Elizabeth C Shallenberger | College of Media

Brand Ambassador Program to assist Fighting Illini student-athletes in building personal brands

August 31, 2022

More than 30 student-athletes and student brand ambassadors, including 21 advertising students, are part of a new Brand Ambassador Program on campus.

A select group of students from the University of Illinois College of Media will be paired with individual Fighting Illini student-athletes as a part of the new Brand Ambassador Program, a project of the Hub for Brand Innovation and Advertising Technology and the Charles H. Sandage Department of Advertising.

“There is no question that many Illini student-athletes are among the most high-profile brands in the State of Illinois,” said Dr. Mike Yao, professor of digital media and head of the Charles H. Sandage Department of Advertising in the College of Media. “We could not be more excited for our outstanding students to grow alongside student-athletes and local businesses with whom they share the Illinois experience. Today’s personal branding opportunities are limitless, and I look forward to seeing the results.”

The Brand Ambassador Program requires a rigorous application process and provides students with a passion for brand marketing and social media with hands-on training to become effective, creative, and positive brand managers. Fighting Illini student-athletes along with Visit Champaign County, the City of Urbana, the Champaign Community Economic Development Corporation, and other organizations will be paired with individual brand ambassadors in order to establish and better develop their personal brand strategies.

Last year’s changes to state law and NCAA policy allow student-athletes to monetize their name, image, and likeness (NIL), and this shift has created an incentive for student-athletes to increase their social media presences as they begin to play a prominent role in the marketing efforts of both regional and national corporations. Opendorse, a leading NIL technology platform, projects that the student-athlete NIL market could reach $1 billion annually, with a significant majority of NIL activity leveraging student-athletes’ social media presences.

NCAA Women’s Gymnastics Championships individual qualifier Mia Takekawa is one student-athlete who will benefit from this new initiative.

“It’s amazing to consider that I will have a personal social media expert,” Takekawa said. “I’m always wondering how to increase my online presence, and I’m excited to see how this helps elevate my profile to get more NIL deals.”

The Brand Ambassador Program operates in parallel with the INFLUENCE Program, the Division of Intercollegiate Athletics educational approach to NIL, which emphasizes brand and strategy development along with business and financial concepts.

“The University of Illinois has some of the finest advertising students in the nation, and I am delighted that our student-athletes will get the benefit of this new program,” said Josh Whitman, director of Athletics. “I am grateful to the College of Media, Dr. Yao, and the many others who worked to include our student-athletes in this new endeavor.”

The Brand Ambassador Program will begin at the start of the Fall 2022 semester. The program currently has 21 advertising students and serves 10 student-athlete brands (two of whom are Media majors) and brands in the community.

View original press release from DIA.

New professor Garza connects journalism history to the present

August 22, 2022 | Vivian La, Communications Intern

Melita Garza, an award-winning journalist, media historian, and a new associate professor and Tom and June Netzel Sleeman Scholar in Business Journalism, sees a reporter as a detective investigating a larger story. And she’s most interested in the stories that haven’t been told.

“The idea of trying to piece together the missing pages of history—that is the most fascinating to me,” Garza said. “I know that these stories have been overlooked in the past, so I want to uncover them.”

Garza is interested in how history can be used to understand current issues surrounding representation, diversity, and equity. It’s also the foundation of the class she’s teaching this fall, JOUR 250: Journalism Ethics & Diversity.

“I bring up historical issues, always,” Garza said. “Because I think it’s not possible to understand the present if we don’t understand the past.”

She also wants to ground the course in psychology.

“I think it is important, no matter what you plan to do with your career, to be aware of how our minds work to short circuit our ability to get the full picture or get the full story,” she said. “Understanding the psychology of diversity is just as important as understanding the history of diversity.”

With more than 20 years of experience at professional media outlets such as the Chicago Tribune, Bloomberg News in New York, and the McKinsey Quarterly in London, Garza is an expert in journalism history, media diversity, business reporting, English- and Spanish-language news, the media and civil rights, and literary journalism. For the past decade, she was on the journalism faculty at Texas Christian University.

After graduating from Harvard University with a bachelor’s degree in government in 1983, Garza began her journalism career. She was an inaugural member of Los Angeles Times’ Minority Editorial Training Program. She then worked at the Milwaukee Journal for a few years before landing a position at the Chicago Tribune.

During her 15-year tenure at the Chicago Tribune, Garza covered a range of stories that spanned city government, immigration, and big business. She did a lot of “old-fashioned reporting” before the Internet became a resource, and her investigative work on the 2001 Firestone tire failures led to a Pulitzer Prize nomination.

“It was an adventure in terms of finding out what went wrong at the tire plant indicator and how that led to potentially many deaths,” Garza said.

As a reporter, Garza was always interested in business journalism, seeing business as a very dominant influence “in defining public discourse,” she said.

She earned her MBA from the University of Chicago while working as associate editor for McKinsey Quarterly, a London-based business publication.

“Part of the problem with being a journalist is you’re always on the outside looking in,” Garza said. “And I thought that maybe I could get better insight into business if I did this.”

While in business school, she realized how much she enjoyed research and digging deeper into topics. And her peers in class encouraged her, saying she would make a good teacher.

Garza worked at Bloomberg news before pursuing a PhD in journalism and mass communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her dissertation focused on a Spanish-language newspaper in San Antonio, Texas, La Prensa, which she had heard stories about from her parents. She compared La Prensa’s coverage of Mexican immigrants during the Great Depression to that found in English-language newspapers, then drew parallels to how immigration was portrayed in the news media in 2008 during the financial crisis.

This fall, in addition to her teaching, Garza will be editing a collection of essays called The Routledge Companion to American Journalism History, which she described as a re-imagining of journalism history.

She’s also working on an oral history project on how the lived experiences of journalists of color are valued or not valued in newsrooms across the country.

Garza said she’s excited to be back in Illinois, and especially getting to know more people in the College of Media.

“I’m looking forward to meeting a lot of new students from very diverse backgrounds,” she said. “I’m just super excited to be coming and meeting all of you.”

Heuman to support media literacy initiatives as College of Media Dean’s Fellow

Josh Heuman, a teaching assistant professor in the Department of Media & Cinema Studies and the Department of Journalism, has been appointed by College of Media Dean Tracy Sulkin as a Dean’s Fellow for the coming academic year. Heuman will work with department and college leadership teams to facilitate activities around the college’s 2022-2023 annual theme of media literacy.

The idea for an annual theme emerged from the College of Media strategic planning process in 2020. Each year, college faculty and students brainstorm about possible themes and then vote to select among them. Last year, the inaugural theme focused on social justice.

“This is a critically important time to be examining media literacy,” said Dean Tracy Sulkin. “We’re excited to bring together perspectives from advertising, journalism, and media and cinema studies through class projects, college events, and public engagement. I’m very pleased to have Professor Heuman join our leadership team this year to support these initiatives.”

Heuman sees the theme as particularly timely. As the pandemic has increased our time spent online, there are concerns about how to be an informed citizen amidst the spread of misinformation.

“We are at a moment where the ways that we engage with media have qualitatively changed,” he said. “It’s hard not to peek out into the scary world outside and see lots of ways that [media literacy] is very relevant, whether we’re talking about the field of politics or social media, and [the effect it has on] young people.”

As part of his duties, Heuman will engage with IMEDIA, a joint collaboration between faculty in the College of Media and College of Education that is helping Illinois public school educators learn how to teach media literacy to students and hosted a media literacy workshop this summer.

“I think it’s a really exciting time to think about these questions, maybe at a more abstract level, but also to recognize and engage with the people who are putting these ideas on the ground, in schools across the state and other states, too,” he said.

Heuman’s own research explores media industries and regulation, especially in television, with an emphasis on the regulation of media work. He’s also interested in the evolution of the television writers’ room—the place where stories are first introduced.

“What kind of an environment is this, in which the stories that we see on the screen come to be formed and come to be shaped?” Heuman asked. “We have a sense of struggles and tensions and what’s at stake in the stories that we end up seeing on screen.”

As media literacy events are announced, Heuman invites faculty, students, and alumni, within the college and beyond, to engage in the conversations.

—Vivian La, Communications Intern

Helping Students Be Wise Consumers of Media

August 5, 2022 | Tom Hanlon (College of Education) with Holly Rushakoff (College of Media)

Educators at the IMEDIA media literacy workshop

Twenty-one Illinois public school educators learned how to incorporate media literacy into their curricula this summer through an IMEDIA media literacy workshop on campus, hosted by faculty from the College of Media and College of Education.

“Media literacy is especially important in light of the last presidential election and the amount of disinformation and misinformation that is pervasive in the U.S.,” said Professor Sarah McCarthey, head of the Department of Curriculum & Instruction in the College of Education. “It’s more and more critical that we equip students with the ability to discern what’s factual from what’s not.”

The workshop, attended by librarians and teachers from language arts, social studies, special education, and art, was developed by the College of Media and the College of Education. The two colleges recently jointly launched a program entitled “Initiative for Media Education Inquiry and Action (IMEDIA),” along with the cofounder of the Illinois Media Literacy Coalition, Michael Spikes of Northwestern University.

The workshop was designed to better equip teachers and students with media literacy skills to encourage mindful media consumption and production and to help teachers meet the needs of a state mandate requiring public high schools to teach media literacy beginning with the 2022-2023 school year.

“Many of us in the College of Media have been working on media literacy-related research and teaching in the last several years,” said Professor Stephanie Craft, head of the Department of Journalism. “When we heard about the new law, we wanted to be able to turn that work into action. Teaming up with curriculum and instruction experts in the College of Education seemed an ideal way to do that.”

The IMEDIA team introduced participants to key concepts in the framework for media literacy, with a focus on news media literacy. Educators were:

shown how to help students identify propaganda and see how the media have been used for social and political change throughout history,
instructed in how to use documentaries to increase media literacy, and
taught by a local Urbana High School student and undergraduate students from the College of Media how students are both creators and consumers of social media content.

The IMEDIA collaboration is working to build a robust critical media literacy curriculum in Illinois schools. Interested teachers will continue working with IMEDIA for follow up on media literacy implementation throughout the 2022-2023 school year.

“Preparing Illinois students to successfully navigate an increasingly complex media environment is vital to their well-being and ability to participate in democratic life,” Craft said.

“The end goal is quite simple,” McCarthey added. “We want all of our students to be prepared to be critical media consumers.”

Learn more about IMEDIA.

IMEDIA team members include Professor Sarah McCarthey from the College of Education; Professor Amanda Ciafone from the College of Media; Michael Spikes from Northwestern University; doctoral student Sakshi Bhalla from the College of Media; Professor Michelle Nelson from the College of Media; Professor CL Cole from the College of Media; Professor Stephanie Craft from the College of Media; and Professor Jon Hale from the College of Education.

Yan (Anna) Liu

Email: yanliu10@illinois.edu

Research Interests

Anna studies emerging technologies, data and quantification, persuasion, and strategic communication. Her research follows two lines: (1) Broadly, how emerging technologies transform content generation and media exposure in strategic communication. More specifically, how AI-generated summaries (AIGS) synthesize information, how they transform strategic communication message and media strategies in the contexts of social media, search engines, and online review platforms, as well as how consumers process the synthesized and streamlined information in AIGS. Additionally, her research on generative AI (GenAI) also explores GenAI and users’ information-seeking, as well as GenAI and creativity. (2) Broadly, Anna studies the social impact of data and quantification in strategic communication. More specifically, how brands and organizations communicate numerical data effectively and ethically in persuasive messages, and how to leverage regulatory forces and consumers’ data literacy to strengthen consumer protection.

She employs a mixed-method approach, using computational methods (e.g., computer vision, machine learning, sentiment analysis, etc.), traditional quantitative (e.g., experiment, survey, content analysis), and qualitative methods (e.g., interview, netnography) in her research.

She has 5 years of professional experience in the marketing research industry. Before joining ICR, Anna was a Senior Research Manager at Ipsos (Beijing office), one of the world’s top three marketing research firms, where she conducted research on brands, advertising, media, products, and consumers using a various methods, including survey, experiment, content analysis, focus group, in-depth interview, observation, home visit, shop-along, consumer diary, eye-tracking, social media analytics, etc.

Anna earned a B.A. in journalism from Renmin University of China and an M.S.S.c. in advertising from Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Recent Publications/Presentations

Baptiste, P.*, Fukada, M.*, Lee, Y.*, Liu, A. Y.*, & Nelson, M. R.* (In press). How Audiences Negotiate the Changing Streaming Video Landscape: Accepting or Avoiding Advertising Depends on Your Advertising Socialization. Advertising & Society Quarterly.

Liu, A. Y. & Zhang, M. M. (2026). Positivity Bias in AI-Generated Summaries of User-Generated Content: Exploring Its Sources and Impact on Public Sentiment. Computational Communication Research. https://doi.org/10.5117/CCR2026.2.4.LIU

Liu, A. Y. (2025). Ephemeral Visibility and Externally Visible Production: How Algorithmic Automation Accelerates Fans’ Data Work. New Media & Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448251393480

Liu, A. Y., Ji, A. R., Taneja, H. & Nelson, M. R. (2025). Stakeholder-Desired Audiences: Fans’ Audience Data Imaginaries and How They Shape Industry Data Practices. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565251366412

Liu, A. Y., & Taneja, H. (2025). Visibility of K-pop in the US: Global Rankings, ‘Audience Mis-aggregation’, and Mainstream Attention to Niche Genre. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565251320755

Pan, S., & Liu, A. Y. (2018). Examining the Effect of WeChat Usage on Social Capital among Chinese College Students. Chinese Journal of Journalism & Communication, 40(4), 126-143. http://cjjc.ruc.edu.cn/CN/Y2018/V40/I4/126

Liu, A. Y., & Zhang, M. M. (2026, Aug 5-8). AI-Powered Social Information Seeking: Taxonomy Development and Cross-Cultural Comparison. Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) Annual Conference, New Orleans, United States.

Liu, A. Y. (2025, Jun 12-16). Context Matters: Exploring Consumers’ Sense-Making of Online Ratings in the Social Context. International Communication Association (ICA) Annual Conference, Denver, United States.

Gong, Z., Chen, T., Liu, A. Y., Xuan, J., & Su, L. Y. F. (2025, March 6-9). Navigating Consumer Acceptance of Cultured Meat: An Exploratory Narrative Review of Communication Strategies. American Academy of Advertising (AAA) Annual Conference, Pittsburgh, United States.

* The authors contributed to the work equally.

Courses Taught

ADV 281 Advertising Research Method (Instructor of Record)
ADV 360 Innovations in Advertising (TA)
ADV 284 Consumer Insight (TA)
ADV 250 Advertising and Brand Strategy (TA)
ADV 201 Social Media and Personal Branding (TA)
ADV 200 Data Literacy (TA)
ADV 150 Introduction to Advertising (TA)
MACS 100 Introduction to Popular TV & Movies (TA)

Awards and Honors

Webtoon Emerging Scholar Award (Honorable Mention), AEJMC Advertising Division
2026 James Webb Young Fund, Summer Scholar, Department of Advertising, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (Faculty supervisor: Dr. Michelle Nelson)
James Webb Young Grad Research Award, Department of Advertising, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Bart A. Cummings Advertising Gift Fund (Research fund for dissertation), Department of Advertising, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Petullo Fellowship, Department of Advertising, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
James Webb Young Travel Fund, Department of Advertising, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
MusicID 2024 Digital Research Fellowship

ICR student Rojas-Alvarez receives campus public engagement award

Jorge Rojas-Alvarez, a doctoral student at the Institute of Communications Research in the College of Media, was honored with the 2022 Campus Excellence in Public Engagement Award for Graduate/Professional Students. The Campus Awards for Excellence in Public Engagement are given to individuals at the University of Illinois who engage the public to address critical societal issues, and include a $2,000 stipend.

Most notably, Rojas-Alvarez contributed to the 211/Champaign County helpline that connects individuals in need with local social service organizations. The project—called 211: The Role of Information Resources + Services in Crisis Response—is a partnership between the Community Data Clinic at Illinois; NCSA’s Students Pushing Innovation internship program; and the community organizations Champaign County Mental Health Board, Champaign County Developmental Disabilities Board, Cunningham Township Supervisor’s Office, and United Way of Champaign.

Rojas-Alvarez said this award motivates him “to continue working on these types of projects involving collaborations between universities and local communities” and the award underscores how “UIUC takes seriously the value of this kind of work.”

As part of the Community Data Clinic team, which is directed by Anita Say Chan, associate professor in the Department of Media & Cinema Studies and in the School of Information Sciences, Rojas-Alvarez focused on redesigning the Champaign County Resources (CCR) website with community partners. For more than two years, Rojas-Alvarez organized and implemented improvements to make the 211 service more accessible and navigable to users.

Rojas-Alvarez organized and led information sessions with nearly 50 CCR service providers, and coordinated their web updates. He engaged Latinx groups during the process. He also led the web design team and mentored Illinois engineering students who were involved.

The CCR website is now managed by a community-based board and features new resources and community directories that are more visible to potential clients, and has Spanish and French language options.

“The multi-language feature was based on the growing immigrant population in Champaign County,” Rojas-Alvarez said. “Additionally, I found that immigrants and refugees avoided using the 211 directory because they believed such contact would expose them to immigration authorities. Unfortunately, the old directory did not identify organizations that accept participants despite their immigration status. Under my suggestion and outreach, the new directory provides immigrant-friendly services.”

According to his nominators, Rojas-Alvarez demonstrated a forward-thinking mindset and leadership by organizing partnerships, group services, research, and funding to benefit the surrounding community.

Rojas-Alvarez draws inspiration from designing technologies for social change. His passion for community-building combined with his ability to identify growth opportunities has helped to serve Champaign County residents.

Rojas-Alvarez’s background is in computer science and history of technology. In Colombia, he helped design public history exercises in national libraries, which emerged as spaces of dialogue between historical documental archives and the memories of users.

View University of Illinois News Bureau press release.

—Holly Rushakoff

Nudo publishes book on journalism grad school experience at Illinois

Sal Nudo (MS ’16, journalism) has released a new book on Amazon in which he recounts his experiences in graduate school in journalism at the College of Media: Learning Journalism Where Writers Rise: Four Enlightening Years in Graduate School at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Nudo interviewed several past and current journalism faculty members at Illinois and added their thoughts in his book, including Swanlund Chair Professor of Journalism Leon Dash; Professor Emeritus Matt Ehrlich; Knight Chair Professor in Investigative and Enterprise Reporting Brant Houston; Associate Professor Emeritus Rich Martin, and Lecturer Jean McDonald.

He also interviewed and included three journalism classmates in his book: Jessica Elliott, Janelle O’Day, and Teryn Payne.

“I wrote this book to relate the values and practices of journalism for aspiring journalists, and for those who have an interest in the field,” Nudo said. “This is a book on how to do a wide range of journalism right, with thoughts from scholars, practitioners, and former students who care about the field.”

Nudo has published multiple books that are available on Amazon, including Far From Mars (2021), which contains nine creative nonfiction articles about individuals who live and work in Champaign-Urbana. Learn more.

ICR welcomes 2022 cohort

The Institute of Communications Research is excited to announce our newest cohort! Please learn more about the students’ research interests in their profiles below and join us in welcoming them to the University of Illinois College of Media community this fall.

Jiyeon Chang received her master’s degree in communication and media and bachelor’s degrees in journalism and advertising & PR at Ewha Womans University, Seoul. Jiyeon studies the psychological and societal impacts of using new media. Her newest research focuses primarily on personal traits that determine psychological well-being and improvement in work skills in the virtual work environment. As a new student in ICR, she is interested in understanding collective actions and homophily in online and social media. She also wants to examine senior citizens’ new media usage to minimize information gaps and social disparities. Before joining ICR, Jiyeon worked in a government-funded research institute in South Korea. She has contributed to policy developments in the broadcasting and media fields in line with technological developments and changes in the media environment.

Jennifer Cintron received her bachelor’s degree in English literature with a minor in film studies from North Central College. She then completed a master’s degree at Northern Illinois University, in English with a concentration in film and literature. Her research across these degrees has focused on adaption from the written to visual, emphasizing youth culture and social media. At a past conference, she has spoken on the choice of adaptation literature in youth media, as it affects ongoing conversations of cultural and historical awareness. With her new work at the ICR, she hopes to continue this path and research these ongoing changes that can be seen in the film medium.

Namita Gupta graduated from Lady Shri Ram College for Women, University of Delhi, receiving her bachelor’s in English, and she attained her master’s degree in English from Shiv Nadar University (India). Her research lies at the intersection of print and digital public sphere, where she aims to study the impact of new technologies on social and political discourse in visual and popular culture. Particularly, she is interested in examining how contesting notions of nationalism, collective memory, and belonging are interpreted in mass media texts. Before joining ICR as a PhD student, she worked as a researcher with Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad, participating in various projects on gender, politics of space, and trolling. She has also held several teaching assistantships and editorial positions.

Ruochong (Alice) Ji received her bachelor’s degree in psychology and economics at the University of Chicago. Her bachelor’s thesis in psychology “Ramifications of social inclusion: Does social inclusion affect people’s adoption and internalization of harm-doing group normative behavior?” examined whether profile likes by group members on social media affected subsequent learning and internalization of aggressive behaviors displayed by other group members. Prior to joining ICR, she also worked as a research assistant at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Her primary research interest is in media psychology. Specifically, she is interested in the reception of health messages and scientific/political communication on social media, the effects of social media in promoting policy and social change, and influencer (real or virtual) marketing.

Jiwon Oh’s research interests intersect digital culture, technology, and identity. Drawing upon both qualitative and computational methods, she would like to study how gendered and racialized boundaries are created, enforced, and protected within digital spaces, particularly regarding how Asian-American communities navigate pandemic-era identity politics online. Jiwon holds an MA in communication from Seoul National University, where she studied cringe culture, fandoms, and Korean popular culture. She has also conducted research with industry giants like Netflix and HYBE. She graduated magna cum laude from New York University, receiving a BS with honors in media, culture, and communication.

Julie Turnock to serve as inaugural director of Roger Ebert Center for Film Studies

June 3, 2022 | Holly Rushakoff

Julie Turnock, associate professor of media and cinema studies, has been appointed to serve as the inaugural director of the Roger Ebert Center for Film Studies, which officially launches this fall.

“The College of Media is eager to celebrate Roger Ebert’s legacy through this new center that will engage scholars, students, and movie fans alike in robust conversations about film,” said Dean Tracy Sulkin. “I look forward to the energy and insight that Professor Turnock will bring to the director role.”

“I’m excited to help the center bring both more awareness of cinema and cinema studies to the campus, as well as the opportunity to bring more film-centered programming,” Turnock said.

As part of her appointment, Turnock will coordinate event programming, including the Ebert Symposium, Ebert Lecture, and a screening series; Ebert research grants and travel grants for film studies; and the Ebert Fellows Program for undergraduate students.

The first event Turnock is planning is the annual Ebert Lecture for mid-fall, which will feature a scholar of film studies.

“We will invite a prominent speaker and hopefully also have a screening, both of which will be open to the public,” she said.

Turnock’s research focuses on film, with an emphasis on special/visual effects, and she coordinates the film studies curriculum.

“I never met Roger Ebert, but like many people around my age, I watched the TV program Siskel and Ebert at the Movies religiously every week,” Turnock said. “Even though most of the films they reviewed weren’t playing in my northern Indiana town, it was an exposure to a wide variety of movies that I might eventually be able to rent at the video store.”

Turnock served as acting head of the Department of Media & Cinema Studies during academic year 2019-2020. At the 2019 Chaz & Roger Ebert Symposium, she moderated a panel discussion on diversity in film. She is the author of The Empire of Effects: Industrial Light and Magic and the Rendering of Realism (University of Texas Press, 2022) and Plastic Reality: Special Effects, Technology, and the Emergence of 1970s Blockbuster Aesthetics (Columbia University Press, 2015).

Rooks receives 2022 College of Media Emerging Leader Award

May 31, 2022 | Vivian La, Communications Intern

Taylor Rooks (BS ’14, journalism), sports journalist and broadcaster at Bleacher Report, is known in the field of sports journalism for her interviewing skills and for her ability to connect with athletes. She was recently nominated for a 2022 Sports Emmy Award for “Outstanding Personality/Emerging On-Air Talent.”

Rooks said her time at the University of Illinois provided the opportunity for her to ask questions and was an important foundation for her career today.

The College of Media has selected Rooks as the recipient of the 2022 Emerging Leader Award, which honors an alum for their exemplary early career achievements and engagement with the college.

“As sports media fans already know, Taylor Rooks is a talented and innovative journalist, and we are fortunate to have her share inspiring personal and career experiences with students in the College of Media,” said Dean Tracy Sulkin. “We are proud to recognize her with the Emerging Leader Award.”

Rooks has been a panelist at a 2021 Media Career Night focused on sports media; she is part of the college’s Alumni Speakers Bureau and has been a featured guest in journalism classes; and she is involved in a College of Media mentoring program that pairs alumni and students from underrepresented populations, where alumni share perspectives and advice.

“Things are so much more special when they come from places or people or institutions that you have a very deep emotional tie to, and the University of Illinois has been so important in my life and in my family’s life,” Rooks said.

Both of her parents attended Illinois, where her mother was a broadcast journalism major and her father was an Illini running back and studied political science.

From the start of Rooks’s time at Illinois, she was involved with the athletic department and applied her studies to her interests in sports media.

“Being around that environment really showed me that doing the media side of it was something that I could do, and could excel at,” she said. “And the College of Media gave me the tools.… That was the first time that I really saw how the team aspect of news is what really makes it work. And that’s something I have carried with me ever since.”

Rooks was involved with the Big Ten Network as a student, and worked for them full-time after graduating. From there, she spent two years at SportsNet New York before being hired at Bleacher Report.

At Bleacher Report, Rooks had her own web series, Take It There with Taylor Rooks, where she did longform interviews with athletes such as Jimmy Butler and DeMar DeRozan. Her episode “Inside the NBA Bubble with Taylor Rooks” was a 2021 honoree for a Webby Award in the Social, Sports (Series & Campaigns) category. Along the way, she has developed a large following on social media, with nearly 500,000 followers on Instagram and more than 240,000 followers on Twitter.

As an interviewer, she tries to engage in conversations that tell a story.

“When you have conversations with [people] on a human level and you allow them the space to tell you who they are, you have a better understanding of them completely,” Rooks said.

Rooks said she sees a lot of dehumanization of athletes in sports and it can be hard for fans to understand that these players are human beings with real emotions.

“We only see people for what they do,” Rooks said. “And it’s just really important to me to let them feel like their voice exists and that it’s important, and that when they sit in the chair, they can use their voice in whichever way they wish.”

And these emotions are often connected to identity, Rooks said. Most of the athletes she talks to want to discuss how they feel in relation to their Black identity or womanhood, for example.

“Those are all things that have to be in the conversation to get a full scope of someone’s life from a perspective, someone’s point of view,” Rooks said.

Rooks said it also helps when she shares her own experiences as a Black woman, something she did when she was inside the NBA Bubble, an isolation zone for basketball players during the final games of the 2019-2020 season and 2020 NBA playoffs, when the pandemic began.

It was the summer where protests following the murder of George Floyd were at their height, affecting many of the players inside the bubble but also Rooks herself, as a Black journalist.

Calling it the best thing she’s done in her career, Rooks said the experience taught her about her responsibilities as a journalist and how it’s necessary to tell multiple stories at once.

“Because with all these people in a place, the experiences aren’t monolithic,” she said.

There were players who wanted to leave the bubble to join the George Floyd protests, and players worried about their families getting COVID-19.

“You wanted to do right by them and tell the stories in the ways they intended for them to be told. And we all just wanted our work to reflect the duality that was happening in the bubble,” she said.

Her own identity and experiences has helped in the storytelling she does—something that Rooks encourages students to remember.

“It’s so much less about having to shy away from stories you have a personal connection to and more so about understanding how lending your voice to it actually pushes it forward,” she said.

Everyone’s lives are different, Rooks said. She advised focusing on things that can be controlled and that it’s okay to not have everything figured out as a college student.

“What you can control is working, waking up and trying to be better, looking inside to figure out the things that move you, that make you feel passionate, and you cultivate those,” she said.

Author: Elizabeth C Shallenberger