SMPA is a pioneering teaching and research leader. Professor Silvio Waisbord is Editor of the International Journal of Press/Politics, an interdisciplinary journal for the analysis and discussion of the role of the press and politics in a globalized world.
Students at our annual Communications Career Expo network with a CNN recruiter. SMPA helps students pursue rewarding careers in media, journalism, and communications via internships, networking events, and employment workshops.
Graduate student Rachel Weisel and Professor Kimberly Gross, in partnership with the Project for Excellence in Journalism, studied how the media uses Twitter. Their findings were published in a groundbreaking report that garnered national press coverage.
Students line up outside GW's Lisner Auditorium before Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates speak at an event hosted by SMPA. The event was broadcast on CNN.
SMPA Faculty and staff use the flash studio for live and recorded professional programming.
Longtime political reporter and broadcaster Gwen Ifill of The Newshour with Jim Lehrer addresses students.
CNN's Christiane Amanpour and SMPA Director Frank Sesno interview five former U.S. Secretaries of State, Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell, Warren Christopher, Henry A. Kissinger and James A. Baker III. The free event was sponsored by SMPA.
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Prime Movers Media, SMPA's journalism mentoring program, made an appearance at last month's White House Correspondents' Association dinner. PMM presented a video highlighting the program's special partnership with the WHCA to the 2,000 guests in attendance—including President and Mrs. Obama. The video can be viewed below.
A collaboration between the School of Media and Public Affairs and the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism has produced a new study, released today, that examines how news institutions and reporters use Twitter in their daily news outreach.
Students from SMPA's Spring 2011 Senior Seminars taught by Professors Kim Gross and Robert Entman spent a semester coding the data of thousands of tweets, providing content analysis and applying the theories learned in the classroom to real-world research.
“This study gave students the opportunity to work on a significant research project about an evolving medium,” says Professor Gross. “As most of our understanding of Twitter is based on anecdotal evidence, collecting and analyzing empirical data is very valuable to our understanding of it.”
Students also received guidance from SMPA alumnus Jesse Holcomb (M.A. ’09), now a Research Associate for the Project for Excellence in Journalism, who served as a link between SMPA and the Pew Research Center. SMPA Master's students, Rachel Weisel and Lauren Martens, were also involved in the project, with Weisel serving as one of the lead researchers.
The study, which analyzed more than 3,600 tweets from 13 major news organizations over the course of one week, yielded interesting findings. For example, the study showed that news organizations rarely used Twitter as a reporting tool or to recommend information that originated elsewhere. Just 2% of the tweets analyzed sought views or first-hand accounts from readers, and only 1% of tweets studied were “retweets” from a Twitter feed outside the organization.
“Tweets from news organizations mainly push out news content already published online on site they own,” says Professor Gross. “The same is true of reporters. As a result, these reporters are not building a personal brand, as they rarely interact with other Twitter users beyond reposting articles.”
Professor Gross attributes this to news organizations cautiously navigating through the interactive potential of Twitter due to concerns about adhering to journalistic rules.
“The codes of ethics for journalism have to be adapted for a new medium,” says Professor Gross. “Until that happens, news organizations will continue to use Twitter mostly as a promotional tool or another platform to disseminate news content.”
To read the press release, click here.
To read the complete study, click here.
This week, seven distinguished photographers visited the Jack Morton Auditorium to share insights about the world of modern crisis photojournalism.
The School of Media and Public Affairs, in conjunction with The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Photography, presented Beyond Witness: New Approaches to Crisis Photography, a panel discussion with photojournalists Dominic Bracco II, Sean Gallagher, Andre Lambertson, Richard Mosse, David Rochkind, Stephanie Sinclair and James Whitlow Delano. The panelists described new challenges facing photojournalists, and how to redefine the idea of crisis photography in the face of ongoing conflicts.
Following the panel, the GW Program Board hosted an outdoor reception for attendees while projections of photographs by Richard Mosse appeared on the south wall of the Lisner Auditorium (see at right, photo by Aaron DeNu).
By Jacqueline Corba
JMC '12
Professor Kimberly Gross and Professor Robert Entman’s Senior Seminar combined their class' efforts this semester to work on a Twitter research project with the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ), a D.C.-based non-profit organization that evaluates and studies the performance of the press. 
This new partnership with PEJ allowed SMPA students the opportunity to apply the theory used in the classroom to a real-world research project coding and analyzing “legacy media” tweets.
After the PEJ trained them in coding earlier this semester, a total of 30 students analyzed the content of tweets written by professional news organizations. In the end, the students will produce an analysis memo and some may be used by PEJ in a future report.
“Our class’ role has mainly been to code tweets based on several different variables: what the tweet is about, how many re-tweets it received, whether there was a link and if there was, what the link brought you to,” said Alec Jacobs, a senior Political Communication major who will be graduating in December. “We've also helped them clarify their codebook, hopefully making future projects of this kind run a little bit more smoothly.” Read the rest of this entry »
