What is your current position(s): I’m a tenure-track assistant professor at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. My interests include journalism history, race and news media, and journalism and democracy. This is my second year as a tenure-track professor at Merrill College. For a year before that, I was a visiting assistant professor while I finished my dissertation. I earned my doctorate from the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers.

What is your favorite class to teach: My freshman Journalism History class. We talk about the social, economic, and technological trends that have influenced the production of journalism in the United States. We also talk very candidly about the many ways in which news organizations have either fulfilled their responsibilities to everyone in society or epically failed, because I want students to enter the industry with an understanding of the challenges they may face and the historical roots of those challenges.

Since we often discuss some heavy topics, because the history of journalism in this country is often not pretty, it’s important to lighten the mood. One way we do that is by playing games to review the material. I grew up watching a lot of game shows and bits on late night television in the 1980s, so I draw inspiration from that. Students can win wacky prizes like Elmo-themed cups, pencils made from recycled newspapers, bubbles, fake gold chains with dollar-sign medallions, and T-Rex dinosaur grabbers with retractable necks. I’m big into creating immersive experiences for students, so usually there’s usually music from pricing games from The Price is Right in the background.

The other nice thing about the class is that I enjoy meeting our newest students and nurturing their ambitions. I think of my role, in part, as a manager in professional wrestling. If you’ve a fan of wrestling, you know there’s a term called “getting someone over.” It’s about putting someone who works hard to maximize their talents in the best position to succeed. So I spend a lot of time as a professor thinking about how to get our students over.

What is your current research project: I’m finishing up some things related to my dissertation, but what really fuels my imagination is my foray into the study of weather journalism. Television meteorologists are among the most trusted journalists at a time when trust in news media in general is low, and we turn to meteorologists for information about dangerous weather and to better understand the risks from climate change. According to a recent poll by YouGov and The Economist, The Weather Channel, for instance, is the only national news network in the United States with a net-positive trust rating among both Republicans and Democrats. 

So, it would be nice to understand how weathercasters develop trust with the many diverse members of their audiences, to consider how those habits and practices might be transferable to other forms of journalism. And this matters because it’s hard for news organizations to hold institutions accountable if no one trusts journalists or the information they provide. And if people don’t trust journalists, they might get their news from sources that peddle disinformation, or stop being a news consumer altogether. Neither of these outcomes are great for democracy in the U.S., so it’s important to better understand how weathercasters cultivate trust. 

But weather journalism is woefully understudied in the field of journalism studies. I’m working on research that hopefully changes that, so stay tuned. Anyone who knows me well knows that I’ve been passionate about weather since I was a kid, and I even worked at the National Weather Service when I was an undergraduate—so this is a convergence of a lot of personal and professional interests for me.

Fun fact about yourself: I’m a big fan of The Young and The Restless and I have been ever since I watched it years ago with my grandmother during the summers that I spent as a kid in East Texas. I watched it on KSLA-TV, the CBS affiliate in Shreveport, for those of you reading this from the Ark-La-Tex. 

I used to be a background actor when I lived in New Orleans and appeared on some episodes of NCIS: New Orleans, but my real ambition is to appear on The Young and the Restless. I have to find a way to make that happen. Maybe I could figure into one of Victor’s schemes. Or, I could be a professor at Genoa City University. Or both. In any case, my students are amused whenever I start class with, “Previously on The Young and the Restless …” Either that or they figure, “You know what, just let him live.”