Author: Holly Nicole Rushakoff

Q&A with Pulitzer Prize-Winning Alum Eli Murray

Eli Murray

Eli Murray

University of Illinois alumnus Eli Murray (BS ’15, journalism), investigative reporter at the Tampa Bay Times, won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Investigative Reporting along with fellow investigative reporters Corey G. Johnson and Rebecca Woolington, for their series “Poisoned.” Their reporting was described as “a compelling exposé of highly toxic hazards inside Florida’s only battery recycling plant that forced the implementation of safety measures to adequately protect workers and nearby residents.” Learn more.

Join us in person or via Zoom for a Q&A about Murray’s investigative reporting career and the Illinois and College of Media experiences that helped shape him. The Q&A will be led by Associate Professor Charles “Stretch” Ledford, who was one of Murray’s influential journalism professors.

This event is presented by the Richard and Leslie Frank Center for Leadership and Innovation in Media.

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Melita Garza

Melita Garza

Associate Professor and Tom and June Netzel Sleeman Scholar in Business Journalism
Director of Graduate Studies

Affiliations

  • Department of Journalism
  • Institute of Communications Research 

Education

  • PhD in Journalism, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Hussman School of Journalism and Media 
  • MBA, University of Chicago Booth School of Business 
  • AB in Government, Harvard University

Course Specialties

  • Journalism History 
  • Business Journalism 
  • Diversity 
  • Qualitative Research Methods 
  • Oral History

Background

Melita M. Garza is an associate professor and the Tom and June Netzel Sleeman Scholar in Business Journalism in the Department of Journalism. She is the 2022-2023 Chair of the Standing Committee on Research for the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. She was a fellow at the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism. Prior to getting her PhD, Melita M. Garza was an award-winning journalist, working at the Chicago Tribune, Bloomberg news, and the Los Angeles Times during a two-decade-long career.

Awards

Research and Creative Endeavor

Melita Garza is an American journalism historian who studies news as an agent of democracy, specializing in English- and Spanish-language news, the immigrant press, and coverage of underrepresented groups. She is the lead editor of The Routledge Companion to American Journalism History (2024). She is the author of They Came to Toil: Newspaper Representations of Mexicans and Immigrants in the Great Depression (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018), which was a finalist for the Tankard Book Award, the Frank Luther Mot/ Kappa Tau Alpha Award, and the National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACCS) Tejas Fojo Award. Her research has also won awards from the American Journalism Historians Association (AJHA), and the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) divisions of: History, Minorities and Communication, and International Communication.

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Melita M. Garza

Contact

melitamg@illinois.edu

Colleen King

Colleen King


Clinical Associate Professor
Director, Richard and Leslie Frank Center for Leadership and Innovation in Media

Affiliations

  • Department of Journalism
  • Siebel Center for Design

Background

Colleen King is a clinical associate professor of journalism and the inaugural director of the Richard and Leslie Frank Center for Leadership and Innovation in Media. 

She comes to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign following 17 years in television news that culminated in her tenure as executive producer of MSNBC’s The 11th Hour with Brian Williams. Under King’s leadership, The 11th Hour became the number one cable news program at 11 p.m., labeled “a success” by The Washington Post and “a must-watch program for political junkies and the Beltway crowd” by The Los Angeles Times. 

King also produced MSNBC election programming and breaking news coverage anchored by Williams. She covered live events including the Parkland school shooting, the Trump-Putin summit, testimony by former FBI Directors James Comey and Robert Mueller on Capitol Hill, Supreme Court confirmation hearings, hurricanes, and other breaking news. 

King has covered four presidential and five congressional midterm elections. She has booked and produced interviews with presidents, presidential candidates, and top lawmakers. King has also produced live coverage of the Iowa caucuses, New Hampshire primaries, party conventions, and presidential inaugurations.

King began at MSNBC as a booking producer for Hardball with Chris Matthews. There, she secured and produced interviews with top politicians and celebrities including Joe Biden, John McCain, Colin Powell, Sandra Day O’Connor, Robert De Niro, Matt Damon, and Robin Williams. 

At MSNBC, she also served as senior producer for Morning Joe, Hardball with Chris Matthews, and other network programming. 

King began her television news career at CBS News in Washington. She also worked as an associate producer and booker for the Fox News Channel prior to joining MSNBC. 

King received a master’s degree in journalism and mass communication with a concentration in journalism education from Kent State University. She earned her bachelor’s degree in political communication from The George Washington University. 

Honors

  • 2026-27 Dean’s Fellow, focus on artificial intelligence in curriculum and instruction

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Colleen King

Contact

cck@illinois.edu

The Frank Center for Leadership & Innovation in Media Presents: A Panel on Sports and Social Media

Sports and Social Media panel

From Naomi Osaka announcing her French Open exit on Instagram to the viral video of Illini gymnast Evan Manivong brandishing his vaccination card, how social media platforms enable and shape interactions among athletes, sports teams, fans, brands, and many others is increasingly clear. Athletes and teams can and do control what they post to social media accounts, but not what happens afterward, as those messages are shared, commented on, used as source material in news stories, and so on. This panel will consider some of the issues, pitfalls, benefits, and concerns where social media and sports intersect.

Panelists include:
Josh Whitman, University of Illinois Athletic Director
Colleen Kane (BS ’03, Journalism), Sportswriter for the Chicago Tribune
Alex Iniguez (BS ’11, Journalism), Senior Editor at The Athletic
De’Myla Brown, Fighting Illini women’s basketball player and journalism student
Moderator: Alison Davis (BS ’91, MS ’11, Journalism), Lecturer in the Department of Journalism 

Sports and Social Media panel

Carrie Wilson-Brown

Carrie Wilson-Brown

Senior Lecturer

Affiliations

  • Department of Media & Cinema Studies
  • Charles H. Sandage Department of Advertising

Video

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Carrie Wilson-Brown

Contact

carrieaw@illinois.edu

Thomas Guback

Blue silhouette

Professor Emeritus, Institute of Communications Research

Education

  • B.A., Rutgers University, 1958 
  • M.S., University of Illinois, 1959 
  • Ph. D., University of Illinois, 1964
  • M. Div. Nashotah House Theological Seminary, 2000

Course Specialties

  • Film Studies 
  • Political Economy of Communications

Research and Creative Endeavor

Researcher, writer, on-air host of Silver Screen, WILL-TV, 1987-1997.

Contact

meadow49670@gmail.com

Angela Aguayo

Angela Aguayo

Associate Professor

Affiliations

  • Department of Media & Cinema Studies
  • Institute of Communications Research

Education

  • PhD in Communications, 2005, University of Texas, Austin

Course Specialties

  • Introduction to Documentary 
  • New Media, Culture and Society 
  • Gender and Popular Culture 
  • Documentary and Social Change

Research and Creative Endeavor

Angela J. Aguayo is Associate Professor in the Department of Media & Cinema Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Angela’s scholarly research and production practice reflect an interdisciplinary focus on documentary, media studies, rhetoric, critical and cultural studies. She is focused on the possibilities for documentary to engage the process of social change, with the specific attention to collective identification and the new media technologies used in conjunction with the genre to mobilize participatory media publics. As a scholar-media artist specializing in participatory and engaged cinema, her most recent book, Documentary Resistance: Social Change and Participatory Media (Oxford University Press, 2019) investigates the political impact of documentary practice. Aguayo is also an award-winning director and producer of documentary shorts utilized in community engagement campaigns, exhibited at museums, and viewed at film festivals around the world, including such prestigious sites as Anthology Film Archives, The Art Institute of Chicago and Harvard University. Most recently, Aguayo is the founding Director of the Illinois Community Media Project, establishing efforts to support media production opportunities for underserved communities across the state of Illinois. She has also served as Acting Director of the Roger Ebert Center for Film Studies.

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Angela Aguayo

Contact

ajaguayo@illinois.edu

Jonathan Knipp

Jon Knipp

Senior Lecturer

Affiliations

  • Department of Media & Cinema Studies
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Jon Knipp

Contact

knipp@illinois.edu

217-244-5692

College of Media
119 Gregory Hall
810 S. Wright St.
Urbana, IL 61801
217-333-2350