UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Nearly 40 members from the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications will present research, lead discussions and/or accept awards this week during the all-virtual annual conference of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.
Sixteen faculty members and 21 graduate students from the Bellisario College will share thoughts, insights and expertise on many areas of communications, including chat bots, discrimination in the media, misinformation and news consumption, politics in the news, smartphone use, social media and more. The conference, originally scheduled for San Francisco, will be conducted Aug. 6-9.
On the first day of the conference, Dean Marie Hardin of the Bellisario College, who was AEJMC president in 2019, will participate on a panel discussing responses to the coronavirus pandemic.
The Law & Policy Division of AEJMC awarded “top paper” to Pioneers Chair and Professor of Telecommunications and Law Rob Frieden. His paper is titled "Challenges to the Conventional Wisdom About Mergers and Consumer Welfare in a Converging Internet Marketplace" and he will present the related research on the second day of the conference.
Likewise, the Media Ethics Division of AEJMC awarded “top paper” to Don W. Davis Professor in Ethics Patrick Plaisance and doctoral student Yuan Sun for their project titled “Moving Into the Media World: The Moral Psychology of Emerging Adults in Journalism and Communication.”
Each year, the Bellisario College’s Don W. Davis Program honors a researcher who completed the best ethics-related dissertation. This year’s recipient is Philip Todd, a graduate student from the University of Oklahoma.
Professor Krishna Jayakar, head of the Department of Telecommunications in the Bellisario College, was awarded the Barry Sherman Award for Teaching Excellence by the Media Management, Economics and Entrepreneurship Division. The award recognizes excellence and innovation in the teaching of media management, economics or entrepreneurship.
Many alumni from the Bellisario College will also be participating in sessions, leading panel discussions and running other events at the conference. Penn State and the Bellisario College have a long history with and have been active members within AEJMC for many years. If possible, next year’s conference will be held Aug. 4-7, 2021, in New Orleans, Louisiana.
AEJMC is a nonprofit organization of more than 3,700 educators, students and practitioners from around the globe. Founded in 1912 by Willard Grosvenor Bleyer, the first president (1912-13) of the American Association of Teachers of Journalism, as it was then known, AEJMC is the oldest and largest alliance of journalism and mass communication educators and administrators at the college level.
AEJMC’s mission is to promote the highest possible standards for journalism and mass communication education, to encourage the widest possible range of communication research, to encourage the implementation of a multi-cultural society in the classroom and curriculum, and to defend and maintain freedom of communication, in an effort to achieve better professional practice, a better informed public and wider human understanding.