Category: Journalism

Margaret Yee Man Ng

Margaret Ng

Associate Professor

Affiliations

  • Department of Journalism
  • Institute of Communications Research
  • Department of Computer Science
  • Cline Center for Advanced Social Research 
  • Center for Digital Agriculture 
  • National Center for Supercomputing Applications 
  • Center for Social and Behavioral Science

Education

  • PhD in Journalism, 2018, University of Texas
  • MA in Journalism, 2014, University of Missouri
  • BSSc in Journalism and Communication, 2012, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Course Specialties

  • Data Journalism and Data Visualization
  • Multimedia Editing and Design

Background

Ng is a media researcher with certified industrial training (Galvanize) in data science and database tools. Broadly speaking, her research examines technology use, social media, and information diffusion using large-scale, unstructured data and computational methods. Particularly, she explores three distinctive yet interrelated components of the web: user behavior, embedded structures, and content framing. 

She works closely with United Nations Global Pulse, an innovation initiative of the UN Secretary-General to harness big data and emerging communication technologies for sustainable development and humanitarian action. Before earning a Ph.D., she worked as a news artist at National Geographic Magazine and The Seattle Times and a data reporter for The Center for Public Integrity. During her doctoral study, she was an advanced analytics intern at Pew Research Center’s Data Labs. She was born and raised in Hong Kong.

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Margaret Ng

Contact

ymn@illinois.edu

217-300-8186

Josh Heuman

headshot of Josh Heuman

Senior Lecturer

Affiliations

  • Department of Journalism
  • Department of Media & Cinema Studies

Education

  • PhD, Communication Arts / Media and Cultural Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  • MA, Communication Arts / Telecommunications, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  • BA, French and Comparative Literature, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Course Specialties

  • JOUR 205: History of American Journalism
  • MACS 100: Introduction to Popular TV & Movies
  • MACS 264: Creative and Information Economies​

Background

Dr. Heuman’s research explores media industries and regulation (especially television), with an emphasis on the regulation of media work. His different projects come together in a concern for the cultural life of media industries and their regulation (from content regulation as a style of cultural criticism to the gendered culture of television writers’ rooms), pursuing often neglected documents and discourses (from submissions to administrative and legal proceedings to how-to manuals for online investors and radio and television writers). His current projects follow the historical formation of the professional broadcast writer, from law and policy to contract and organization.

Dr. Heuman’s teaching ranges widely across the field of media studies, including courses in media industries; media law; media history; media theory; and media genre, narrative, and style.

Alongside these main lines of research and teaching, he’s also glad to think and talk about a broader range of interests across the field of media studies, and across the varied forms, genres, and periods of media.

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Josh Heuman

Contact

jmheuman@illinois.edu

217-300-7069

Charles “Stretch” Ledford

Charles

Associate Professor

Affiliations

  • Department of Journalism
  • Center for African Studies

Education

  • M.A., Multimedia Journalism, University of Miami 
  • B.A., Journalism and Psychology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Course Specialties

  • Visual and Audio Journalism

Background

Recipient of the 2020 Illinois Student Government Teaching Excellence Award and named the 2014 Associated Press Media Editors Innovator of the Year for College Students, Stretch Ledford has worked as a journalist telling stories through audio, photographs and video in more than 55 countries. His career began as a staff photojournalist for The State (Columbia, SC), The Fayetteville (NC) Observer, The Durham (NC) Morning Herald, The St. Petersburg (FL) Times (now the Tampa Bay Times) and The Commission, the journal of the Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board. 

As a freelance photojournalist and advertising photographer, Ledford has been published by The Atlantic, Consumer Reports, Health, Ladies Home Journal, Mens Journal, Modern Maturity, Newsweek, Outside, POZ, Readers Digest, Smithsonian, Time, USA Weekend, The Washington Post Sunday Magazine, the Washingtonian, The Associated Press, Black Star, Knight Ridder/Tribune News, United Press International, The Wall Street Journal, Advanced Micro Devices, Arnold Worldwide, Bank One, CNN, Continental Airlines, Cryolife, Deere & Company, Dominion, DuPont, Freddie Mac, Genworth, Geico, Kindercare Learning Centers, KPMG, The Martin Agency, Mazda, Nike, Ogilvy & Mather, Ping, the Rocky Mountain School of Design, the Royal Bank of Canada, Ryder, Sanofi-Aventis, Shell, Sports Illustrated, Tillamook Creamery, Trigon/Blue Cross, the United States Chamber of Commerce, the Virginia Department of Transportation, Wal-Mart, Washington Mutual Bank, Whole Foods Market, XCel Energy, CARE, Catholic Relief Services, Food for the Hungry, the Grossman Burn Foundation, Habitat for Humanity, Junior Achievement Worldwide, MercyCorps, Project Angel Heart, Project HOPE and the YMCA. 

Since joining the Illinois faculty in 2011, Ledford’s work has been featured online and/or broadcast by major news organizations around the world, including NPR’s Morning Edition, NBC’s Nightly News with Brian Williams, the Today show, Time, the Huffington Post, The Weather Channel, the BBC, The Atlantic, Esquire, the Wall Street Journal, the Globe and Mail (Toronto), the Guardian (London), the Nippon Television Network (Japan), Gawker, Vice and Forbes.

Galleries and museums in Colorado, North Carolina, Florida, Illinois, Nebraska and Virginia have displayed Ledford’s photographs. His work has been recognized with awards from the National Press Photographers Association, the Online News Association, the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, the New York Art Directors Club, the International Photography Awards and Communication Arts Magazine’s Photography Annual.

Research and Creative Endeavor

We fragile humans are more prone to label one another, to place one another into groups and to revert to the insularity of our various tribes than we are to recognize our innate commonalities. Doing so is easy, risk free and readily dismissed as “just human nature.”

But there also exists a deeper human nature that longs for recognition by and connection with the phenomenological Other. If there’s any single motivating factor behind my work it is my desire for it to provide a pathway for that deeper Self to recognize the connectedness it shares with the Other. Psychologists would call this “catalyzing humanistic empathy;” for journalists, it’s “promoting civil discourse.”

Since I began making photographs as a journalist in 1983, my cameras have taken me to more than 50 countries – places with exotic sounding names like Ouagadougou and as isolated geographically as the Sangihe Islands in the western Pacific. I have photographed Ronald Reagan in the Oval Office, Mother Teresa in an earthquake zone and both Bill and Hillary Clinton (and Donald Trump) on the campaign trail. I have photographed people on the verge of starvation, several women giving birth and any number of weddings.  I have been detained by police or military units in three countries as I worked to make photographs that would get below surface appearances and tell meaningful stories.

Throughout, my goal is to find, capture and produce stories that foster the shared sense of community that I believe defines our deepest human nature.

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Charles "Stretch" Ledford

Contact

stretch@illinois.edu

217-333-1259

Brian Johnson

Brian Johnson

Professor Emeritus

Affiliations

  • Department of Journalism

Education

  • MS in Journalism, 1987, University of Illinois 
  • BS in Journalism, 1981, University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire

Course Specialties

  • Multimedia
  • Photojournalism
  • Photography

Background

Johnson started his journalism career as a staff photojournalist at The News-Gazette in Champaign and has been teaching at the University since 1988. Johnson’s work has been published in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post, USA Today, Newsday and others.

Research and Creative Endeavor

Johnson was the editor of the book, C-U in Seven Plus, A Week (Plus a little bit more) in the Life of Champaign-Urbana. He has won prizes in the Horizon Interactive awards, National Press Photographers Association Pictures of the Year and the Telly Awards. His multimedia project This Bond won Best Faculty Creative Project from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication Visual Communication Division. His current work uses photojournalism as a methodology to document the unseen in the seen.

Johnson has received more than 60 national, regional and state awards for his photojournalism, multimedia and videos. Johnson has received recognition for his teaching including being selected as a Vice Chancellor’s Teaching Scholar and as Faculty Member of the Year from the University of Illinois Dads Association. He was twice the head of the Visual Communications Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication and was vice president of the Illinois Press Photographers Association. He has served the department of journalism at the University as director of graduate studies, associate department head and as department head.

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Brian Johnson

Contact

bkj@illinois.edu

Brant Houston

Brant Houston

Knight Chair Professor in Investigative and Enterprise Reporting

Affiliations

  • Department of Journalism

Background

Professor Brant Houston holds the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Chair in Investigative and Enterprise Reporting at the University of Illinois. Houston teaches investigative and advanced reporting in the Department of Journalism in the College of Media at Illinois.

He also oversees the online newsroom at Illinois, CU-CitizenAccess.org, which serves as a lab for digital innovation and data journalism. 

Houston became the chair in 2007 after serving for more than a decade as the executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), a 5,000-member organization, and as a professor at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. Before joining IRE, he was an award-winning investigative reporter at daily newspapers for 17 years.

Houston is the author of six editions of the textbook, Computer-Assisted Reporting: A Practical Guide, and co-author of the fourth, fifth and sixth editions of The Investigative Reporter’s Handbook, and Changing Models for Journalism: Reinventing the Newsroom. He co-founded the Global Investigative Journalism Network in 2003 and serves as chair of its board of directors. He also co-founded the Institute for Nonprofit News in 2009. He has taught and spoken about investigative and computer-assisted reporting at newsrooms and universities in 25 countries.

Currently he is working on projects involving nonprofit journalism newsrooms, digital tools for news-gathering, and new business models for journalism.

In 2022, Houston helped preserve the investigative news content of the website FairWarning.org with the University of Illinois Archives.

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Brant Houston

Contact

houstonb@illinois.edu

217-244-8861

Kenneth R. Erdey

Ken Erdey

Technical Coordinator for Broadcast Operations

Affiliations

  • Department of Journalism

Education

  • M.S., Roosevelt University (Journalism)
  • B.A., Columbia College Chicago (Television Production)

Course Specialties

  • Video Storytelling/Reporting
  • Newscast Production
  • Television Production
  • Video Editing

Background

Erdey previously worked as a news photographer/editor for the television station WCIA in Champaign, Illinois. Other stations include CLTV, WFLD-Fox32, WCIU, CNN Chicago Bureau, all based in Chicago. He is a current board member of the Illinois Journalism Education Association and has served as the Executive Director of the IJEA Fall Conference. He is also a member of the Broadcast Education Association.

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Ken Erdey

Contact

kerdey@illinois.edu

217-244-6276

Leon Dash

Leon Dash

Swanlund Chair Professor Emeritus

Affiliations

  • Department of Journalism
  • Center for Advanced Study
  • Department of African American Studies
  • Center of African Studies
  • Institute of Government and Public Affairs
  • College of Law

Education

  • B.A., Howard University
  • Honorary Doctor of Letters, Lincoln University, Pennsylvania

Course Specialties

  • Immersion Journalism

Background

Leon DeCosta Dash, Jr., born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, grew up in Harlem and the Bronx. He graduated from Howard University with a Bachelor of Arts in History and a minor in Political Science in 1968. Before graduating, he held an internship as a newsroom copy boy for The Washington Post in 1965. This internship would begin a storied thirty year career at The Post, interrupted only by an early two year stint with the Peace Corps teaching high school students in Kenya. He later would become a professor at the University of Illinois.

Among his more thrilling early assignments were two prolonged periods of closely observing UNITA rebels in Angola, one for four months, and the second (during the brutal civil war in 1976) for seven months. Dash traveled a collective 2,100 miles on foot, mostly through a war zone. Besides giving Dash the qualifications for appointment as the West African Station Chief in 1979, these excursions put Dash in close proximity with his subject, which gave shape to his unique style of investigation.

Dash was an early pioneer of immersion journalism, providing deep and wide profiles of the individuals he reported on. Partly ethnographic, he interviewed his subject and his subject’s family and friends at length. Partly historical, he situated his subjects according to the social, political, and economic developments that preceded them (Brown).

All throughout his career, he buttressed his journalism with history and anthropology to humanize people who were criminalized; driven by a deep desire to understand human behavior and motivation. His distinctive methods can be learned today at the University of Illinois. But how could someone without so much as a master’s degree come to be a professor of upper level classes at a world-class university? Well, his fascination with a newly named phenomena called the underclass proved profitable in an era when sociologists and policymakers where increasingly keen on describing and regulating this sect of society.

His 1994 eight-day front page serial on a generational tale of poverty and survival in urban America would win a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism, as well as the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award. For this story, he followed Rosa Lee, her children, and her grandchildren for four years, shedding an empathetic light on the difficult story of a family trapped in a struggle with heroin, AIDS, and the criminal justice system.

Dash’s transition from professional journalism to the academy went smoothly. He arrived at the University of Illinois in 1998 as a Professor of Journalism and Afro – American Studies. He was the Department of Communication’s first Swanlund Chair appointee in 2000. In 2003, he became a professor at the Center for Advanced Study, before becoming the Center’s director in 2009. In 2016, he was inducted into the National Association of Black Journalists Founders (NABJ) Hall of Fame. He serves as the Illinois NABJ chapter advisor. 

NABJ is an organization Dash and 43 other Black journalists founded in 1975 to increase Black representation in the media profession. The organization’s formation follows directly from Dash’s group’s 1972 Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint against The Washington Post which charged unequal opportunity with regards to job assignments and promotional opportunities for Black reporters in The Post‘s newsroom. The seven Black reporters became known as “The Metro Seven.” The Metro Seven was inducted into the NABJ’s Hall of Fame on August 9, 2019.

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Leon Dash

Contact

leondash@illinois.edu

217-265-5055

Stephanie Craft

Stephanie Craft

Professor
Associate Dean for Academic and Faculty Affairs

Affiliations

  • Department of Journalism
  • Institute of Communications Research

Education

  • PhD in Communication, Stanford University
  • MA in Journalism, University of Missouri
  • BA in History, Washington University in St. Louis

Course Specialties

  • Introduction to Journalism
  • Journalism Ethics & Diversity
  • History of American Journalism

Background

Before earning a doctorate, Craft worked as a journalist for newspapers in California, Arkansas and Washington. She previously chaired the Journalism Studies faculty at the University of Missouri School of Journalism and is a former head of the Journalism Studies Division of the International Communication Association and of the Media Ethics Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.

Research and Creative Endeavor

Stephanie Craft’s research addresses news literacy — how is it defined and measured and how improving it can help reduce susceptibility to misinformation and conspiracy theories. She also studies media literacy more broadly, with current work focusing on what older people do or don’t understand about emerging technologies such as AI and how that shapes how they navigate the media. She also writes on issues related to journalism’s norms and ethics and is the co-author of a widely used introductory textbook, Principles of American Journalism, now in its fourth edition. She serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Media Ethics, Journalism Practice and Journalism & Communication Monographs.

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Stephanie Craft

Contact

scraft@illinois.edu

217-244-4608

College announces additions to leadership team

Block I

May 18, 2018

The College of Media is pleased to announce several additions to the leadership team.

Stephanie Craft will be assuming the position of Head of the Department of Journalism, effective June 16, 2018. Her research focuses on news literacy and journalism ethics.

Mike Yao will become Interim Head of the Charles H. Sandage Department of Advertising, also beginning June 16, 2018. His research research focuses on the social and psychological impacts of interactive digital media.  

Michelle Nelson will become the College’s inaugural Associate Dean for Research and Creative Endeavor, effective August 16, 2018. Her research interest lies in advertising literacy and the use of media literacy to promote healthier behaviors among children and adolescents.

“Faculty and students in the College of Media are already producing a great variety of innovative and impactful research and creative endeavor,” Nelson said. “I look forward to helping to support and promote their efforts inside the college and to external audiences in this new position. I’m excited to work with faculty and students so that together we can do more to strengthen our research culture.”

Congratulations to all!

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Kissel to speak at 2018 Convocation

Dave Kissel

January 22, 2018

Dave Kissel

The College of Media is pleased to announce that Dave Kissel, a 1985 journalism graduate, will be the alumni speaker at the College of Media Convocation ceremony on Sunday, May 13, 2018. He has built a distinguished career in marketing, advertising and sports for Fortune 500 clients by leading high-impact teams at world-class agencies and media companies.

Kissel is currently a member of the senior management team of DDB, one of the largest and most awarded advertising agencies in the world, and a partner to McDonald’s Corporation in 44 countries. He is responsible for the global leadership and coordination of DDB’s worldwide McDonald’s relationships, helping each office deliver innovative strategy, content and experiences to measurably grow the McDonald’s brand and business.

He moved into DDB’s McDonald’s global role after having been a key architect and builder of Omnicom’s We Are Unlimited, called by The Wall Street Journal as the “Advertising Agency of the Future;” an agency designed specifically for McDonald’s U.S. Dave helped establish the agency, source its talent, develop its first work and, as the agency’s Chief Delivery Officer, helped create the agency’s operating system and technology tools.

In addition, Kissel is currently a Strategic Advisor to, and the former CEO of, InStadium, a national Nielsen-measured sports media network consisting of 450+ pro and college teams. Under his leadership, InStadium transformed into a multi-media video and gaming platform for major brands. Prior to InStadium, he helped create and scale the award-winning agency Zócalo Group, Omnicom’s first dedicated social media agency, a division of Critical Mass.

A frequent speaker on sports marketing, advertising and social media, Kissel has more than 25 years of accomplishments and awards in sports media and marketing, is an advisor to Block Six Analytics, a sports-analytics technology company, and to the University of Illinois’ College of Media’s Executive Board. He lives in a northern suburb of Chicago with his wife and fellow Illini alumnus, Sue, and his three daughters.

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DEV College of Media
119 Gregory Hall
810 S. Wright St.
Urbana, IL 61801
217-333-2350