SJMC Weekly Announcements

Mike has been awarded the Helen Firstbrook Franklin Professorship from the School of Journalism and Mass Communication for his outstanding research, teaching a service. Congratulations, Mike!

Emeritus status was conferred upon Laura for her distinguished service to WSUM and UW-Madison. Laura served as the WSUM broadcast and IT engineer for over 11 years and retired earlier this summer. Congratulations, Laura!

Sijia received a Fall 2023-2024 Competition award to fund Computational Approaches and Message Effects Research's (CAMER) new research project titled "Testing the Efficacy of Employing Automated Text Generation AI to Promote Vaccine Confidence: Bots as Messengers and Machine-Deliverable Persuasive Message Features." The project will text whether social bots as messengers can improve the persuasiveness of AI-generated messages by reducing psycholgoical reactance. This is a collaborative project with visiting scholar Hyun Suk Kim, grad students Ran Tao, Yoo Ji Suh and Zening Duan, and J-School undergraduate alumna Shifan Zhang.

A publication led by professor Sijia Yang was published in the Journal of Health Communication. The article, "Applying the Hornik & Woolf Approach to Identify Messaging Themes and Improve COVID-19 Vaccine Confidence Among Federally Qualified Health Centers’ Workforce in Wisconsin," explores COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy in under-resourced communities in Wisconsin and how messaging can increase vaccine confidence. Read the full article.

A group of SJMC faculty and current and former graduate students have published a new research study inspired by the LGBTQ+ representation in the television program Schitt’s Creek. The findings in this paper suggest a narrative storyline depicting rewards for characters who engage in positive, inclusive behaviors toward gay individuals were more likely to result in prosocial outcomes compared to a storyline depicting characters who were punished for their homophobia. The article, entitled “Learning through rewards: Priming and identification as psychological mechanisms of the effects of LGBTQ+ narratives on inclusive attitudes and behavioral intentions” is published in Media Psychology. Graduate student first authors Ran Tao and Nguyen (Rosie) Nguyen were joined by Linqi Lu, Luhang Sun, Hyungjin Gill, Kate Christy, and Karyn Riddle in authoring this study. Read the full article.