First and foremost, I am a tenured and promoted Associate Professor as of August 2005. The 2007-08 school year will be my eighth here at SJSU (hard to believe!). I've taught everything from entry-level general education classes to upper-division writing classes to graduate seminars. In Fall 2003 I became co-adviser to the Spartan Daily, our venerable campus newspaper. I seem to be fairly popular with the students, though I'm not in the best position to judge that. For something slightly more objective, check out some of the names they call me. In addition to all my teaching and research activities, I've created a great deal of Web content for the School of Journalism & Mass Communications. I created an entire new Web site for the JMC School in Fall 2000, then designed and developed The SPART, a student Web portal for the students of the JMC School, during the Fall 2001 and Spring 2002 semesters.
Before arriving at SJSU, I spent the preceding two years as a visiting professor at Butler University in Indianapolis, IN. I served as faculty advisor for both the Butler Collegian student newspaper and the Butler online student paper, DawgNet. I also designed the Butler Journalism Department Web site and taught writing and mass communication classes there. Before that, from August 1996 through April 1998, I worked as a visiting professor at the University of Michigan in the Department of Communication Studies.
My book, Online Journalism: Reporting, Writing, and Editing for New Media, is available from Wadsworth-Thomson Learning. To read all about it, click here.
My main research area is media and politics, with a specialty in public opinion. I'm also involved in learning and writing about non-political effects of the various mass media -- not just news and entertainment outlets, but also the persuasive media such as advertising and public relations, as well as the so-called "new media."
I was born and raised in National City, CA, a suburb of San Diego. I graduated from the University of California at San Diego with a degree in Communication in June of 1988. I then spent all or part of six years as a writer and editor at daily newspapers, working my way up from sorting letters and pouring coffee to editing and paginating nightly on deadline. I worked first for the Blade-Citizen in Oceanside, CA, then later the Herald & Review in Decatur, IL, and most recently with the the North County Times in Escondido, CA. I have won awards from the San Diego Press Club, the California Newspaper Publishers Association and the Illinois Press Association for my reporting. My political commentary has appeared in the New York Times, the Miami Herald, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and many other outlets. For two years, I wrote a weekly online column about media and politics called Unsubstantiated Facts.
As a graduate student, I received my Ph.D. from the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in October 1995. My academic work includes publications and works in progress that address many aspects of the reciprocal relationship between officials, voters and the media. My doctoral dissertation, "The Pulse of Expectations: News Making in Presidential Campaigns," looks at the ways in which campaign reporting has become a day-to-day series of contests, with assorted image-related hoops for candidates to jump through.
My publications and academic works are listed in my curriculum vitae.
