The Center on Media and Society at the University of Massachusetts Boston was created in April, 2004 as a resource for the university, the community, and the professional worlds of journalism and politics. As part of the McCormack Graduate School of Policy Studies, the Center complements and enhances academic courses and research. It also serves an important role in the University's public mission, contributing to the diverse communities from which its students come, to the greater New England area, and to the practice of journalism around the world. The Center supports the highest standards of professional and academic practice, and encourages engagement in civic life.
The Center has three major projects: The Ethnic Media Project, the David Nyhan Student Journalism Award and the Empower Disabled Fund.
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NEWz New England's Ethnic Newswire
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NEWz, the New England Ethnic News, is the culmination of three years of work by the Center on Media and Society at UMass Boston. The Center, which is part of the McCormack Graduate School of Policy Studies, was founded in April 2004 as a university-community partnership which supports best practice journalism, trains students about journalism and politics, offers workshops, public debates and newsmaker briefings, sponsors awards and research, and seeks to promote understanding across ethnic divides.
The Ethnic Media Project’s founding leaders were Ellen Hume, Bill Forry, Hiteshkumar Hathi, Henry Rafael and Yawu Miller. Today the project is run by a core group of ethnic media partners who are shaping its programs and direction, including the creation of NEWz. Participants include media from the African, African-American, Armenian, Brazilian, Chinese, Haitian, Indian, Irish, Latino, Polish, Russian, and other ethnic groups of New England. If you wish to join the project as a participating ethnic media partner, please contact editor@go-newz.com.
The Ethnic Media Project was inspired by New America Media, and we have worked closely with that nonprofit organization on the 2006 New America Media awards (dubbed the ethnic “Pulitzer Prizes”), the national Ethnic Media Expo at Columbia University in June 2005. and other projects.
All aspects of the project are done on a nonprofit basis and participation is usually free of charge. NEWz is supported by a grant from the Ford Foundation and is actively raising funds to pay the staff who currently work only part-time, many of them as unpaid volunteers. If you wish to donate funding or take out a support ad for this website, please contact Ellen Hume.
This effort is supported by a grant from the Ford Foundation.
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What's Here Now
Ethnic Media Project
The David Nyhan Student Journalism Award
The Empower Disabled Fund
Who's Who
The Center's founding director is former Wall Street Journal correspondent Ellen Hume, who served as executive director of the Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and also as director of PBS's Democracy Project. Nancy Riordan is administrative coordinator and Adam Smith is editor of the news wire. The Center's Professional Advisory Board is drawn from professional, business and academic communities.
Past Projects
The Center published MEDIA NATION an independent student newspaper on media issues during the Democratic National Convention in July, 2004, in partnership with Harvard University's Nieman Foundation for Journalism and the Boston Globe. The student newspaper, which drew the favorable attention of MSNBC, Japanese television, ABC's The Note website, the Chronicle of Higher Education and others, was published and distributed as two pages within the daily Boston Globe. It included a daily exclusive cartoon by Pulitzer-prize-winning political cartoonist Doug Marlette, stories about what was being overlooked and how American ethnic journalists were covering the convention, humor, how the Arab television networks and the rest of the world were viewing the convention, a Q&A with media newsmakers, and other features.
Students were paired with professional journalism "coaches" from the Nieman program and Center on Media and Society. Editors and advisors included: Seth Effron and Melinda Grenier of the Nieman Foundation, Ellen Hume and Mark Schlesinger of the UMass Boston Center on Media and Society, David Nyhan, Ed Fouhy, and others. Harvard and UMass Boston students participated in a special journalism "boot camp" to prepare them for this venture, for which UMass students earned course credit.
The Center was inaugurated with a community-wide conference, "Dangerous Intersection: Where the Media and Public Policy Collide" April 7, 2004, featuring ABC News Commentator George Stephanopoulos. Other speakers included Harvard professor Thomas Patterson, author of "The Vanishing Voter," Edmund Beard, acting dean of the McCormack Graduate School, Carol Hardy-Fanta, director of the Center on Women in Politics and Public Policy, and Paul Watanabe of the UMass Boston faculty. The conference was sponsored by a grant from Fleet Bank, a Bank of America company.
The Center has pioneered several courses at UMass Boston, including "News Media and Political Power," the forthcoming "Local and Ethnic Journalism," and special topics courses in 2005 on "Radio Journalism," taught by NPR Producer Bruce Gellerman, and "Media, History and Identity," co- taught by Adam Strom of Facing History and Ourselves.
John W. McCormack Graduate School of Policy Studies
The Center on Media and Society is part of the John. W. McCormack Graduate School of Policy Studies, created at the University of Massachusetts Boston in August 2003 to reflect the University's strengths in policy studies and its desire to develop that strength as a true "signature" area of excellence.
Offering a broad range of graduate degrees in public policy, public affairs, and gerontology, the School teaches students to think and work across traditional boundaries, particularly at the intersection of the public, private, and not-for-profit sectors. Existing research centers within the Graduate School focus on State and Local Policy, Social Policy, Women in Politics and Public Policy, Gerontology, Media and Society and Democracy and Development.
UMass Boston
UMass Boston, located on Boston harbor, is one of the five campuses of the University of Massachusetts, whose mission is to provide a quality affordable university education to the citizens of Massachusetts, regardless of economic means. UMass Boston serves the most diverse student population in New England. The UMB student body speaks over 80 languages at home, and half are first generation college students. The only public university in metropolitan Boston, UMass Boston is integral to the City and its neighborhoods, reaching out through partnerships with the Boston Public Schools, local businesses, community programs, and youth sports.
UMass Boston offers 73 undergraduate degree programs, 44 master's degree programs, 11 doctoral programs, and 14 undergraduate certificate programs through its five colleges and Division of Corporate, Continuing, and Distance Education. As a key institution in Boston that sponsors 25 Research Centers and Institutes, UMass Boston contributes substantially to public policy discussion and formulation in such areas as economic development, social well-being, environmental affairs, and health care.
The University of Massachusetts Boston has unique connections with community and ethnic media, thanks to its students' and faculty's direct experience with ethnic Asian, African, Caribbean, European and Hispanic communities in Boston; UMB's Institutes, WUMB, the campus's professional public radio station; and UMB's College of Public and Community Service.