

The book includes the impact of recent, groundbreaking research, such as a computer-brain interface that allows a person to communicate via Twitter merely by thinking about the message.

"This is the most fun I’ve had writing a book," Sweeney said. "There’s so much information out there, and it’s changing every day. And it’s just fascinating."

National Geographic editors praised Sweeney’s ability to make such a complex subject understandable to the ordinary reader.

This is Sweeney’s 10th book, and the eighth for the Geographic.

School of Journalism Associate Director Robert Stewart said the free iPhone app, called "JSchool," is intended to make information about the school’s activities more widely available to students and alumni, while also demonstrating its commitment to new technology.

"As media technology evolves, we believe it is essential that we do our level best to not just know about it, but to incorporate these opportunities to communicate into our curriculum,” he said. “The iPhone app demonstrates our commitment to our students, alumni and prospective students.”

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Steve Sapienza has covered a wide range of issues from the intense effects of global warming on Bangladesh to sex workers in the Dominican Republic.

On a recent trip to Athens, the international journalist and award-winning documentary and news producer talked with journalism students about the challenges and rewards of covering issues abroad. His visit, organized by the Institute for International Journalism, concluded with a presentation to a larger audience, with both faculty and students, where he presented a trailer for his new documentary, “Easy Like Water: Reporting from the Front Line of Climate Change.”

The presentation was followed by a question and answer session, where a wide variety of issues were discussed, such as potential dangers of working abroad and how journalists overcome language barriers.

For students specializing in international journalism, visiting speakers like Sapienza are essential to their education. Not only to get a picture of the daily professional life of a journalist in the field but also to network and develop contacts.

Sally Ann Cruikshank, a current PhD student at Scripps, says “With the media landscape changing, it is so important to meet journalists in the field to find out how they are putting together stories.”

During his visit, Sapienza offered important advice to journalism students emerging on the job market.

“Augment the fundamental JSchool studies, print, TV, radio, photography, with some digital news-gathering skills, like learning to collect and edit audio and use a program like Soundslides, or starting a blog or a website. Or even just try shooting and posting a video to a site like YouTube. You don’t need to learn every digital media skill, but you should be prepared to promote yourself as multidimensional job candidate when you go for that interview.”

In 2008, Sapienza received the Ruth Adams Award for his coverage of the diminishing water supplies in Asia.

Watch the Institute for International Journalism page of the Scripps site to find out about upcoming events.

Go to the Pulitzer Center website to see more about Steve Sapienza.

Assistant Professor Aimee Edmondson recently presented her dissertation, "In Sullivan’s Shadow, the use and abuse of libel law during the civil rights movement," to members of the American Journalism Historians Association.

"New York Times Co. v. Sullivan" was the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1964 that established the actual malice standard. which has to be met before coverage about public officials can be considered to be defamation and libel. The case was key in allowing free reporting of the civil rights campaigns in the southern United States. It is one of the key decisions supporting the freedom of the press therefore changed the way reporters do their job.

Edmondson, whose dissertation was a finalist for The Margaret A. Blanchard Dissertation Prize, looked at what kind of cases were going through the courts during the 1960s. She found many other libel cases going through the courts when Sullivan was overturned in 1964. Southern courts took their time interpreting the meaning of that ruling.

“It took a long time and millions of dollars that the media had to spend defending themselves in southern courts, but eventually Sullivan was instrumental,” according to Edmondson.

Edmondson did both legal and historical research. She read through personal papers, court cases and available archives. She spent time looking through the National Archives and reading numerous personal papers of plaintiffs and defendants,“archival material ... vital for historial research,” according to Edmondson.

She also got the chance to read items that hadn’t yet been processed. “Your sitting in this big room with personal papers of these journalists,” said Edmondson.

The fact that many cases she was researching were state cases meant she had to dig. “That was fun. It was a lot of needle in a haystack.”

Edmondson spent a month traveling in the south doing archival research and found roughly thirty cases that provided enough evidence to make the argument that “had Sullivan not been overturned it would have been catastrophic, not only for The New York Times but for the rest of the northern media.”

Edmondson’s interest in this topic has lead her to expand upon her research to produce a book. She plans to travel this summer and do more archival research, to “try and drill down a little more for more detail.”

She hopes to finish her book in the next 2-3 years.

Video interviews with alumni will be posted in the next few days.

Doctoral student Ed Simpson’s recently completed master’s thesis reflects his strong interest in the First Amendment.

Entitled "Sustained Outrage: Owner/publisher W.E. "Ned" Chilton III and the Charleston (West Virginia) Gazette, 1962-87,” Simpson’s thesis examines the crusading owner/publisher of West Virginia’s largest newspaper.

Simpson became interested in Chilton when he worked at the Gazette. But he became convinced of his significance when studying the First Amendment and historical media criticism.

He was the first in the nation to discover the FBI was investigating and developing profiles on media outlets. He repeatedly sued to get open records, including ethics violations involving lawyers and doctors. In addition, his decision to publish the name of a juvenile suspect led to the U.S. Supreme Court precedent that said media outlets could not be criminally charged for printing the names of juvenile suspects.

The methods for his research were journalistic and qualitative. Simpson interviewed more than a dozen people and was the first to go through Chilton’s papers at the West Virginia University library where he went through numerous editions of the Gazette.

Simpson spent three weeks in West Virginia and a week on the telephone gathering sources. As he sat down to write he soon discovered he did not gather enough information in his first go-round and had several holes in his research that needed to be filled in. That is why his advice to graduate students is to gather more info than you think you need.

Although there are usually unforeseen hardships when collecting data, there are also pleasant surprises that arise. Simpson’s greatest delight was the fact that the more he investigated Chilton the more he felt he could make a compelling argument that he was more than colorful.

“He was significant and important to any truly comprehensive study of how the First Amendment translates into daily journalism,” according to Simpson.

Simpson admits that when his committee chair signed off on the finished thesis it felt like a thousand tons had been taken off his shoulders.

“There is a remarkable feeling of accomplishment and a certain confidence that comes from completing the big project." But Simpson also stresses the importance of building onto thesis research.

“I have learned you are never really finished, depending on what you want to do with your research. I continue to look for papers stemming from my thesis that I can submit to conferences.”

His advice for graduate students beginning their thesis is to develop an idea as early as possible and to “use the winter break to advance your goals.” He also encourages students to talk to professors about identifying a chair and committee. “The faculty at OU are astonishingly helpful. “

Simpson is currently in the PhD program at the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism.Listen to interview with Ed Simpson.

Prof. Hans Meyer introduces Mahaney (right) to JOUR 231A students.

See: chipmahaney.com

Self-proclaimed “international news junkie” and JSchool doctorate student Sally Ann Cruikshank recently completed a masters thesis that compared how international broadcasters covered the 2008 U.S. election.

Cruikshank’s interest in this research topic did not come as a surprise to those who know her. Her thesis, titled “US Politics on a Global Stage: A Content Analysis of 2008 Election Coverage on Al Jazeera, the BBC and Russia Today,” content analyzed media coverage of the presidential election, beginning one month before election day and ending on election day.

Because no database of international broadcast news is available she recorded the Monday through Friday evening newscasts, an hour and a half each day. Although her research required a substantial time commitment, she was able to delve into unchartered territory and develop a unique thesis, which sets her research apart.

Through her research Cruikshank found that BBC and Al Jazeera covered the election as a fair, democratic process, whereas Russia Today questioned the fairness of the election as well as issues related to corruption in the election.

One aspect that did surprise her was the heavy emphasis on the “horserace” element of the election in the international media. She said the horserace aspect of the coverage benefited Obama, who was a consistent leader in the polls.

Cruikshank hopes to study this topic further utilizing additional coverage she recorded in the 30 days after the election. In doing a further analysis of the material, she may include more countries.

Her advice to graduate students is to pick a topic early and, “Put what you do in class to good use.” She also encourages students to utilize the professors as resources.

Ohio University is building on its 25-year relationship with the University of Guyana (UG) to develop that nation’s fourth estate.

Photo: Mary Rogus opens a TV production workshop session that focused on developing professional broadcast standards for news and information programming in Guyana.

E.W. Scripps School of Journalism Associate Professor Mary Rogus and School of Media Arts and Studies Professor Vibert Cambridge are teaching journalism practices in Guyana as part of a three-year, $300,000 United States Agency for International Development (USAID) grant.

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