Session of the ongoing Journalism Speakers Forum featuring John Derf Backderf.

Sponsored by the Bellisario College and Penn State World Campus, featuring alumni Ron Wagner ('89) and Maram Cadwell ('16g). Strategies for success if you stay in your job ... and if you decide to leave. Free event.

Registration Link: https://psu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_v8MkubAoSEK6abezRCrRZA

Claire Smith was among the pioneering group of women to break into sports writing, and is the first woman, and fourth African-American, to win the J.G. Taylor Spink Award, which is the highest honor given by the Baseball Writers’ Association of America. Smith attended Penn State and graduated from Temple University. The session is a Women’s History Month event, co-sponsored by the John Curley Center for Sports Journalism, the Office of Diversity & Inclusion, and the Penn State chapter of the Association for Women in Sports Media.

Larry Starks is a senior editor at USA Today sports, covering NBA news and breaking news. Prior to joining USA Today, Starks served for 13 years as the NBA news editor at ESPN, overseeing editorial content for NBA productions on the ESPN family of networks, ensuring material was fairly, accurately and consistently presented during game broadcasts. Earlier in his career, Starks was the assistant managing editor for sports at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He earned a bachelor’s degree in English at Judson University in Elgin, Illinois. The session is part of the ongoing Conversation Series conducted by the John Curley Center for Sports Journalism, housed in the Bellisario College. The event is co-sponsored by the Office of Diversity and Inclusion.

S. Shyam Sundar, the James P. Jimirro Professor of Media Effects, will make a presenation as part of the Data Science Community research talks. Free event on Zoom. Advance registration required. To learn more about Data Science Community events or to join the community mailing list, visit https://datascience.psu.edu.

Session of the ongoing Journalism Speakers Forum featuring Ben Garvin.

Annual board meeting of Bellisario College Advertising/Public Relations Alumni Network Board.

Zoom Link

Dr. Suzannah Evans Comfort (Ph.D., University of North Carolina, 2016) is an assistant professor in the Media School at Indiana University. Her research focuses on environmental communication with a particular emphasis on news coverage of climate change as well as communicative tactics by environmental NGOs. Her work has been published in numerous journals, including Journalism, Science Communication, and Environmental Communication. Prior to earning her Ph.D., Dr. Comfort worked as the editorial director at Oceana, the world’s largest environmental organization dedicated to ocean conservation. There, she published the book The Perfect Protein: The Fish Lover’s Guide to Saving the Oceans and Feeding the World with Oceana CEO Andy Sharpless.

At IU, Dr. Comfort teaches courses related to journalism practice, media literacy, and environmental and science communication.

In an age of globalization, centralized power, economic inequality, deep demographic shifts, political polarization, pandemics and climate change, and radical disruption in the media and information environments, we face these converging trends in a constitutional democracy that feels to many increasingly unresponsive, nonadaptive, and even antiquated. Part of a virtual series of events presented by The McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State.