July 31, 2025 Thanks to a $2.5M gift from Richard and Leslie Frank in 2024—who endowed the Richard and Leslie Frank Center for Leadership and Innovation in Media in 2020 and enabled the renovation of Richmond Studio—exciting upgrades in the lower level of Gregory Hall began in Spring 2025. This will result in the creation of […]
July 23, 2025 Four students in the Spring 2025 ADV 409: Media Entrepreneurship course won 2025 American Digital Design Awards presented by Graphic Design USA magazine. Alessandra Lopez, Macy Miller, Ben Riseman, and Emmanuel Tinajero, all 2025 graduates in advertising, were seniors at the time of the class. The students created a comprehensive pitch deck for a […]
July 17, 2025 En Vivo Contigo, the first all-Spanish news broadcast on the student-run UI7 Newsroom, won first place for the Ñ Award from the National Association of Hispanic Journalists in the category of Student Broadcast Journalism. The award-winning segment featured an interview conducted by Emilio Reyes (BS ’25, journalism) with Salvatore Callesano, assistant professor […]
July 16, 2025 Sean Evans (BS ’08, journalism) was featured in the inaugural TIME100 Creators list: The Most Influential Digital Voices of 2025. Evans is the host of the Emmy Award-nominated Hot Ones, the YouTube series launched in 2015 in which celebrities are interviewed while eating progressively spicy chicken wings. The show, which is most known for […]
July 1, 2025 | The News-Gazette I suspect AI will continue to be used to help political strategists in creating, testing and managing campaigns. This means we’ll probably receive even more personalized ads—I’m hopeful that we, as citizens, are able to know what is AI and what is not, and what is truthful and what […]
June 30, 2025 Faculty, graduate students, and recent alumni from the College of Media co-presented various topics of research at the 75th annual International Communication Association Conference—the largest academic conference for communication scholars—on June 12-16, 2025, in Denver, Colorado. The ICA aims to advance the scholarly study of human communication by encouraging and facilitating excellence in academic research worldwide. […]
May 20, 2025 A group of University of Illinois students have been recognized for their outstanding work in the 2024-25 Hearst Journalism Awards Program. Update June 12, 2025: Congratulations to two journalism students for their outstanding accomplishments at the Hearst National Championships! Layli Nazarova won first place and a $10,000 scholarship award in Hearst’s National […]
June 5, 2025 Will Leitch (BS ’98, journalism), author, sportswriter, contributing editor for New York magazine, and podcast co-host, will serve as an executive producer of the movie adaptation of his latest novel Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride. Lionsgate purchased the rights to the novel, published by Harper in May, which focuses on Lloyd McNeil, a beat cop in […]
June 4, 2025 | Liz Westfield and Kelly Youngblood Students took their classwork to broadcast television with the opportunity to create documentaries this spring for Prairie Fire, WILL-TV’s magazine program offering cinematic documentaries, profiles, and performances from downstate Illinois. “It was so cool to see something we made [included] on a professional show,” said Adrien […]
June 2, 2025 Illinois Student Newsroom at Illinois Public Media members and journalism students Madison Holcomb and Layli Nazarova were named 2024 Mark of Excellence Awards winners in the audio category in their region by the Society of Professional Journalists. SPJ’s Region 5 comprises collegiate journalists within Illinois, Indiana, and Kentucky. Holcomb, a senior, was […]