About Me

I am a Professor of Journalism at Columbia College Chicago, the LAS Faculty Fellow for Civic Engagement, and the creator of Columbia Votes! I’m also an accredited Solutions Journalism trainer.

I’ve had the pleasure of creating and teaching a wide variety of courses, inside and outside my department. I love curriculum development because it’s all about helping people learn. 

My scholarly research mainly focuses on the influence of 20th century magazines on American culture, though I am also interested in how magazine fact-checking practices are changing in the digital age, and how solutions journalism is finding a place in branded content. 

My research has been published in Journalism Practice, the Journal of Magazine Media, and the Columbia Journalism Review, as well as in the Handbook of Magazine Studies (Wiley, 2020) and Curating Culture: How 20th Century Magazines Influenced America (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), of which I am also the co-editor. I also created a fact-checking course for Mediabistro. I am a co-organizer of Mapping the Magazine 5, an international conference in Chicago in July 2018, Mapping the Magazine 6, held virtually from Portugal in 2020, and Mapping the Magazine 7, which was held in Des Moines in 2022.

I have led workshops on Solutions Journalism for educators and journalism organizations, including the faculty at Drake University, the National Association of State Radio Networks, and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

My articles have been published in the South Side Weekly, Journalism Practice, the Columbia Journalism Review, Chicago magazine, the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Tribune Magazine, the Chicago Sun-Times, In These Times, Belt magazine, Huffington Post, the Common Review, Ocean Paddler, Adventure Kayak, Sea Kayaker and other publications. I also work as a freelance editor.  
Here is a link to my current CV.