My research on news, international communication, newsroom practices and hashtag movements, informs my teaching. I am currently a professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, where my research and my extensive online and traditional media experience helps me create and teach various courses like news writing, advanced media reporting, global media and intercultural reporting. Deeply interested in digital communication and data, I ensure that my students learn the basics of data journalism and data visualization approaches. Many of my invited lectures in various graduate level classes in my own as well as other universities focus on gender in the newsroom, citizen media, minority journalists and social media and culture.

I was awarded the Nevada Semenza Christian Teaching Award in 2020.  This award is presented each year to a Reynolds School faculty member, to recognize outstanding teaching. Nominations are made by students.

 Some courses taught include:

International and Cross-Cultural Reporting: This course focuses on the best practices in both foreign reporting. It also looks at the analysis of global and historical contexts for cross-cultural news content. Students here apply and evaluate modes of academic inquiry, creative expression, or results of research to problems in historical and contemporary global contexts. Students will articulate connections among local, national, and international contexts and evaluate the ways that historical and contemporary global influences affect their current situations. The course will challenge students to consider their own perspectives, the role of the ‘other’ in shaping narratives, and the viewpoints of various cultures and strategies for cross-cultural mass media communications. Students appraise best practices in foreign reporting, plan for reporting trips in culturally diverse communities, analyze international media within global and historical contexts and learn to create publishable cross-cultural news content. The concept of cross-cultural reporting also extends to working in distinct communities. This course is designed to prepare students to work as  journalists in a foreign country as well as report on diaspora and immigrant communities within the United States.

Social Media and Journalism:  This course is organized around the broad question of what journalists should know about the way digital media are reshaping society. This class will also help students learn about social media to develop their roles as journalists and strategic communicators.  Students develop their ability to critically analyze the nature of a digital community and the use of social media for professional endeavors.

Social media and Society: This course provides a series of foundational readings on the effects of new media on a number of domains of social life, including culture, the economy, privacy, law, politics, social movements and journalism. It is designed to provide journalists covering any of these domains with the knowledge to analyze the development of technology and its continuing impact. Many journalism courses emphasize the craft of new media — the tools and tactics for effective newsgathering, storytelling, engagement, presentation and dissemination —here students step back and do both, learn about its practical uses and seek to illuminate its social-science dimensions.

Strategic Communication and News Writing courses: This course is designed to develop journalistic skills and practices including researching, investigating, reporting, writing, analyzing data, and thinking critically and creatively.

Digital Journalism: The changes driven by technology have profound effects on how journalists do reporting, approach a story, distribute the story and more. This is not just a theoretical course and is designed to equip students with the mindset and skills to be an innovative digital journalist. Students get hands-on practice in the fundamentals — including news judgment, interviewing, information gathering, fact checking, story conceptualization, reporting and writing — as they get a feel for the new tools’ journalists are embracing. At the same time, they understand that each digital platform is its own medium, requiring different approaches, keeping the audience in mind.

Data Journalism: The information explosion of the past few years has us drowning in data but often starved of knowledge. With that explosion of data, journalists now more than ever need the skills to analyze and understand data to produce the stories hidden in the information. This class does not require a pre-existing familiarity or comfort with technical tools or methods. After an initial assessment of the journalism and computer experience and aptitude of the class, students develop and refine skills in Microsoft Excel and other software and learn that the best computer-assisted reporting is as much or more about journalism and reporting as it is about technology and data.

Introduction to News Writing: In this course, students learn to find stories, explore time-honored techniques for telling them, and examine new ways of interactive storytelling by which consumers of journalism take on greater responsibility for explaining things to themselves and their audiences.

Reporting: Words: This course helps students think more deeply and critically about news coverage in   communities. Students learn and embrace the importance of meeting deadlines and staying on schedule. This is designed to help them become better journalists and provides opportunities to develop and improve portfolios as students begin the crucial transition from college to careers as journalists.

Media Engagement and participation: This class combines theoretical and practical concepts of engagement and strategic communication. The concepts of community, network, behavior change, communication campaign, media matrix, and other engagement relevant ideas are assigned as readings and discussed in classes.  In addition, students explore research, planning, implementation and evaluation as an approach to engaging publics and targeted audiences to create community change through the integration of messages.  Through this approach, students explore how to analyze a situation, and develop goals, objectives and strategies.  Students also explore a series of tactics used by organizations whose success depends on informing and engaging the public through a better understanding how to deliver messages and measure the impact.

Reporting: Words and Editing for Print & Online: This contains a substantial writing component and fulfills part of the basic education requirement in writing. Students learn how to gather and evaluate information to craft stories for the broad public. This course teaches the core skills of news judgment, news writing, basic reporting and editing, feature writing, law and ethics — and covering news from diverse communities.