Andrew Flanagin (U of California - Santa Barbara), with Co-PIs Divyakant Agrawal (Computer Science), Stacy Patterson (Mechanical Engineering), Bassam Bamieh (Mechanical Engineering) and Amr El Abbadi (Computer Science), received a grant in the amount of $199,934 from the National Science Foundation, Division of Information and Intelligent Systems for their project “Data-Driven Frameworks for Analyzing User Interactions in Social Media.” This project will integrate expertise from diverse disciplines with the goal of developing reliable, valid models and tools for online social networks research.  In particular, the project will examine techniques for aiding or stemming information flow in online social networks, develop models that accurately capture the opinion formation process, and assess the relative importance of different topics or trends in online social networks over multiple spatial and temporal resolutions.

Linda Putnam (U of California - Santa Barbara) has won the 2011 Academy of Management Distinguished Service Award.  This award recognizes excellence in developing and enhancing a field of study and building institutions through creative and unusually effective service to major professional organizations.  This award honors her contributions to promoting organizational communication studies in the field of management, her centrality in promoting conflict management research in organizations, and her service to the Academy of Management through multiple divisions and association-wide committees.  She will accept her award at the Academy of Management Annual Meeting in San Antonio, TX, 12-16 August.

The Donald McGannon Communication Research Center at Fordham
University is pleased to announce the cowinners of the 2010 Donald McGannon
Award for Social and Ethical Relevance in Communications Policy Research: The
Master Switch (Knopf) by Tim Wu of Columbia University School of Law, and The Death and Life of American Journalism (Nation Books) by Robert McChesney of the University of Illinois Institute for Communication Research and John Nichols of The Nation. This year represents the first year in the history of
the award that it has been shared by two books, both of which were deemed by
the review committee to make substantial contributions to the communications
policy field.

Robert McChesney (U of Illinois) and Victor Pickard (New York U) announce the publication by The New Press of their coedited book Will the Last Reporter Please Turn Out the Lights: The Collapse of Journalism and What Can Be Done to Fix It. The book includes 32 new essays on the crisis of journalism in the United States, written by leading scholars, journalists, activists and policymakers. The essays cover a broad range of approaches to the topic and viewpoints and offer an equally broad range of prospective solutions. The pieces are all written since 2008 and mostly in 2010, and include considerable groundbreaking research and analysis. A few were published in magazines or journals, but most were commissioned and written specifically for this volume.