Dr. Marie A. Mater, associate professor, has been appointed chair of the Department of Communication and Rhetoric at Houston Baptist University.
Orayb Najjar, Northern Illinois U, was promoted to Professor at the Department of Communication in August, 2009. Bill Cassidy was promoted to Associate Professor.
Jinbong Choi, Texas State U - San Marcos, published a book, Framing North Korea: How Do American and South Korean newspapers Frame North Korea? in August, 2009 (ISBN: 9788964060032).
The Miniplenary on "Keywords: The Public Sphere, Public Culture and Reasoned Public Choice" at the ICA 2009 conference in Chicago has resulted in an interactive online essay forum, hosted by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and by NYU's Institute for Public Knowledge (IPK): http://publicsphere.ssrc.org/. The essay forum enables to continue the conversation and make it interactive. Readers of the essays are invited to submit comments. The essay forum is accompanied by the beta version of a Public Sphere Guide. The guide serves as a research and teaching guide, creating a map of the fragmented interdisciplinary field of study and building a resource for the renewal of the public sphere: http://publicsphere.ssrc.org/guide/
The Handbook of Journalism Studies, edited by Karin Wahl-Jorgensen and Thomas Hantizsch, received a favorable review in the Australian Journalism Review, Australia's leading refereed journal in the academic field of communication. A link to the review can be found on the ICA website, or at http://www.icahdq.org/aboutica/press/AJR-09A-bookreviews.pdf.
