These are the units for news, profiles, and roles (not bios.)
October 2, 2023
Join us for a tour of the recently renovated Richmond Studio, featuring the brand-new Richard and Leslie Frank Newsroom; remarks by Provost John Coleman, Dean Tracy Sulkin, and Richard and Leslie Frank; a ribbon-cutting ceremony; and cake.
Email: rji3@illinois.edu
My research centers on the psychology of persuasion in digital media, with a particular focus on social media platforms. I investigate how consumers interpret and react to persuasive messages such as advertisements and health-related messages by brands and social media influencers. I am also interested in the effects of misinformation and their mitigation, as well as the impact of LLM conversational agents like GPT models on cognitive processing.
Wise, K., Willis, E., Ji, A., Paltaratskaya, V. (2025, November). Reimagining the Presentation of Important Safety Information (ISI) in Social Media Pharmaceutical Advertising. NCA 111th Annual Convention, Colorado, US.
Liu, A. Y., Ji, A., Taneja, H., & Nelson, M. R. (2025). Stakeholder-desired audiences: Fans’
audience data imaginaries and how they shape industry data practices. Convergence, 0(0).
https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565251366412
Paltaratskaya, V., Ji, A., Mazumdar, P., & Wise, K. (2025). Beyond Buzzwords: The Development of Large Language Models and Their Use in Advertising and Strategic Communication Research. Journal of Current Issues & Research in Advertising, 1–40. https://doi.org/10.1080/10641734.2025.2498996
Wise, K., Paltaratskaya, V., & Ji, A. (2025). Media choice. In De Gruyter Handbook of Media Psychology. Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG.
Ji, A., Paltaratskaya, V., & Wise, K. (2025, June). The Effect of Message Fatigue on Visual Attention to, and Elaboration of Mental Health Infographics. Annual Conference of the International Communication Association (ICA 2025), Colorado, US.
Ji, A., Khowaja, L., Gilloly, K., Luo, H., Oshodi, N., Randolph, Z., Sun, R., Wang, C.-Y., Nelson, M. R. (2025, March). TikTok Made Me Buy It: Breaking Expectations with Shoppable Ads. American Academy of Advertising 2025 Annual Conference, Pennsylvania, US.
September 21, 2023
Update 11/9/2023: Watch the recording of “A Conversation with Brian Williams.”
Brian Williams, former anchor of MSNBC’s The 11th Hour with Brian Williams and NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams, will be on the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus for a conversation about the evolution of broadcast news in America on Monday, October 23, 7-8 p.m.
This event is free and open to the public and is presented by the Richard and Leslie Frank Center for Leadership and Innovation in Media at the University of Illinois College of Media.
Attendees may join the event at the Beckman Institute Auditorium, 405 N. Mathews, Urbana, or register to join via Zoom. The conversation will be led by Colleen King, director of the Frank Center and clinical assistant professor of journalism. King worked closely with Williams as his executive producer of The 11th Hour.
“Working with Brian Williams was the privilege of a lifetime and a daily course in broadcast excellency,” King said. “I can’t wait to hear him reflect on his 40 years in television—and to introduce him to our students, so he can offer advice on reporting, interviewing, and on-air delivery.”
Brian Williams is a 40-year veteran of television news and is among the most highly decorated journalists of his generation. He has received a dozen Emmy Awards, 11 Edward R. Murrow Awards, the duPont-Columbia Award, the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism, and the industry’s highest honor: the George Foster Peabody Award, which he received for his tireless coverage of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. Over the course of his career, he covered every major story imaginable: political conventions and presidential elections, our nation’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, conflict in the Middle East, natural disasters, and countless mass-casualty tragedies in the United States and abroad. He traveled to more than two dozen countries, many of them aboard Air Force One. He has interviewed six American presidents.
For more information, please contact Colleen King, director of the Frank Center and clinical assistant professor of journalism, at cck@illinois.edu.
September 21, 2023
Brian Williams, former anchor of MSNBC’s The 11th Hour with Brian Williams and NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams, will be on campus for a conversation about the evolution of broadcast news in America.
A 40-year veteran of television news, Williams has received a dozen Emmy Awards, 11 Edward R. Murrow Awards, the duPont-Columbia Award, the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism, and the industry’s highest honor: the George Foster Peabody Award.
The conversation will be led by Colleen King, director of the Frank Center and clinical assistant professor of journalism. King worked closely with Williams as his executive producer of The 11th Hour.
Questions may be submitted in advance through the Zoom registration form or through this online submission form.
This event is presented by the Richard and Leslie Frank Center for Leadership and Innovation in Media.
Brian Williams is a 40-year veteran of television news and is among the most highly decorated journalists of his generation. After 28 years at NBC News, he signed off the air for the last time on December 9, 2021.
Over the course of his career, he covered every major story imaginable: political conventions and presidential elections, our nation’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, conflict in the Middle East, natural disasters, and countless mass-casualty tragedies in the United States and abroad. He traveled to more than two dozen countries, many of them aboard Air Force One. He has interviewed six American presidents.
His work has been richly rewarded, with a dozen Emmy Awards, 11 Edward R. Murrow Awards, the duPont-Columbia Award, the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism, and the industry’s highest honor: the George Foster Peabody Award, which he received for his tireless coverage of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. His televised reports from New Orleans were praised by Vanity Fair as “Murrow-worthy.”
During the decade he spent as anchor and managing editor of NBC Nightly News, it was the most-watched news broadcast in the United States—and Williams was viewed by more people on a daily basis than any other broadcaster. At the time of his retirement from NBC, he was anchor of the critically-acclaimed 11th Hour with Brian Williams, which chronicled the 2016 election and its aftermath, including the January 6th insurrection and the failed attempt to overturn a presidential election.
Williams joined NBC in 1993 after a dozen years in local news. Two years later, he was named Chief White House Correspondent. In 2007, Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Along the way, he became a favorite of late-night talk show audiences, and in 2008 he became the first evening news anchor to host Saturday Night Live. In 2014, Williams was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame by fellow member Bruce Springsteen.
Beyond his family, his first love has always been firefighting—and that remains true today. He applied for enrollment in the fire academy at the age of 18, and has served as a volunteer firefighter for many years. He is currently an active and fully accredited member of the fire service in Ocean County, New Jersey. He has been a member of the Leary Firefighters Foundation Board of Directors for 10 years, where he is proud to advocate for the needs of the nation’s 130,000 volunteer firefighters.
September 18, 2023 | Lois Yoksoulian, University of Illinois News Bureau
New research led by data science experts at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and United Nations Global Pulse found that there is no strong evidence that YouTube promoted anti-vaccine sentiment during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The study, published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, performed an algorithmic audit to examine if YouTube’s recommendation system acted as a “rabbit hole,” leading users searching for vaccine-related videos to anti-vaccine content.
For the study, the researchers asked World Health Organization-trained participants and workers from Amazon Mechanical Turk to intentionally find an anti-vaccine video with as few clicks as possible, starting from an initial informational COVID-19 video posted by the WHO. They compared the recommendations seen by these users to related videos that are obtained from the YouTube application programming interface and to YouTube’s Up-Next recommended videos that were seen by clean browsers without any user-identifying cookies.
The team then used machine learning methods to classify anti-vaccine content, analyzing more than 27,000 video recommendations made by YouTube.
“We found no evidence that YouTube promotes anti-vaccine content to its users,” said Margaret Yee Man Ng, an Illinois assistant professor of journalism with an appointment in the Institute of Communications Research and lead author of the study. “The average share of anti-vaccine or vaccine hesitancy videos remained below 6% at all steps in users’ recommendation trajectories.”
The initial goal of the research was to better understand YouTube’s famously opaque techniques for content recommendations—going beyond querying the platform’s application programming interfaces to collect real-world data—and whether these techniques funnel users toward anti-vaccine sentiment and vaccine hesitancy.
“We wanted to learn about how different entities were using the platform to disseminate their content so that we could develop recommendations for how YouTube could do a better job of not pushing misinformation,” said UN Global Pulse researcher Katherine Hoffmann Pham, a co-author of the study. “Contrary to public belief, YouTube wasn’t promoting anti-vaccine content. The study reveals that YouTube’s algorithms instead recommended other health-related content that was not explicitly related to vaccination.”
“The videos that users were directed to were longer and contained more popular content, and attempted to push a blockbuster strategy to engage users by promoting other reliably successful content across the platform,” Ng said.
The study also allowed the researchers to examine how users’ real-world experiences differ from the personalized recommendations obtained by querying YouTube’s “RelatedToVideo” application programming interface. This API is designed to help programmers search for related content on the platform or using clean browsers, replicating the experience of a new user visiting YouTube with no search or view history, which is often used to study the platform’s recommendation system.
The study reports that the watch histories of users significantly affect video recommendations, suggesting that data from the API or a clean browser does not offer an accurate picture of the suggestions that real users are seeing. Real users saw slightly more pro-vaccine content as they advanced through their recommendation trajectories. In contrast, searches performed by the API or clean browsers during the study were drawn toward irrelevant recommendations as they advanced.
“I think one benefit of this study relative to others is that it proposes a relatively lightweight methodology to gather real data on how people navigate through YouTube’s video recommendations,” Pham said. “So unlike the APIs, which will just sort of randomly suggest new links, the users can critically review the links and pick one, which sort of mimics the behavior that many people would use on YouTube in reality.”
Understanding recommendation systems is important because it promotes transparency and holds them accountable,” added co-author Miguel Luengo-Oroz, a professor at the Telecommunications School of the Universidad Politecnica de Madrid. ”This helps people understand the choices being made for them by platform designers.”
Ng is also affiliated with the Department of computer science, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and the Center for Social and Behavioral Science at Illinois.
Editor’s notes:
To contact Margaret Yee Man Ng, call 217-300-8186; email ymn@illinois.edu.
The paper “Exploring YouTube’s recommendation system in the context of COVID-19 vaccines: Computational and comparative analysis of video trajectories” is available online. DOI: 10.2196/49061
September 18, 2023
The Institute of Communications Research is excited to announce our newest cohort! Please learn more about the students’ research interests below and join us in welcoming them to the University of Illinois College of Media community this fall. For more information, see full student profiles.
Weiting Du earned his master’s degree in journalism from Michigan State University, specializing in science and environmental journalism, and holds a bachelor’s degree in ecological environmental engineering from Chongqing University. Weiting’s research interests encompass media effects and risk communication under the context of climate change, with a particular interest in climate inactions. In parallel, Weiting explores how contemporary visual imagery represents the complex interplay between human-environment relationships, collective memories, and broader societal issues. Weiting’s past research covers topics such as the social power of photography in China and persuasive health messages.
Yewon Hong received her master’s degree in cultural studies/critical theory and analysis from the University of Amsterdam and a bachelor’s degree in comparative literature from Yonsei University. Her research interests include cuteness, aesthetics, affect, game, critical theory, cultural studies, and cultural analysis.
Yanbo Li’s research interests lie at the intersection of computational communication and political communication. Specifically, Li is interested in using computational methods to learn about online misinformation and incivility contagion inside and between different countries and the possible factors that foster these processes.
Veranika Paltaratskaya completed her bachelor’s degree in neuroscience and art history at Emory University, and her master’s in advertising at UIUC. Veranika’s master’s thesis focused on the topic of time perception during media use. Her current research focuses on time perception, message fatigue, and computational approaches to communications research.
Se II (James) Park received his master’s in advertising and bachelor’s in communication, both from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Se Il’s interdisciplinary research focuses on persuasive messages in the context of emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, Metaverse, and Web 3.0. He wants to examine the difference in consumer behavior in a more immersive and intelligent virtual. In addition, he worked for the Korean government agency, KOTRA, as a marketing consultant in Chicago and for a blockchain project, WEMIX, as a business development and PR manager in Korea.
Nisa Rahman received her MS in advertising from the College of Media at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and BA in communication from Purdue University – West Lafayette. Nisa’s research interest lies in emerging technologies and their effect on social behavior in the context of health communication. This exploration takes shape through studies utilizing anthropomorphic conversational agents, i.e., “chatbots” to debunk health misinformation and persuade behavior change, as well as the effect of modality in cognitive processing. Nisa is also interested in the intersections between gender presentations and its influence in Human-AI Communication.
Wei Xiao received her MA in communication, culture, and technology from Georgetown University and BA in communication and economics from University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is broadly interested in exploring alternative approaches to the reasoning behind sharing dis/misinformation to debunk dis/misinformation or inoculate people against misinformation. Her research also involves technology policy topics, such as data privacy, free expression, and AI governance. While fighting traditional disinformation, Wei is equally dedicated to addressing the potential ramifications inherent in AI-amplified disinformation scenarios.
Junwei Zhan received his master’s degree in fine arts from the University of Oregon. Before joining ICR, he explored gardens and vehicles in Japan as media to better understand the condition and method of language/culture. Junwei’s research interests are centered around the relations between subjectivity, governmentality, global media network and the network’s interpretive power, which eradicate the boundary between public/private space, human/posthuman and self-governing/self-enslaving. Besides his academic research on communication and media, he is also a cross-disciplinary artist.
Zixuan (Melodie) Zhao earned her BA and MA degrees in journalism from the University of Missouri. She is primarily researching the social and psychological effects of media messages and digital media use. Her specific interests revolve around the interactions between interactive media technologies and individuals’ identity, perceptions of “otherness,” and social relationships, as well as their role in driving social mobilization or polarization.
Nini Zhou’s research interests include critical studies of communication, free labor of women online, and female digital communities.
Ronald E. Taylor (MS ’71, advertising; PhD ’83, communications, ICR), devoted scholar, teacher, and mentor, passed away at his home in Tennessee on September 11.
After receiving his PhD from the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Taylor joined the University of Tennessee as the head of the Department of Advertising, where he built a nationally recognized advertising program at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.
During his tenure, the Department of Advertising was rated by US News & World Report as one of the top eight advertising graduate programs in the country. After a reorganization of the college, Taylor served as the director of the School of Advertising and Public Relations until 2011.
Taylor was an active member of the American Academy of Advertising, where he served as secretary. In 2013, he was awarded AAA’s Charles H. Sandage Award for Teaching Excellence, which recognizes outstanding contributions to advertising education.
Academically, he was a champion of qualitative research and a recognized leader in advertising message strategy. He is best known for his “Six Segment Strategy Wheel” conceptualization, which he published in the Journal of Advertising Research in 1999.
Email: yanbol2@illinois.edu
My research interests lie at the intersection of computational communication and political communication. Specifically, I am interested in using computational methods to learn about online misinformation and incivility contagion inside and between different countries and the possible factors that foster these processes.
Li, Y., & Su, C. (2022). “Toxidization” of social media discussion: Comparing online incivility expressed about the Russian-Ukraine war in China and the United States. Paper presented at the 73rd ICA annual conference, Toronto.
Chaikulngamdee Chawannuch, Janaki Riji Nair, Yanbo Li, Yanling Zhao, Cathleen Cusachs, Danilo Martinez, Yangyang Duan, Zige Chen, Xuanqi Ye, & Kelsey Prena. (2022). Learning through gaming: Examining the learning outcomes of EEK! game. Paper presented at 2022 International Conference on Meaningful Play, East Lansing, MI.
Jill Wine-Banks (BS ’64, journalism), MSNBC legal analyst, author, podcast co-host, and former prosecutor at the U.S. Department of Justice, was one of five female lawyers to receive the 2023 Margaret Brent Women Lawyers of Achievement Award this summer.
The American Bar Association Commission on Women in the Profession established the award to recognize and celebrate the accomplishments of women lawyers who have excelled in their field and have paved the way to success for other women lawyers.
“These five distinguished lawyers are role models for all women in the legal profession,” said Commission member Victoria Alvarez, co-chair of the Margaret Brent Awards committee.
Wine-Banks, who earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a law degree at Columbia Law School, was the first woman to serve as an organized crime prosecutor at the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. Less than five years later, she was named one of the three Assistant Watergate Special Prosecutors—and the only woman—for the obstruction of justice trial against President Nixon’s top aides. She became a major player in the Watergate tapes hearing that preceded the trial, cross-examining Rose Mary Woods, President Nixon’s secretary, about the 18 ½-minute gap in a key White House recording.
Her legal career also includes service as the first female General Counsel of the U.S. Army where she helped integrate women into the Regulate Army by eliminating the Women’s Army Corps, and into West Point; as the first Solicitor General of Illinois where she argued in the U.S. Supreme Court and first female Deputy Attorney General; and as the executive vice president and chief operating officer of the American Bar Association, the only woman to have held that position.
Email: spark110@illinois.edu
Se Il is a doctoral student at the Institute of Communications Research (ICR). Se Il’s interdisciplinary research focuses on persuasive messages in the context of emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, Metaverse, and Web 3.0. He wants to examine the difference in consumer behavior in a more immersive and intelligent virtual environment.
Prior to joining ICR, Se Il received his master’s in advertising and bachelor’s in communication, both from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. In addition, he worked for the Korean government agency, KOTRA, as a marketing consultant in Chicago and for a blockchain project, WEMIX, as a business development and PR manager in Korea.
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I am an avid golfer.