JRMC Announcements and Faculty Contribution

 

Kim Fox was the Audio Team Co-Lead for the Online News Association's 2022 Conference

Faculty Member Featured: Kim Fox

September 29, 2022

Professor of Practice Kim Fox was invited to co-lead the Online News Association's (ONA) audio team to cover their annual conference in Los Angeles, California on September 21-24, 2022.

 

Plant-based Meat Alternatives

Faculty Member Featured: Yousra Bakr

September 29, 2022

Yousra Bakr has published a cross-cultural study on the acceptance of plant-based meat alternatives in Kuwait and Canada. The paper, Consumer Intention to Buy Plant-Based Meat Alternatives: A Cross-Cultural Analysis, was published in the Journal of International Consumer Marketing with two co-authors from Kuwait: Hayat Al-Bloushi and Mohamed Mostafa.

57357 Children Cancer Hospital Foundation

Faculty Member Featured: Ahmed Taher

September 29, 2022

Ahmed Taher was nominated for the third time for another three-year term on the Board of Trustees of 57357 Children Cancer Hospital Foundation.

 

Brown Bag Series Relaunch

JRMC Department

September 29, 2022

The JRMC's Brown Bag series is back after a two-year hiatus due to the pandemic.

The relaunch featured Adjunct Professor Ahmed El Mahrouky who talked about the aspirations of Egypt's United Media Services (UMS) company in the local media industry as seen through the prism of the Magic Bullet theory of communication. Several JRMC Faculty and student engaged in the discussion.

 

Keep it in the Family

JRMC Department

September 29, 2022

The Photographic Gallery ends its first fall exhibition, Keep it in the Family, on October 5.

The group exhibit features works from 38 students enrolled in last year's JRMC photography courses. Three professors and the gallery’s curator collaborated to bring about this photographic show. 

The exhibition is made up of visual stories that look at the idea of family life from different perspectives. The photographs cover the contemporary family in a breadth of situations through creative approaches that depict ideas of belonging, kinship, and absence, to open a window onto how the family is, in a way, a cultural construct. These visual stories reveal how photography can be a means of creating new images of family and a family of images that sheds light on this universal subject to rethink our own place within the family condition. 

Gallery hours are Sunday through Thursday, from 10 am - 4 pm.

 

Rasha Allam Conducts a Workshop on Media Advocacy

Faculty Member Featured: Rasha Allam

September 21, 2022

Rasha Allam gave a one-day training session on September 20 on media advocacy tools and strategies for 25 participants who represent different trade unions around Egypt. The training session is part of the Public Policy HUB project in tandem with the International Labour Organization ILO Cairo organization.

 

The 55th African Journalists Workshop

JRMC Department

September 21, 2022

The Kamal Adham Center for Television and Digital Journalism and the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication organized the 55th African Journalists Workshop in association with the Union of African Journalists on Tuesday, September 20, 2022. 

The 22 journalists who attended the one-day workshop came from 25 countries across Africa, namely Morocco, Cameron, Côte d’ Ivoire, Congo Brazzaville, Kenya, Gabon, Mauritania, Zambia, Nigeria, South Africa, South Sudan, Sudan, Uganda, Senegal, Chad, Tunisia, and Togo; and additional 10 Egyptian journalists also participated.

The workshop included sessions on Print Media Research, Science Journalism, media literacy, as well as Print Media Management delivered by Hussein Amin, Director of the Kamal Adham Center. In addition to Heba Al Shahed, Salma ElGhetany, and Lobna Khairy, JRMC adjunct faculty members. 

The bi-annual workshop comes within the framework of UAJ’s and JRMC’s role to train African cadres in the field of Journalism to benefit all African countries. The training program that was launched in 1992 under the supervision of Hussein Amin, has now developed into a network of journalists who have been trained at the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication, School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the American University in Cairo, and work all over African media.

IMC Students Compete to Win the Fayrouz Pitch

Faculty Member Featured: Tara Al-Kadi

September 21, 2022

Adjunct Faculty Tara Al-Kadi hosted Fayrouz marketing team members: Amina Abdel Razek, senior brand manager; Joy Malek, media planning manager; and Maryam Soliman, junior brand manager. 

The visit aimed to bridge the gap between the academic and professional worlds by introducing the brief. In December, all 12 teams will be competing for their IMC campaigns to be implemented by Fayrouz in the spring. In addition, student winners will be awarded internship and employment opportunities.

 

MCA Event: Explore the Disciplines!

JRMC Department

September 21, 2022

The First Year Program (FYP) held its second "Explore the Disciplines Fair '' event in collaboration with all AUC schools. The fair displayed majors, minors, and special programs. The event took place on September 21 from 1 to 3 pm at the Bartlett Plaza.

MCA representatives participated in representing the JRMC department, distributed flyers, and answered students' inquiries.

 

Rasha Abdulla at the International Association for Media and Communication Research

Faculty Member Featured: Rasha Abdulla

September 15, 2022

Rasha Abdulla, Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication, was invited to speak at a plenary session of IAMCR (International Association for Media and Communication Research) 2022. The session was entitled "Talking with Technology: Global Dialogues and Diverse Civilizations." IAMCR is a preeminent international organization in the field of media and communication research. Its annual convention is one of the largest in the field.

To watch the full session, click here.

Kim Fox Takes the Stage at Podcast Movement

Faculty Member Featured: Kim Fox

September 15, 2022

Professor of Practice Kim Fox attended Podcast Movement, which claims the title as the World's Largest Community of Podcasters, in Dallas, Texas from August 23-26.

Attending the conference for the first time, Fox highlighted her audio students' award-winning work during the session on Teaching Students to Produce Compelling and Award-Winning Narrative Audio Stories.

Fox was also on the Africa X Podcasting panel where she shared her work with PodFest Cairo, the Ehky Ya Masr Podcast and her scholarly research on podcasting.

A clip of her comments on the Afripods Instagram account.

 

A Chapter in a Wiley Publication

September 15, 2022

Professor of Practice Kim Fox also had a chapter co-authored with Oberlin College's Taylor Allen published in 

The Wiley Handbook of Collaborative Online Learning and Global Engagement this summer. 

Fox and Allen met in 2019 as a part of the Global Course Connection, a project from the Global Liberal Arts Alliance where AUC is a member. Fox and Allen have collaborated on two course exchanges (Fall 2019 and Fall 2020) which lead to their chapter: Cross-Training and Perspective-Taking: The Development of an Oral History Project in the Sciences and Humanities.

 

Naila Hamdy joins Editorial Board of the Journal of Communication

Faculty Member Featured: Naila Hamdy

September 15, 2022

Naila Hamdy recently agreed to join the editorial board for the Journal of Communication and will be serving in this capacity for two years.

 

Why Zamalek are Champions

Faculty Member Featured: Alaa Abdel-Ghani

September 1, 2022

Alaa Abdel-Ghani writes on why Zamalek are Egypt's football league champions for the second consecutive season.

 

Shahira Fahmy Elected Chair of the AEJMC Publications Committee for 2022-2023

Faculty Member Featured: Shahira Fahmy

September 1, 2022

On August 27,  Shahira Fahmy was elected chair of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) Publications Committee. 

Fahmy started her three-year term on the AEJMC Publications Committee in 2020. The committee is responsible for the oversight of the three association-wide top-ranked journals:  Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly (JMCQ), Journalism and Mass Communication Educator and Journalism and Communication Monographs. Fahmy will provide the sort of intellectual navigation needed to ensure the highest possible standards for these top-ranked journals in journalism and mass communication.

 

Kim Fox Presented on Two Panels at AEJMC 2022 in Detroit

Faculty Member Featured: Kim Fox

September 1, 2022

JRMC's Kim Fox presented on two panels at the 2022 AEJMC conference in Detroit in early August.

Panel #1: Elevating #Women Scholars' Voices: Moving Toward Academic Cosmopolitanism

Panel #2: What Does It Mean to Teach Journalism Online: Lessons After Two Years of Pandemic Teaching

 

The 2022 National Student Production Awards

JRMC Department

September 1, 2022

We’re excited to announce that three of our JRMC students (some are recent grads) are finalists in the 2022 National Student Production Awards in the category for Best Regularly Scheduled Entertainment Program for the episode: The Rundown: Powerpuff Girls Episode 5.

The Powerpuff Girls are:

• Nouran Saleh
• Laila Hatem
• Menna Kamel

Tweet from the Collegiate Broadcasters Inc. (CBI) Twitter account.

YouTube Video of the CBI Awards Finalist Announcement (see 6:26).

The winners will be announced at the CBI convention in Baltimore, Maryland, which takes place on October 26 and 29, 2022.

Congratulations Nouran, Laila and Menna. The Department is proud of you!

 

Shahira S. Fahmy agreed to serve on the editorial board for the Journal of Communication

Faculty Member Featured: Shahira Fahmy

August 25, 2022

In September 2022, Shahira Fahmy will start her role as an editorial board  member for the Journal of Communication (JoC). Given Professor’s Fahmy expertise and outstanding service for JoC as Associate Editor since 2018, the incoming editors invited her to continue her service with the Flagship Journal and join the editorial board. The appointment is for two years and may be renewed.

 

Four JRMC graduate students along with Professor Shahira S. Fahmy presented two papers at the AEJMC annual conference in Detroit

August 25, 2022

On August 6, 2022, Shahira Fahmy and her graduate students presented two refereed papers at AEJMC in Detroit, Michigan. The first paper examined social media activism among youth in the context of TikTok Intifada. The work is co-authored with Professor Fahmy’s current MA students Laila Abbas, Sherry Ayad,  Merna Ibrahim and Ali Abdelmoneim. The second paper was a critical discourse analysis on the Cuban Twitter-sphere. It was co-authored with her current MA students Aliaa El Shabassy, Nouran, Nour, Laila Abbas, Sherry Ayad and Merna Ibrahim.

 

Shahira S. Fahmy Leads a Workshop on How to Publish in Top Academic Journals in Spain

August 25, 2022

“What do editors and reviewers look for? Preparing your paper for journal publication” was the title of the workshop led by Professor Shahira Fahmy in July 2022. The workshop, sponsored by Erasmus plus, was geared towards faculty and graduate students at the University of Murcia (UM) in Spain. 

Professor Fahmy secured the Erasmus+ International Credit Mobility (ICM) Program between AUC and UM for two consecutive years. The program allows cooperation and exchange in research and teaching between the two universities.

 

Kim Fox named to the Inaugural 40 over 40 in Podcasting List

Faculty Member Featured: Kim Fox

August 25, 2022

The August 2022 issue of Podcasting Magazine celebrates 40 podcasters over the age of forty who are passionate about podcasting, and have been for years. JRMC's Kim Fox is among them. See Fox's online profile for the magazine along with the others.

 

Kim Fox Participated Virtually in the London-based International Women's Podcast Festival

Faculty Member Featured: Kim Fox

July 21, 2022

On June 18, Kim Fox participated in the International Women's Podcast Festival, which was hybrid and based in London. Fox's panel, Beyond Anglophone Podcasting, was on the Global Voices Virtual Stage.

 

Podcast Discussion with Kim Fox and Yasmeen Ebada

July 21, 2022

Last month, JRMC Professor of Practice Kim Fox and JRMC Adjunct Professor Yasmeen Ebada were invited to join the Podcast PhDs discussion group composed of PhD students and candidates whose primary subject matter is podcast studies. The group discussed Fox's and Ebada's research article Egyptian female podcasters: shaping feminist identities. Some of the topics discussed were podcast pedagogy and delivery techniques for podcasters.

 

Teaching Using Case Studies

Faculty Member Featured: Ahmed Taher
July 21, 2022

Ahmed Taher was invited to address the MBA and business PhD faculty at the Faculty of Management Technology at the German University in Cairo. The topic was teaching using the case method, and the demonstration used the Harvard Case: Los Angeles Philharmonic: Cultural Entrepreneurship.

 

Equity and Access - Healthcare for All

July 21, 2022

Ahmed Taher co-authored a paper accepted at the Equity and Access - Healthcare for All conference in Hobart, Australia in September 2022.

 

Outstanding GAPP Achievement and Excellence

JRMC Department

June 23, 2022

On Tuesday, June 14, GAPP celebrated the achievements of GAPP Faculty and Staff for the Academic Year 2021-2022.

For the GAPP Faculty Outstanding Research Award; the first award is granted to Noura Wahby, assistant professor, Department of Public Policy and Administration. 

The second GAPP Faculty Outstanding Research Award is jointly awarded to Shahira Fahmy, professor, Department of Journalism and Mass Communication and Ghada Barsoum, associate professor and Chair, Department of Public Policy and Administration in recognition of their valuable contribution to academic research in 2022. 

The GAPP Faculty Outstanding Contribution to Practice Award is jointly awarded to Laila El Baradei, professor and MPA director, Department of Public Policy and Administration and Kim Fox, professor of practice, Department of Journalism and Mass Communication in recognition of their valuable contribution to practice in 2022.

For the GAPP Staff Excellence Award: 

Ahmed Nabil, Technical Support Specialist

Enas Abdel Azim, Manager, Graduate Programs, Department of Public Policy and Administration

Joint third: Heba Fouad Ibrahim, Senior Administrative Affairs Assistant, Caravan, Department of Journalism and Mass Communication/ Lamya Desokey, Officer, Internships and Events, Department of Journalism and Mass Communication

And an award of recognition to:

Nesrin Azmy, Student Services Manager, Department of Journalism and Mass Communication

 

GAPP Honors Assembly

JRMC Department
June 23, 2022

The Department of Journalism and Mass Communication held its GAPP Honors Assembly for the major undergraduates on Sunday, April 12 in Moataz Alalfi hall. The event celebrated the highest GPA students from spring 2020 through spring 2022. Rasha Allam gave the opening remarks and presented the certificates to the honored students. The event was well-attended by students and their families.

 

Rasha Abdulla speaks at RightsCon

Faculty Member Featured: Rasha Abdulla
June 23, 2022

Rasha Abdulla, Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication, spoke on a panel at RightsCon conference on June 7 entitled "Platform Content Moderation in the Arab World: An Update." The panel was moderated by David Kaye, the former United Nations Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression and Professor at the University of California Irvine School of Law. The panel also featured speakers from Smex Lebanon, Mnemonic, and Access Now.

 

Rasha Abdulla Speaks on AlJazeera Twitter Space; publishes an op-ed with Thomson Reuters

June 23, 2022

Rasha Abdulla was invited to speak on a Twitter Space organized by AlJazeera (in Arabic) on the potential purchase by Elon Musk of Twitter. Abdulla was also invited by Thomson Reuters to publish an op-ed on the same topic for the international news outlet. The op-ed, entitled "Will Elon Musk Remove My Twitter Shadow Ban?"

 

Chapters Published

Faculty Member Featured: Sara El-Richani
June 23, 2022

Sarah El-Richani has just published a chapter in Arabic on the Lebanese media from its inception to the present day, taking stock of the legal and political framework and the challenges encountered as well as the prospects for media in Lebanon in light of the unprecedented financial and economic crisis gripping the small nation.The chapter is available in Arabic here.

Sarah el-Richani's chapter "Le paysage médiatique libanais : une liberté et un pluralisme paradoxaux" has just been published in French in an edited volume entitled La culture et ses dépendances edited by Abdelfettah Benchenna and Dominique Marchetti and published by the Institut français du Proche-Orient (IFPO) and the Centre Jacques-Berque. The chapter can be accessed here.

With these two chapters, El-Richani has now been published in four languages.

 

Farewell to an African Coach

Faculty Member Featured: Alaa Abdel-Ghani
June 16, 2022

Adjunct Professor Alaa Abdel-Ghani writes on the departure of Ahly's sole African coach in their storied history and Egypt’s new football coach that was let go after three matches.

 

The Journal of Visual Political Communication

Faculty Member Featured: Shahira Fahmy
June 16, 2022

In June 2022, Prof. Fahmy was appointed to the editorial board of the  Journal of Visual Political Communication.

Professor Shahira S. Fahmy participates at the International Communication Association Annual Convention

In the last week of May 2022, Shahira Fahmy served as a discussant on a panel focusing on the interaction between visuals and power and chaired another session on hostile and conspiratorial media at the International Communication Association annual convention in Paris, France. 
She also presented a refereed paper on political personalization on Instagram co-authored with her Spanish colleagues Marta Rebolledo and Rocío Zamora Medina, and another paper on a comparative Covid memes project with her former AUC colleague Brian J. Bowe and AUC alum Basma Mostafa Taha.

 

Annual International Conference on Visual and Performing Arts in Greece

In June 2022, Shahira Fahmy presented her research at the 13th Annual International Conference on Visual and Performing Arts in Athens, Greece. The work, co-authored with Spanish colleague Rocio Zamorra Medina, looks at TikTok as a tool for political persuasion from a comparative European perspective.

 

A “TikTok Intifada”

Shahira Fahmy, with current MA students Laila Khaled, Shery Thabet, Mirna R. Khela and AbdelMoneim Hany, has published an article in Online Media and Global Communication journal. The work entitled “TikTok Intifada: Analyzing social media activism among youth”, is the lead article in the journal’s themed issue. The journal is translated to both Arabic and Chinese and the work will be presented at the AEJMC annual convention scheduled to take place in Michigan this summer.

 

Fox Book Review Published in The Electronic News Journal

Faculty Member Featured: Kim Fox
June 16, 2022

Professor of Practice Kim Fox had a book review published in The Electronic News Journal at the end of May 2022. The review is on "NPR’s podcast start-up guide: Create, launch, and grow a podcast on any budget" written by Glen Weldon from NPR.

 

For the Love of Heinz

Faculty Member Featured: Tara Al-Kadi
June 9, 2022

Select students from Tara Al-Kadi’s creative advertising strategy and copywriting sections were invited to present their Heinz campaigns. Two groups recognized by Heinz’s advertising agency Bubblegum’s founder and Managing Director, Mohamed Wasfy, were asked to present their campaigns to Passant Ghannam, marketing director, MEA and Turkey, Heinz-Kraft. Ghannam said she was pleasantly surprised by the final ads and commended the group members for their research insights and for adequately tackling the challenging briefs they were given.

 

JRMC Students win 9th Undergraduate Research Competition in Public Relations and Mass Communications from Abu Dhabi University

Faculty Member Featured: Shahira Fahmy
June 9, 2022

On May 26, Shahira Fahmy’s JRMC undergraduate students Maha ElBeltagy, Nourane Sakr, Wael Mahmoud and Mohanned Samir won a top paper award (third place) for their paper on native advertising in Egypt at the 9th Undergraduate Research Competition in Public Relations and Mass Communications from Abu Dhabi University. The paper was written in Fahmy’s research methods' class in fall 2021.

 

#ICA22 in Paris

Faculty Member Featured: Kim Fox
June 9, 2022

Kim Fox attended the International Communication Association (ICA) conference in Paris. This was her first time to participate in the conference. In addition to networking with faculty from The Danish School of Media and Journalism (DMJX), where she is the coordinator for the study abroad program, she was also on the panel "Contemporary Solutions in Higher Ed for JMC Faculty and Staff."

 

Baseera Foundation

Faculty Member Featured: Ahmed Taher
June 9, 2022

As a member of the board of trustees in Baseera Foundation for People with Visually Impairment, Ahmed Taher oversaw the signing of an agreement between Baseera, West Michigan University and Eslesca University to offer a diploma certifying caregivers for the visually impaired. This is the first of its kind diploma in the MENA region which came after months of negotiations.

 

Mount PR

Faculty Member Featured: Yassmin El-Sayed
May 19, 2022

Last month, Adjunct Faculty Yassmin El-Sayed, hosted two prominent speakers from Mount PR agency, a full-fledged public relations and communication agency operating in the local market,  in her JRMC 4415 Public Relations Theory and Techniques class. Marina Iskandar, deputy communication director, and Eman El-Homossany, senior account director in Mount PR, talked about the meaning of public relations campaigns and how to plan an effective one.

Mount PR team members gave the students a chance to take on real clients that need to develop real public relatoins plans. All the students will work in teams of five or six to complete a plan for the client.

 

 

Wunderman Thompson

Faculty Member Featured: Sherin Moody
May 19, 2022

Adjunct Faculty, Sherin Moody invited Wunderman Thompson (WT) as the panel for the JRMC 4425 Integrated Marketing Communication Campaigns Capstone two-day presentations that were held on May 11 and 15, 2022. After a full semester of research and production, 10 groups presented their creative strategies and final campaigns. All projects were start-ups. The topics this semester were Ice Cream Museum, Egyptian Themed Amusement Park, Bride Guide App, Domestic Home Gatherings & Catering Services, Digital Egyptian Museum, Art Experience Cafe, Bicycle Renting, Color Factory, Customizable Resin Jewelry, and Local Scented Candles.

In the end, each group received an award for their respective projects. Two winning groups received the prestigious Wunderman Thompson Award of Excellence, and an opportunity to have internships at WT.

 

Sherin Moody was later invited by Professor Dina Farouk Abou Zeid (‘96), Head of the Mass Communication Department, Faculty of Arts, Ain Shams University (former Dean of Media Sciences at International Academy For Engineering & Media Science- IAEMS) to be part of the judging panel of 14 Advertising and PR graduation projects.

 

Got a Headache?

Faculty Member Featured: Ahmed Taher
May 19, 2022

Ahmed Taher's JRMC 4425 Agency Operations Management class presented live to Julphar's Senior Marketing Team their projects to launch Adol (headache medicine line) and Mebo Scar (anti-scarring line) in Egypt. Two teams worked on the course for three months and showed off their proposed campaigns including media plans, production budgets, and radio and film ads.  Julphar is a multinational pharmaceutical company based in UAE.

 

Communications Consultant

Faculty Member Featured: Sarah Seif
May 19, 2022

Adjunct Faculty Sara Seif has been appointed as a Communications Consultant for Maxim Investment Group of (Royal Maxim Kempinski, Maxim Mall & Developments, and more) for an upcoming project taking place soon.

 

Recent Article

Faculty Member Featured: Alaa Abdel-Ghani
May 19, 2022

Adjunct professor Alaa Abdel-Ghani writes that while Egypt’s Ahly and Wydad of Morocco are in the final of the African Champions League, the achievement has been overshadowed by controversy surrounding the venue.

 

UAE Innovates initiative

Faculty Member Featured: Hesham Dinana
May 19, 2022

Hesham Dinana conducted two workshops as part of the UAE Innovates initiative to help the youth there get familiar with the impact of innovation on the future of the Healthcare industry. The workshops were titled:

• How AI (Artificial Intelligence) is reshaping Healthcare: The Hope, the Hype and the real Work Impact
• Big Data & Health Informatics Use in Health Care

 

 

Dinana was also elected to the Board of Directors for Eitesal, the leading ICT (Information and Communications Technology) industry NGO. Eitesal plays a pivotal role in supporting Egypt's national ambition for Digital Transformation and in growing the contribution of the ICT industry to the country's GDP and exports. Eitesal started in 1997 and has more than 170 of the leading Egyptian and Multinational  ICT companies in its membership base.

 

Une Liberté et un Pluralisme Paradoxaux

Faculty Member Featured: Sarah El-Richani
May 19, 2022

Sarah el-Richani's chapter "Le paysage médiatique libanais : une liberté et un pluralisme paradoxaux" has just been published in French in an edited volume entitled La culture et ses dépendances edited by Abdelfettah Benchenna and Dominique Marchetti and published by the Institut Français du Proche-Orient (IFPO) and the Centre Jacques-Berque.

 

Professor Shahira S. Fahmy attends EU COST meeting in Lisbon, Portugal

Faculty Member Featured: Shahira Fahmy
May 19, 2022

In the first week of May 2022, Professor Fahmy participated in the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (EU COST) meeting at the University of Lisbon, in Lisbon, Portugal. The aim of this COST action is to build a network for the interdisciplinary study of interactive digital narratives.

 

Feminist Pedagogy

Faculty Member Featured: Kim Fox
May 19, 2022

Kim Fox was interviewed on the Canada-based Amplify Podcasting Network. Listen to the episode where Fox discusses feminist pedagogy in her recently co-authored (w/JRMC's Yasmeen Ebada) research article Egyptian female podcasters: shaping feminist identities along with other topics like her award-winning Ehky Ya Masr Podcast, as well as her work on PodFest Cairo, Egypt and Africa's first podcasting conference.

 

Kim Fox Wins at BEA Conference

May 19, 2022

At the first face-to-face Broadcast Education Association (BEA) Convention since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, Kim Fox was the only AUC/JRMC faculty member to attend the gathering in Las Vegas. 

In addition to beginning her term on the BEA board of directors as vice-president for academic relations, Kim Fox was the recipient of two (2) BEA Best of Festival awards, the first time that anyone has ever won two in the same year, for Ehky Ya Masr's How Egypt's Water Crisis Impacts Food Production (Audio category), and Ehky Ya Masr's The Syrian Shawarma Takeover (News category).

Kim Fox was also the recipient of a BEA Award of Excellence for Ehky Ya Masr's Come Drink Tea, The Egyptian Way (Audio category).

Kim Fox was also a panelist on five panels as well as moderating two panels. For a full list, please visit the BEA website.

 

Speaker for a talk hosted by AUC's School of Continuing Education and the US Embassy in Cairo

May 19, 2022

JRMC Professor of Practice Kim Fox was an invited speaker for the AUC School of Continuing Education and the US Embassy in Cairo for a talk "The Changing Media Landscape in the US: Major Media to Social Media." The talk, which took place on Tuesday, May 17, was hosted on Zoom and was followed by a robust discussion on the topic.

 

Guest Speakers in JRMC 4460 Class

Faculty Member Featured: Sally Kandil
May 19, 2022

To wrap up the semester to a nice end, JRMC 4460 class had 2 guest speakers on May 17. Shady Manaa (a professional VO artist) and Sherif Samir (a sound designer and music producer).

They gave the students a very inspiring talk on the field of voice over and sound design then they had an open discussion with students who are interested to go deeper in the field of voice over and sound production.

 

 

Regulating African Digital Media

Faculty Member Featured: Sherin Moody
May 19, 2022

Adjunct Faculty Sherin Moody presented a paper on “Online Violence Against African Females“ at the “Regulating African Digital Media Conference” (two-day conference) organized by the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research, Birmingham City University, UK.  

The May 3 conference examined current African “regulatory interventions in media technologies” and their effect on societies. The presentation focused on the scarcity of African social media regulations to protect women and girls and was followed by a panel discussion on “Regulating Online Harms.”

 

Eternal River Photography Exhibition

JRMC Department
May 19, 2022

Curator Dina el Deeb hosted photographer Roger Anis who gave a talk on his exhibition, The Eternal River at the Photographic Gallery on April 12. Anis is an award-winning photojournalist who began his career with Shorouk newspaper in 2010 before going on to work on personal photo essays exploring issues of social change within different communities in Egypt. He is a recipient of several grants and awards, including the World Press Photo grant (2013), Reuters Microsoft Mobile Photo award (2014) and UNICEF photo of the year (2015) among others.

He spoke with the JRMC students from the JRMC Photography classes and photography professors Ronnie Close, Nadia Mounier and Ahmed Hussein. The exhibition runs until the end of April, see here.

 

Call for Papers: African Women in Media (#AWiM22)

May 19, 2022

Under the theme United in Action, the African Women in Media 2022 (#AWiM22) will hold its hybrid conference in Casablanca, Morocco, on December 8-9 2022.

All submissions should be made via this online form by noon WAT on 25 May 2022.

 

Deadlines for BEA On-Location Conference in Colorado, USA October 2022

May 19, 2022

-Paper and panel submissions: June 15

-Creative competition deadline for faculty and student entries: July 15 

Find more information on the website: https://buff.ly/2XWPL1N

 

Tell It like It Is: A Talk with Anas Bukhash

JRMC Department
April 14, 2022

Anas Bukhash, Emirati entrepreneur and host of the YouTube channel #ABtalks, met with nearly a hundred students on April 11 to talk about “honesty” online which is very rare nowadays and people tend to lie in order to fit in society. Bukhash encouraged the students to celebrate their uniqueness and to just be themselves. 

The idea of his show is to celebrate humanity and to open up for empathy and compassion. He stressed that social media should be about sharing the best moments of the day.

In order to start a business and succeed you need the 3Ps, he said: “Passion, Plan, and Perseverance”.

• Two of the Adjunct Faculty Sally Kandil’s audio production students (Shahd Hashem and Sarah Youssry) were among the students who had the chance to interview Anas Bukhash in the radio studio.
• He also visited the Adham Center studios and gave a very candid and inspiring interview to graduate students running the studio.

The talk is available to watch here.

      

 

Strategy Savvy

Faculty Member Featured: Hesham Dinana
April 14, 2022

In January, Hesham Dinana signed a book agreement with world renowned Taylor and Francis Publishing Group. The book will be published under the Routledge publishing brand and it will be titled: Strategy Savvy: Balanced strategy Development Approach Using Insights, Culture, Operations, and Digitization.

The book will be out this summer in the US and Europe academic and professional markets.

 

Workshops at the Children Cancer Hospital Foundation 57357

April 14, 2022

In March, Dr. Dinana organized two workshops for the team of the Children Cancer Hospital Foundation 57357 titled:

Insights-Driven Marketing Communications - Think Like a Marketeer

The workshops were also marketed for external attendees as part of the fund-raising activities for the hospital to support its mission in Egypt.

 

Professor Shahira S. Fahmy selected to  join the Fulbright Specialist Roster

Faculty Member Featured: Shahira Fahmy
April 14, 2022

On behalf of the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) and World Learning, Shahira S. Fahmy has been recommended by the Peer Review Panel for placement on the Fulbright Specialist Roster for a tenure of four years. Fahmy's roster tenure officially begins on April 8, 2022 and will end on April 8, 2026.

 

Rowaidah Bibers Meets students

Faculty Member Featured: Andalib Fahmy
April 14, 2022

In an attempt to exchange knowledge and experiences between different generations, students in the JRMC4415-01, PR Theory and Techniques class taught by Adjunct Faculty Andalib Fahmy, welcomed Mrs. Rowidah Bibers, the general manager of POD Egypt for PR and events, at Mary Cross Hall on April 7.

Over the course of 90 minutes, Bibers exchanged with the students some insights about the PR career in Egypt, and helped the attendees to know the required skills that they should have in order to get job offers in public relations. She also spoke with the students about how to handle different crises and different stakeholders.

Bibers also advised the students to be team players and to start building their networks from now. 

Moreover, she recommended that they read a lot and to be aware of the main media headlines as well as what is happening in the country in general and to train themselves to think out of the box if they wanted to be successful in PR.

Bibers is an influential PR figure in Egypt and the Middle East with 10 years of specialized PR and communication experience in the region.

POD Egypt is part of United Media Services. The company has more than 130 employees who serve 20 varied sectors in order to achieve the best PR, Marketing, and event management experience.

 

Challenges Facing Traditional Media Management

Faculty Member Featured: Lobna Khairy
April 14, 2022

On March 31, Adjunct Faculty Lobna Khairy hosted Mona Mourad, CEO OnAir Studios & Arabsat Executive Consultant, in the JRMC 4420 Media Management class for a practical talk about the many challenges of managing traditional media outlets in the digital era.

Mourad also discussed the different business models adopted by media platforms and the future financial plans for both OnAir & Arabsat.

 

IMC Talks - Guest Speakers Share Industry Insights

Faculty Member Featured: Heba El Shahed
April 7, 2022

Heba El Shahed hosted two prominent speakers in the IMC field, Mai Salama and Ranim El-Kishky in her JRMC 3315 and JRMC 4425 classes on March 31.

Mai Salama is the managing partner at The Worx and founding partner of the creative industry summit; Ranim El-Kishky is a former IMC student and AUC alumna and the project manager at The Worx. They talked about the future of IMC and the creative economy. Students received a gist of the practicality of their major and what they will face in the working field in addition to what working in the creative industry looks like.

Earlier, El Shahed hosted Shady Samy, CEO of Square Cube communication to talk about brief milestones of marketing, what distinguishes a good marketer, and how to succeed in today’s fierce market. He also discussed with students future trends in marketing and IMC practices.

 

International Conference on Global Public Affairs in a Changing World

JRMC Department
March 31, 2022

On March 21, the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication organized two panels as part of the first International Conference on Global Public Affairs in a Changing World, which was virtually held by the School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the American University in Cairo.

The first panel, moderated by Rasha Allam, assistant professor and associate chair, titled “From Transformational Technology to Digital Deception: How AI, Deep Fakes, Targeted Marketing are Chaining the Industry". The panel consisted of Sylvia Chan Olmsted, Director of Media Consumer Research at the University of Florida, Hesham Dinana, assistant professor (JRMC, AUC), Nadine El Sayed, associate professor of practice (JRMC, AUC) and Mr Khalid Baramawi, Egyptian journalist and expert in digital media.

The second panel, moderated by Associate Professor of Practice Khaled Ezzelarab, was titled The Future of Journalism Schools, Necessary Skills, and Employment. The speakers were: Randa Abul Azm, the Bureau Chief of Al Arabiya news channel in Cairo, Mohamed Fathi, a writer, academic and content producer, and a media professor at the Faculty of Arts at Helwan University, and Karim Al Damanhouri, an academic and a practicing journalist, and assistant Professor at the University of Denver's Media, Film & Journalism Studies department.

Both sessions were well-attended by media professionals, academics, and students.

 

Professor Shahira S. Fahmy to serve on the international advisory board for the ICA Handbook Series

Faculty Member Featured: Shahira Fahmy
March 31, 2022

In March 2022, Professor Shahira Fahmy was appointed to the international advisory board for the International CommunicationAssociation (ICA) HandbookSeries. As a leading international expert, she would serve as a member of this advisory board for a term of three  years.

The prestigious handbooks published in the series comprehensively chart the field by covering a range of key debates, issues and contexts. In addition to a critical engagement with central theoretical and empirical traditions, they provide a systematic and accessible overview of the state of scholarship, advance theory-building and problem-solving, and identify areas for further theory and research in an international context.

 

JRMC and CASAR Lecture

Faculty Member Featured: Naila Hamdy
March 31, 2022

Naila Hamdy arranged for a joint JRMC and CASAR (Center for American Studies and Research) lecture held on March 23. Thomas Dolan, Fulbright U.S. Scholar; Adjunct Faculty, Department of History, AUC presented his perceptions on depictions of the Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) which have seen increased interest in the MENA region, particularly on the part of streaming services looking to exploit the growing MENA market. At the same time, performer-activists have had unprecedented success in advocating for a “MENA” category to be recognized by the acting unions, production companies, casting societies and even the Oscars. His talk examined US race-making, organizing and entertainment to offer an overview of new possibilities and challenges facing MENA representation, as MENA performers move from the margins to the mainstream and claim the right to represent themselves on their own terms.

 

Media Viewership Research

Faculty Member Featured: Samar Abdelaal
March 31, 2022

On March 20, Mr. Mohammed El Sayegh, Associate Director at Awe Research, was invited to adjunct faculty Samar Abdelaal's introduction to mass communication class section 02-03, to introduce them to Media Viewership Research. Mr. Sayegh shared insightful knowledge about the definition of media viewership research, its objectives,  methodologies and applications using some real examples from the Egyptian and regional media scene.

 

Field Trip to Al-Ahram

Faculty Member Featured: Dina Mahmoud
March 31, 2022

Adjunct faculty Dina Mahmoud took her “Media Convergence Capstone 4482” class for a field trip to Al-Ahram Weekly and Ahram Online. The visit included a tour in the building of Al-Ahram, its center of microfilms and electronic documentation, and the printing house. Additionally, they had a meeting with Mr. Khaled Dawoud, adjunct faculty and assistant editor-in-chief of Al-Ahram Weekly, who talked about the history of Al Ahram and discussed the different scenarios of the printed newspapers’ future in the age of convergence. Moreover, Ms. Dina Samak, deputy editor-in-chief of Ahram Online, discussed with them the differences between news reporting to traditional and online newspapers, and she clarified the challenges they face - as online journalists- during the age of convergence, especially in terms of how to balance between scoops and credibility.

 

Call for Abstracts

JRMC Department
March 31, 2022

“Change and Continuity: Journalism Education in the Digital Era” The 6th World Journalism Education Congress (WJEC) will be held in Beijing, China, between July 6 and 8, 2023, with a post conference in Shanghai, China, on July 10, 2023. The conference is being organized by the Communication University of China (CUC) in Beijing and Shanghai…

You can view it from this link : https://wjec.net/6th-world-journalism-education-congress-call-for-abstracts/

 

Kim Fox and Yasmeen Ebada's Recent Research Article Published in Learning, Media and Technology, a Q1 Journal

Faculty Member Featured: Kim Fox and Yasmeen Ebada
March 17, 2022

JRMC Professor Kim Fox and Adjunct Faculty Yasmeen Ebada recently published their research article "Egyptian Female Podcasters: Shaping Feminist Identities" in a special edition of Learning, Media and Technology, a Q1 journal. The article focuses on feminist pedagogy, student-centered learning and the use of podcasts as digital activism. It also features podcasts produced by Nazly Abaza, Kanzy Mahmoud, Sarah El Safty and Jeje Rajab, all former JRMC students.

 

Teaching Journalism and Mass Communication Journal

Faculty Member Featured: Yasmeen Ebada and Amina Zaineldine
March 17, 2022

Adjunct faculty Yasmeen Ebada and Amina Zaineldine published an article in the Teaching Journalism and Mass Communication Journal (a journal published by the AEJMC Small Programs Interest Group).

 

Media and children with Disabilities

Faculty Member Featured: Yassmin El-Sayed
March 17, 2022

Adjunct Faculty Yassmin El-Sayed was hosted On-Air in the “Ahl Al Hemma” radio show of “Al Qahera Al Kobra” public radio station on February 17, 2022. She talked about the role of media in community awareness towards the rights of children with disabilities.

 

Life journey

March 17, 2022

Adjunct Faculty, Yassmin El-Sayed was hosted on (Akwa Mn Alnesyan) radio show of Al Qahera Al Kobra public radio station on Sunday, February 20, 2022, at 7:30 pm. She talked about her life’s journey and she mentioned the most memorable events in her life.

 

Know Your Target Audience!

Faculty Member Featured: Sally Kandil
March 17, 2022

On March 15, Adjunct Faculty Sally Kandil hosted a guest speaker in her class, Ahmed Eman Zakaria, Producer and in-house researcher at Sawt Podcasts. He talked about the importance of podcasts and how brainstorming sessions go with highlighting the importance of knowing your target audience. After that, the students listened to some samples on Sawt and discussed the variety of voices and topics they have on their platform.

 

Zeina

Faculty Member Featured: Lobna Khairy
March 17, 2022

Adjunct Faculty Lobna Khairy appeared on Egyptian Channel Two “Zeina” program to discuss the threats of cyber violence on women and girls safety, and the national efforts exerted to empower young Egyptian girls on social, economic, and health levels through “dawwi” and “Noura” initiatives by the National Council for Women, National Council for Childhood and Motherhood in collaboration with UNICEF and UNDP.

 

Covering Disabilities in Egypt

Faculty Member Featured: Dina Mahmoud
March 17, 2022

Adjunct Faculty Dina Mahmoud was hosted on-air in “Ahl Elhemma” radio show of “Etha’at Alqahira Alkobra” (Radio Greater Cairo) on February 24. She discussed the role of the media in the coverage of the issues of disabilities, and how the media can help the disabled. Additionally, she shed light on the impact of media on raising the public awareness to promote an accurate image of people with disabilities, and to counter stigma and negative stereotypes.

 

Guidelines in the Pharmaceutical Industry

Faculty Member Featured: Ahmed Taher
March 17, 2022

The CEO of Eye Ad. Agency specialized in Pharma Marketing Communications was invited to Dr. Ahmed Taher's Agency Operations Management class. The guest explained how OTC drugs are promoted within the strict communication guidelines of the pharma industry.  He offered opportunities for summer internships in the agency for the students.

 

JRMC Audio Students Win Awards at BEA's 2022 Festival of Media Arts

Faculty Member Featured: Kim Fox
March 10, 2022

Last week two Multimedia Journalism students received international recognition for their audio features at the Broadcast Education Association's (BEA) 2022 Festival of Media Arts Awards. Both students completed the audio features as a part of Kim Fox's Audio Production course.

International Student Audio

First Place: Freedom and Fear: Political Parties in Egypt; Nouran Yasser Saleh.
Student News Competition, Radio Feature .

Second Place: The Musical Magic and Scorched Legacy of Cairo’s Khedivial Royal Opera House v2; Maya Abouelnasr.
Congratulations on our JRMC students for their success.

 

A Recap of PodFest Cairo 2022

March 10, 2022

PodFest Cairo, Egypt and Africa’s first podcasting conference, took place on March 5 at The American University in Cairo’s (AUC) Tahrir Cultural Campus (TCC). The event was hosted by JRMC.

The half day conference was designed to cultivate Egypt’s podcasting community. This year’s face-to-face event featured three panels: How to Start a Podcast; Sounds Good? Voice and Audio Quality in Podcasts; and The Future of Podcasting in Egypt. The panels were held in English and Arabic with simultaneous translation. Panelists included Pakinam Amer, a JRMC alumna, an Emmy-winning journalist, science writer, podcaster and experimental storyteller as well as long time podcaster Hazem Mahani from the I Wanna Rock Podcast and several other panelists. The event moderator was Rawan Lasheen, a JRMC alumna, from the Egyptian Parliament and Al Ghad TV.

The panelists shared their experiences as podcasters including one marketing tip from Ahmed Naguib from the Ma3 Naguib Podcast who encourages his guests to use their social media to help promote the podcast episodes that they appear on. Kim Fox, the conference founder and organizer was impressed with the turnout especially since the previous PodFest Cairo was virtual, “It was ideal to have the event in AUC’s historic Ewart Hall where we could be face-to-face, but in a spacious venue. It was really nice to see people and have vibrant discussions on podcasting.”

The PodFest Cairo team also revealed preliminary results from the inaugural PodFest Cairo Listener Survey. The most popular genres are entertainment, educational and inspirational; the most popular format is interviewing followed by narrative nonfiction; and most respondents listen to podcasts a few times a week.

 

International Women’s Day

Faculty Member Featured: Naila Hamdy
March 10, 2022

On the occasion of  International Women’s Day, Naila Hamdy joined the conversation on challenges to the safety of women journalists held in the Philippines on March 8. She contributed with her perspective on the situation in Egypt. The meeting of speakers was in partnership with the International Association of Women in Radio and Television (IWART)and OsloMet University, Norway.

 

Sound Studio Tour

Faculty Member Featured: Sally Kandil
March 10, 2022

On March 5, Adjunct Faculty Sally Kandil took her JRMC 4460 Audio Production students on a sound studio tour to get insights on the recording process and understand the concept of microphones and clean recordings. 

The students spoke with Hossam Mamdouh, a very prominent sound mixer and foley artist. They watched some of the on-going projects and got an idea of how sound mixing works in post-production and understanding the importance of sound design.

 

Empowering Women

Faculty Member Featured: Sara Seif
March 10, 2022

Adjunct Faculty Sarah Seif appeared on Channel One on International Women's Day, talking about the role of the Egyptian State in empowering women over the last two days.

 

 

Appointment

March 10, 2022

Seif is a Digital Communications Consultant at Moharram & Partners (M&P), a Public Affairs and Strategic Communications firm with a clientele portfolio including Google, Mastercard, and Amazon, spanning across 10+ sectors with operations throughout the region.

 

Guest Speaker Talks to Students

Faculty Member Featured: Marwa Azab
March 3, 2022

Adjunct Faculty Marwa Azab hosted Mr. Fady Ramzy, an independent consultant and trainer for online communication and social media with more than 25 years of international experience in her Online Communication and Global Media Systems classes.

Ramzy is an international speaker and media figure where he spoke at several conferences between Cairo, Rome, Dubai, Sharjah, Riyadh, Manama, Tunis, Kuwait, Nairobi and others, and also has regular media appearances in BBC, SkyNews Arabia, DW Arabic, MBC Masr, Alsharq TV, AlArabiya TV, Monte Carlo Radio and many others.

Ramzy is also a professional trainer & consultant, working with several international entities like Google, Facebook, Thomson Reuters Foundation, Internews, ILO, UNFPA, USAID, Siemens, Goethe institute, and many more..

You can watch the talk here. (Passcode: XO3.K?CY)

 

Journalistic Practices on Twitter

Faculty Member Featured: Shahira Fahmy
March 3, 2022

Shahira Fahmy published in the Online Media and Global Communication journal with former MA students Basma Mostafa Taha and Hasan Karademir work entitled “Journalistic practices on Twitter: A comparative visual study on the personalization of conflict reporting on social media”, The work previously won a top award at AEJMC and is translated to both Arabic and Chinese. 

Using a mixed-method approach, the comparative study unpacks the way journalists personalized the controversial Yemen Civil War by examining the patterns of visual framing on Twitter. It captured the fluctuating role of journalists on Twitter. Journalists occasionally fluctuated in their visual roles between being neutral observers and moral agents. These fluctuations were likely influenced by an array of factors, including the journalist’s home country or foreign identity and the country affiliation of news organizations they were working for. 

This is the first study that demonstrates journalists from different backgrounds have remained somehow obliged to carry on with their journalistic roles on Twitter. It also sheds light on different levels of influences on personalized war coverage on social media and extends the hierarchy of influence model in the context of personalized reporting on Twitter. It thus adds to the growing body of knowledge on how this model plays out in an online-first era, especially in non-western contexts.

 

JRMC ‘Historic’ BEA Win

Faculty Member Featured: Kim Fox
March 3, 2022

JRMC Professor of Practice Kim Fox's Ehky Ya Masr Podcast won TWO Best of Festival awards in the 2022 Broadcast Education Association (BEA) Festival of Media Arts awards that were announced on Monday and Tuesday. Fox is the executive producer of the Ehky Ya Masr Podcast, which began in 2017 and roughly translates to: Tell Your Story Egypt. It's a narrative nonfiction bilingual podcast about life in Egypt.

Fox's two award-winning submissions, Ehky Ya Masr's How Egypt's Water Crisis Impacts Food Production and Ehky Ya Masr's The Syrian Shawarma Takeover (with producer Calvin Harrison (CASA '21), won Best of Competition in their respective categories, which made them eligible for the Best of Festival award.

The BEA Best of Festival is the top award given in each of the creative competitions. For example, there are five awards categories in the Faculty Audio Competition and the Best of Festival award is the BEST out of all five of those categories.

Additionally, Fox's third audio piece, Ehky Ya Masr's Come Drink Tea, the Egyptian Way produced by JRMC alumnae Sarah Hassan and Reem Elmaghraby, received an award of excellence in the Faculty Audio Competition - Longform Production category.

According to BEA's executive director Heather Birks, "This is the first time ever that one person has one two Best of Festival awards in the same year". Each award includes a cash award of $1000. Winners will be recognized at BEA's annual convention in Las Vegas in April.

 

Best of Festival in the Faculty Audio Competition AND

Best of Competition in the International Faculty Audio Competition

Ehky Ya Masr's How Egypt's Water Crisis Impacts Food Production 

Kim Fox; The American University in Cairo

 

Best of Festival in the Faculty News Competition AND

Best of Competition in the Faculty News Competition

Ehky Ya Masr's The Syrian Shawarma Takeover

Kim Fox & Calvin Harrison; The American University in Cairo

 

Find the full list of 2022 award winners on the BEA website.

 

Guest Speaker talks to JRMC 4482 Class

Faculty Member Featured: Dina Mahmoud
March 3, 2022

Adjunct faculty Dina Mahmoud invited the digital transformation consultant Mohamed Kholeif, Vice President of the Committee of Digital Transformation and Digital Culture at the Supreme Council of Culture, as a guest speaker in her JRMC 4482 media convergence capstone class. Kholeif lectured the CMA seniors on the impact of digital transformation on the media disruption. He discussed some important issues like the impact of technology on the media content and the media business models (with a highlight on Netflix business model). Additionally, he clarified some important concepts, like the difference between digitization, digitalization, and digital transformation.

 

Active Citizenship Club

Faculty Member Featured: Ahmed Taher
March 3, 2022

Ahmed Taher launched in Moataz ElAlfy Hall the Active Citizenship Club (ACC) on February 27. The event was sponsored by the  Ministry of Finance and The Graduate Student Association. Speakers included Ahmed Kochouk, Vice Minister of Finance and Khaled Habib, established author and HR Consultant.

A coverage of the event on The Presidency of the Egyptian Council of Ministers facebook page.

You can watch the event on this link.

 

Media and the Power of Dynamics Global Media Systems

Faculty Member Featured: Marwa Azab
February 24, 2022

Adjunct Faculty Marwa Azab hosted author and journalist Sherif Rizk who talked to students in her JRMC 2250 Global Media Systems about his journey as a journalist and how to develop writing abilities. He also shared a presentation on "Media and Power of Dynamics".

He wrote his first book “From the beginning, it was freedom” “in Arabic” published in 2014, and another book “Network Theory and Power Paradigm” published in 2016. He has a master’s degree in International Relations from the University of Bedfordshire, United Kingdom, and has worked as a journalist at Al Masry Alyoum, Egypt Independent, and Daily News Egypt.  

To watch the presentation, click here. (Passcode: R7=+H6Vv)

 

Rocío Zamora-Medina from Spain's University of Murcia Speaks to Students mass communication students

Faculty Member Featured: Shahira Fahmy
February 24, 2022

Rocío Zamora-Medina from the University of Murcia (UM) lectured in Shahira Fahmy’s classes as part of the Erasmus+ International Credit Mobility (ICM) Program between AUC and the UM. Zamora discussed persuasion on TikTok and presented case studies from European political leaders to undergraduate students enrolled in the Public Opinion, Persuasion, and Propaganda class. 

She also lectured on research opportunities for graduate students enrolled in the Current Issues in Mass Communication course. Additionally, Zamora met with AUC candidates for future international mobility to Spain.

 

Mohamad Fouda Receives Award for Best Visual Effects

Faculty Member Featured: Mohamad Fouda
February 24, 2022

Adjunct Faculty Mohamad Fouda received an award for Best Visual Effects at the Cairo Film Society Festival for the year 2021 for the film "The Man and the Mongoose” AKA "El Ens Wel Nems”. Fouda teaches Digital Special Effects in the Art school, Film Department and Visual Communication at JRMC. 

You can find more about the event on AhramOnline and Cairo Film Society.

 

Kim Fox is BEA Faculty Audio Finalist for the Fifth Consecutive Year

Faculty Member Featured: Kim Fox
February 24, 2022

Kim Fox, a professor of practice in JRMC, has been recognized by the Broadcast Education Association (BEA) Festival of Media Arts for the fifth consecutive year for work on her award-winning podcast, The Ehky Ya Masr (Tell Your Story Egypt) Podcast. Fox, the executive producer of the podcast, and her Ehky Ya Masr team have been shortlisted as finalists in three categories.

Faculty Audio Competition - Longform Production

Ehky Ya Masr's Come Drink Tea, the Egyptian Way

Kim Fox, Sarah Hassan and Reem Elmaghraby; The American University in Cairo

International Faculty Audio Competition

Ehky Ya Masr's How Egypt's Water Crisis Impacts Food Production 

Kim Fox; The American University in Cairo

Faculty News Competition

Ehky Ya Masr's The Syrian Shawarma Takeover

Kim Fox and Calvin Harrison; The American University in Cairo

List of all BEA Festival of Media Arts faculty finalists.

Festival winners will be announced on Monday, February 28 and Tuesday, March 1.

For more details, see the BEA Festival of Media Arts website.

 

Mass Communication in the Modern Arab World

Faculty Member Featured: Naila Hamdy
February 24, 2022

Associate Dean Naila Hamdy has published an edited volume in collaboration with Philip Auter University of Lafayette, Louisiana. Mass Communication in the Modern Arab World: Ongoing Agents of Change following the Arab Spring introduces, explains, and explores how unceasing growth of media and communication technologies has acted as an ongoing agent of change in the modern Arab world.

Each contributed chapter provides evidence of mass communication’s potential to transform society, culture, politics, economies and development in a region where expectations of media and communication are higher than those of the Western world. The editors attracted contributions from media scholars with expertise in Arab media and journalism to highlight challenges and opportunities in the region’s communication world.

 

TikTok Safety Advisory Council

February 24, 2022

Building on its efforts to strengthen their safeguards to promote safety, security, and the well-being of their community, TikTok appointed six inaugural members including Associate Dean Naila Hamdy to its newly launched safety advisory council – the first of its kind in the region – to further support content moderation policies and guide safety best practices. 

Hamdy will advise on policies related to internet safety and will also join the discourse on maximizing opportunities to advance the catalytic potential that TikTok as a platform has to promote and support creativity and thirst for knowledge.”

 

Ahmed Taher at Sustainable Development Week

Faculty Member Featured: Ahmed Taher
February 24, 2022

Ahmed Taher delivered a talk about Development Communication Campaigns in the Arab League Sustainable Development Week held in Ritz Carlton. He also was part of the Panel on the role of Media in public awareness about the 17 sustainable goals.

 

The Impact of Social Media: Advantages and Disadvantages

Faculty Member Featured: Yassmin El-Sayed
February 17, 2022

Adjunct Faculty Yassmin El-Sayed was hosted on the “Tahya Masr” radio show of “Al Bernameg Al Aam” public radio station on February 1. She spoke about the advantages and disadvantages of social media and its impact on youth and children in society.

 

Senegal Clinches AfCoN Trophy

Faculty Member Featured: Alaa Abdel-Ghani
February 10, 2022

Adjunct Professor, Alaa Abdel-Ghani writes on Senegal's first-ever win of the Africa Cup of Nations after Egypt could not clear the final hurdle in what was an otherwise remarkable journey.

 

Branding New Cairo

Faculty Member Featured: Ahmed Taher
February 10, 2022

Ahmed Taher was approached by Rania ElTahan (in her capacity as a member representing AUC in the Board of Trustees of New Cairo) regarding contributions by the university for a project to brand New Cairo. This includes multiple ideas namely Logo, Urban nodes landscape design, Signage, Community applications and so on.

As per her communication, there is a budget to kick start a pilot project (especially the part of Logo design, and Urban nodes). 

Taher joins an interdisciplinary group of professors at AUC bringing needed expertise to guide the designs that will be produced by a group of students from their respective departments:

Arts and Graphic Design: Haytham Nawar, Bahia Shehab and Nagla Ismail
Marketing, Business and Policy: Ahmed Taher
Architecture, Landscape and Community Design: Amr Abdel Kawi, Magda Mostafa, Momen ElHusseiny and Basil Kamel

 

Latest Article

Faculty Member Featured: Alaa Abdel-Ghani
February 3, 2022

Adjunct Professor, Alaa Abdel-Ghani writes in Al-Ahram Online on Egypt's chances of reaching the final of the Africa Cup of Nations.

 

JRMC's Kim Fox's Ehky Ya Masr Podcast Listed in the "New and Noteworthy" Section of Apple Podcasts

Faculty Member Featured: Kim Fox
February 3, 2022

Journalism and Mass Communication Professor Kim Fox is the executive producer of the Ehky Ya Masr إحكي يا مصر (Tell Your Story Egypt), an award-winning narrative podcast about life in Egypt. The podcast team just completed the recent "Food Series" in December and is currently featured in the "New and Noteworthy" section of Apple Podcasts.

 

How to Be Influential on Social Media: Guide

Faculty Member Featured: Sara Seif
February 3, 2022

JRMC Adjunct Instructor Sara Seif recently published her book "How to Be Influential on Social media: Guide". The First Print has been sold out in the first week of the release and the second print is in stores now. The book has already been covered on Youm7, Dostor, Madrasetna channel, and Beit Sherif Mega FM.
Anyone interested in receiving a copy can send an email to Sara Seif directly.

 

Professor Shahira S. Fahmy Presents at the Basel Peace Forum 2022 in Switzerland

Faculty Member Featured: Shahira Fahmy
January 26, 2022

Shahira Fahmy was the expert speaker on the role of the media in conflict and peace at a two-day hybrid conference held January 20 - 21 in Basel, Switzerland. The conference brought together 300 handpicked experts and decision-makers from politics, business, civil society, arts, and academia. Participants from over 30 countries joined virtually. The hybrid event created excellent networking opportunities, integrated creative workshop methods, and fostered inspiring conversations with brilliant minds.

 

Professor Shahira S. Fahmy to Continue Service as a Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly Editorial Board Member

January 26, 2022

In January 2022, Shahira Fahmy was invited by the current editor Daniela Dimitrova from Iowa State University to continue her service as an editorial board member for Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly (JMCQ), flagship of The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC). Fahmy has served on the board of this Q1 peer-reviewed journal for several years. Established in 1924, it is the oldest refereed scholarly journal in mass communication and provides leadership in scholarship for the field.

Currently, Fahmy holds an AEJMC association-wide leadership position and at this time is a member of the AEJMC Publications Committee.

 

AUSACE 2022 Call for Papers

JRMC Department
January 26, 2022

There is a great opportunity from AUSACE 2022 cfp for our full-time and adjunct faculty as well as grad students; collaborations are welcome.

 

Latest Article in Ahram Online

Faculty Member Featured: Alaa Abdel-Ghani
January 5, 2022

Alaa Abdel-Ghani reviews who were the biggest winners in the just concluded FIFA Arab Cup. Read the story at Ahram Online.

 

The Future of Media in Africa

Faculty Member Featured: Yasmeen Ebada
January 5, 2022

On December 8, adjunct instructor Yasmeen Ebada participated in the African Women in Media (AWiM21) Conference. The 2021 theme was: "Building Resilience: The Future of Media in Africa". Ebada was the moderator of the "Podcasting and Women in African" panel. Professor Kim Fox was one of the panelists as well.

 

Ethics and Science Journalism

Faculty Member Featured: Heba Elshahed, Tara Alkadi
January 5, 2022

For the past month, adjunct faculty Heba Elshahed and Tara Alkadi moderated a Mini Professional Diploma featuring lectures on Ethical conduct of Science Journalism and coverage of medical-related stories and issues.

The lectures included topics such as dodging fake news on Covid-19, conducting stories with ethical guidelines, the basics of science journalism and scientific writing, the difference between science articles and journalism news stories, data journalism and visual storytelling.

 

Thesis Defense

Faculty Member Featured: Ahmed Taher
January 5, 2022

Ahmed Taher (supervisor), Rasha Allam and Heba Elshahed were committee members for Nahla El Gendy’s successful defense of her master's thesis on communication fatigue among Egyptian school teachers, December 21.

 

Online Security

Faculty Member Featured: Kathy Kamphoefner
January 5, 2022

On December 8, Wessam Maher, AUC's Chief Information Security and Risk Officer, presented vital information about how to stay secure online to students in Kathy Kamphoefner’s JRMC 2270 Online Communication class.

 

IMC Capstone Presentations

Faculty Member Featured: Sherin Moody
January 5, 2022

Adjunct faculty Sherin Moody invited Wunderman Thompson (WT) as the panel for the JRMC 4425 Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC) Capstone final presentations that were held on Wednesday, December the 8th, and Sunday, December 12.

After a full semester of research and production, eight groups presented their creative strategies and final campaigns. The projects were start-ups for a drive-thru mart called “Drively,” “The Egyptian Wax Museum,” a multicultural restaurant called “Jimi’s Kitchen,” a pet app called “4 Paws,” a food truck called “Patina,” a theme park for disabled children called “Joyville,” wooden bags called “Trae,” and sustainable sportswear called “GAIA.” At the end, each group received an award for their respective projects. The winning groups, “The Egyptian Wax Museum” and “Trae” received the Wunderman Thompson Award of Excellence which is a prestigious award and an opportunity to have internships at WT.

 

Appointment

Faculty Member Featured: Sara Seif
January 5, 2022

Adjunct faculty Sara Seif was recently appointed as a Communications Consultant under the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research, specifically to the "Innovators Support Fund" aiming at nurturing Researchers, Innovators and Entrepreneurs.

 

Shaira Fahmy attends EU COST meeting in Tallinn, Estonia

Faculty Member Featured: Shahira Fahmy
December 16, 2021

On December 5 and 6, Shahira Fahmy participated in the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (EU COST) meeting at the University of Tallinn, in Tallinn, Estonia. The aim of this COST action is to build a network for the interdisciplinary study of the potential interactive digital narrative as a means to address complexity as a societal challenge by representing, experiencing and comprehending complex phenomena and thus also address the issue of ‘fake news'.

 

Bassera Foundation

Faculty Member Featured: Ahmed Taher
December 16, 2021

On December 10, Ahmed Taher delivered the opening speech as a member of the board of trustees of Bassera Foundation supporting the visually impaired at the Ministry of Social Solidarity recognition day for people with disabilities.

 

African Women in Media Virtual Conference

Faculty Member Featured: Kim Fox
December 16, 2021

Kim Fox, professor of practice, was a panelist at the 2021 African Women in Media Virtual Conference (#AWiM21). Fox's panel, Podcasting and Women in Africa, took place on Wednesday, December 8. She highlighted her contributions to empowering women in Egypt to podcast through PodFest Cairo, the Ehky Ya Masr (Tell Your Story) Egypt Podcast and through her scholarly research on her students podcasts: Egyptian Female Podcasters: Shaping Feminist Identities (to be published early next year in Learning, Media and Technology). The session was moderated by Yasmeen Ebada, an adjunct professor in JRMC and Fox's research partner on the Egyptian Female Podcasters project.

 

Kim Fox Elected as the Broadcast Education Association's (BEA) Vice-President for Academic Relations

December 16, 2021

At the BEA Board of Directors meeting on December 3, JRMC's Professor of Practice Kim Fox was elected to the position of vice-president for academic relations. Fox and the newly elected members will start their one-year terms during BEA’s annual convention in April 2022.

 

The Inaugural Introduction to Podcasting Course Final Podcast Pitches

December 16, 2021

Kim Fox's Introduction to Podcasting course recently concluded with students pitching their ideas for podcasts. On Wednesday, December 8 the students presented their ideas to a jury consisting of Omar Refaat, a furniture designer and longtime podcast listener along with Lia Abdelwahab, a JRMC alumna, podcast producer and the course teaching assistant. On Sunday, December 12, the jury included Heba Shunbo, author, mom and the host of the podcast "Mommy's Happy Hour," along with Abdehwahab. The podcast pitches included an audio game show, storytime, fitness, wellness, true crime in Egypt, football and more. Pictured are the students with jury member Heba Shunbo (seated on the right)

 

CMA Capstone Presentations

Faculty Member Featured: Sarah El-Richani
December 16, 2021

Sarah El-Richani's CMA Capstone students presented their projects to the AUC community and a panel of judges on December 13. The three groups showcased their campaigns, which tackled a wide spectrum of issues of societal relevance such as global warming, Vitiligo and cyberbullying.

The judges, JRMC's Kim Fox and Adjunct Faculty Mohamed Gameel, selected the project Naqy Hawak as the winners. The project addressed the issue of global warming and alarming pollution levels - an all too important topic in an interesting and accessible way while also providing tips on how to decrease our carbon footprint. The campaign also lobbied the university administration to ban plastics and introduce one meat-free day at all the eateries.

 

Cairo Media Conference 3

Faculty Member Featured: Naila Hamdy
December 9, 2021

The Department of Journalism and Mass Communication has once again partnered with OsloMet University, Norway to host a two-day conference with the goal of bringing together journalism and media professionals, students and academics - ranging from decision-makers and editors to social media influencers - to meet, discuss and explore solutions to ever-changing realities they face.

The Cairo Media Conference held December 6 - 7, 2021 explored ways to address these disruptions, challenges, best practices and innovation in the aftermath of an extraordinary time. The theme of the conference “The reconstruction of journalism in the age of entertainment and uncertainty” allowed for a diverse number of speakers to share and discuss issues of common concern and mutual exchange with the participants of the conference whether it was related to the effects of audience flight or the arrival of artificial intelligence.

Organized by Naila Hamdy the panels and keynotes included Hildegunn Soldal, head of the Digital Department at the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation NRK and Kristoffer Egeberg editor-in-chief of Faktisk an independent Factchecking platform, Abeer Saadi former Egyptian press syndicate member and prominent journalist and current media development expert and researcher at Dortmund University, Gisselle Khoury the eminent host of a interview-style regional TV show, and Ehab El-Zelaki editor-in-chief of Al-Masry Al-Youm, among others.

Following the success of the conference, we already look forward to the fourth edition of the Cairo Media Conference.

 

Peace Communication on Twitter in a Q1 journal

Faculty Member Featured: Shahira Fahmy
December 9, 2021

Shahira Fahmy’s latest publication in the Q1 journal of Media International Australia explores the application of social media in a violent conflict and examines the role that Twitter can play in communicative processes in light of peacebuilding practices. The work that is co-authored with associate professor Shabir Hussain from Bahria University in Islamabad, bridges a gap in communication research by conducting a war/peace framing analysis on Twitter regarding the second deadliest terrorist attack in Pakistan.

Fahmy’s results challenge the idealistic perspectives of peace communication scholars, who predicted that digital platforms would lead to a strong peace framing approach. Similar to traditional media, the tweets were dominated by war frames.

 

Ali Ali on Campus

Faculty Member Featured: Rania Fouda
December 9, 2021

Adjunct Faculty Rania Fouda hosted in her Introduction to Advertising JRMC 3315 class Ali Ali, a renowned film director and founder of GOOD PEOPLE production house/agency. According to a GUNN report, he is one of the top 10 directors in the world and has a collection of 73 awards for his work.

His presentation to class covered some of his recent work like Diesel and Lavazza plus older projects like Hohos and Panda. He spoke about the process of developing campaigns based on a brief and what to do when you get ‘creatively stuck’. He also offered tips on preparing more than one campaign before a client pitch and why some campaigns get rejected and how to work around the reasons to adjust your creative strategy.

 

Cairo’s Ultras: Resistance and Revolution in Egypt’s Football Culture

Faculty Member Featured: Ronnie Close
December 2, 2021

Ronnie Close worked with the Bauhaus Universität Masters program, Zusammenarbeit MFA-Studiengang (Public Art and New Artistic Strategies) in Germany last week. He gave a public lecture on his monograph book Cairo’s Ultras: Resistance and Revolution in Egypt’s Football Culture and screened extracts from his documentary More Out of Curiosity followed by a Q&A. He also ran seminars with the Master’s students on aesthetic theory and art practice in public spaces.

 

Doctoral Dissertation

Faculty Member Featured: Hesham Dinana
December 2, 2021

Hesham Dinana Supervised a Doctoral Dissertation at the Arab academy Graduate School of Business titled “The Impact of On-site and Online Stimuli on Impulsive Buying Behavior” .

The Discussion Committee took place on November 29 and the researcher was awarded his doctorate degree with the highest honors. The committee included Amr Kheir El Din for Ein Shams University and Mona Kadry from the Arab Academy.

 

Professor Shahira S. Fahmy participates in a training course on mediation for the Arab Women Mediators Network

Faculty Member Featured: Shahira Fahmy
December 2, 2021

On November 30, Fahmy spoke about the role of media and soft power in promoting Arab women's participation in peace processes at a training course organized for the members of the Arab Women Mediators Network - affiliated to the League of Arab States.

In the context of the implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 and the Cairo International Center for Conflict Resolution, Peacekeeping and Peacebuilding (CCCPA)'s efforts to advance the implementation of the Women, Peace, and Security agenda through enhancing women’s participation in conflict resolution and peace processes, the training course, which continued through to December 2, aimed to enhance the members' skills in gender-inclusive mediation as well as their overall understanding of women's positive contributions to peace and security. The participants were female ambassadors from 10 different Arab countries.

 

Aswatona Closing Ceremony

Faculty Member Featured: Kim Fox
December 2, 2021

Kim Fox attended and briefly spoke at the Aswatona Closing Ceremony on November 27, at Consoleya in downtown Cairo. Fox was a workshop facilitator for Aswatona earlier in the year.

Fox (center): Tala Elissa (left) and Asmaa Samir (right).

 

To Mask or Not to Mask?

Faculty Member Featured: Kathleen Kamphoefner
December 2, 2021

Kathleen Kamphoefner presented a paper at MESA's 2021 Annual Meeting entitled, "To Mask or Not to Mask?" It focused on Egyptian attitudes to wearing a face mask in these Corona days.

 

Sayedaty Program

Faculty Member Featured: Lobna Khairy
December 2, 2021

Lobna Khairy was hosted in “Sayedaty” program on Egyptian Satellite Channel in celebration of the International 16 days of activism against Gender-based Violence. Khairy, a member of the National Council for Women’s Media Committee, addressed the power of media to change attitudes and push for fair legislation that support women's rights and further protects them against social injustices.

 

Cairo Media Conference 3

December 2, 2021

The Third Edition of the Cairo Media Conference – The Reconstruction of Journalism in the Age of Entertainment and Uncertainty. The conference will take place on December 6 - 7, 2021  at The American University in Cairo - Tahrir Culture Center (TCC) in Downtown, Cairo. 

The conference will host experts and practitioners from Egypt, the region, and Norway to help media professionals address the crucial questions of concern in the field. Moreover, the conference will also bring about a better understanding of the fine line between news and entertainment, and the need to remain true to the values of journalism despite the constant challenges faced by those in the profession.

 

The Journey of an Egyptian Media Startup: Creativito Marketing!

Faculty Member Featured: Mireille Barsoum
November 24, 2021

On November 20 and 22, Media Economics classes JRMC339002 and JRMC339003 welcomed guest speaker Mona El Bardaie, co-founder and communications director at Creativito Marketing, a BTL and digital agency, based in Cairo and founded in 2014. With more than 15 years of marcom experience, Bardaie shared her journey from corporate communications to founding her own media startup. The students got a chance to view a new perspective of the media industry and get a glimpse of how the market operates in real life. Bardaie discussed different economic aspects of media firms including market competitiveness, profitability, regulatory policies, technological advancement, and globalization. She also shared stories of the firm’s successes and successes, allowing students to bridge the gap between theory and practice. The students shared reflections, insights and recommendations with Bardaie for an opportunity to be considered in Creativito’s upcoming internship program in the summer.

 

Less is the New More

November 24, 2021

Adjunct faculty Mireille Barsoum was invited as a guest speaker at a Nile University student event on November 4. The event was themed around student wellbeing and mental and emotional health. Barsoum, a lecturer of positive psychology, marketing communications, and economics, talked about the correlation between choice and happiness. With the overwhelming availability of options, choices, and information today, and with more than 35,000 decisions made by an average person daily, students are shocked with information overload, analysis paralysis and decision fatigue. Barsoum presented the concept of “Choice Paradox” introduced by American psychologist Barry Schwartz in 2004 and suggested key pointers for students to overcome their confusion and self-doubt when making decisions. Through an engaging and interactive live talk, students attending the event from different universities were able to practically realize the effect of narrowing down their choices for improved wellness and self-confidence. The attendees were pleasantly surprised to find out that “less is actually more” when it comes to choices and decision-making.

 

Nourhan ElAbbassy Joins Aid Convoy to Aswan

Faculty Member Featured: Nourhan ElAbbassy
November 24, 2021

Adjunct faculty Nourhan ELAbbassy joins Homeland defenders’ Youth Secretariat humanitarian aid convoy to Aswan providing aid for the people recently affected by the wave of bad weather. The convoy provided affected families with food, home appliances and furniture, along with a medical caravan to alleviate their suffering.

 

Professor Rasha Abdulla and Associate Professor of Practice Nadine El Sayed Participate in Routledge Book Launch

Faculty Member Featured: Rasha Abdulla, Nadine El Sayed
November 18, 2021

The School for International Studies at the Simon Fraser University (SFU) hosted a five-part panel discussion series launching the Routledge Handbook on Contemporary Egypt. The last panel discussion of the series was held on Wednesday, November 10 to discuss the “Media and Popular Culture” section of the book, featuring the section’s editor and renowned Arab media scholar Naomi Sakr as moderator and the sections’ authors, including professor Rasha Abdulla and associate professor of practice Nadine El Sayed.

Abdulla’s chapter discussed the evolution of social media use during the revolution and subsequent period. It traces the evolution of social media in Egypt and analyses their uses and development as agents and reflections of change in society.

El Sayed’s chapter revolved around the rise of independent music from the heart of Tahrir square and the political economy of music production in Egypt after 2011. It explores how platforms like YouTube and Anghamy purveyed diverse messages and genres, including Mahraganat, in a way that was not available to former dissenting singers such as Sayyid Darwish, or Sheikh Imam with Ahmed Fouad Negm.

The panel included a host of Arab media scholars who contributed to the book, including authors Ramy Aly, Ehab Galal, Tourya Guaaybess and Viola Shafik. The book’s editors Tamir Moustafa and Robert Springborg introduced the two-hour panel, which saw around 36 participants.

 

General Manager of FP7/McCann speaks to JRMC 2202 students about PSA

Faculty Member Featured: Nadine El Sayed
November 18, 2021

Associate Professor of Practice Nadine El Sayed hosted Sondos Effat, the general manager of FP7/McCann Cairo advertising agency, to speak to students in the Multimedia Writing and Production (JRMC 2202) course on November 3.

Effat shared her experience in the advertising field with two sections of JRMC 2202, with a focus on creating public service announcements that address the right audience with the right message, angle and language.

Effat, who is a graduate of the IMC program, talked to students about formulating advertising messages based on market insight, discussing a number of case studies from campaigns students are familiar with, including campaigns by the UN raising awareness against the cycle of domestic abuse. She has 16 years of experience in the industry, and has a master of arts in marketing from the University of Westminster in London. Effat has been with FP7/McCann for 13 years and was a part of. Several teams that won prestigious industry international awards, including D&D, LIA, The Andys, AdFest and The One Show.  FP7McCann Cairo is part of the global McCann Worldgroup, the world’s largest advertising network.

 

Salma ElGhetany BEA Judge

Faculty Member Featured: Salma ElGhetany
November 18, 2021

Adjunct Faculty Salma ElGhetany will serve as a judge for the 2021 Broadcast Education Association (BEA) Festival of Media Arts's international competition. This is the second year for this category in the annual festival. This festival's international competition is open to encourage submissions of student and faculty creative works produced outside the US that promote global engagement and an appreciation and awareness of world languages and cultures. The international competition includes four categories; audio, documentary, film and video, and television news. Each category allows both short-form and long-form entries for both students and faculty. This is ElGhetany's second year as a judge.

In October 2021, ElGhetany was also selected for the judging panel of the 2021 Media Information Literacy Youth Hackathon! Hack Media and Information Literacy for Better Futures – is a Global Youth Hackathon led by UNESCO and South Africa, in cooperation with the European Commission, IBM Z and other partners. Teams from all around the world submitted ideas and proposals in English, French or Spanish languages, and were evaluated by a blind panel based on a rubric that included coherence, innovation, feasibility, sustainability and potential impact. Results were announced on October 27 during a plenary session at the end of the Global Media and Information Literacy Week 2021 Youth.

 

Students' Field Trip to El Ayyat

Faculty Member Featured: Sally Kandil
November 18, 2021

On November 13, Adjunct faculty Sally Kandil took her 4441 students on a field trip to El Ayyat village to film a short documentary and get the real-life experience of shooting on the ground.  Students spent the day filming interviews and capturing all the footage needed for their short docs.

 

Copywriting Cilantro

Faculty Member Featured: Tara Al kadi
November 11, 2021

On November 8, Tara Al kadi’s creative advertising strategy and copywriting students presented their campaigns to Cilantro’s CEO and marketing and transformation team.  

The students were tasked with creating social media posts, reels, a slogan and an activation plan for the launch of Cilantro’s latest branch in Rehab. The top two winning teams were announced for each of the three sections via zoom.

 

Chapter Published

Faculty Member Featured: Brian J. Bowe
November 11, 2021

Associate Professor Brian J. Bowe published a chapter in the new book Teaching Race: Struggles, Strategies, and Scholarship for the Mass Communication Classroom, edited by George Daniels and Robin Blom. When journalism and mass communication faculty from various backgrounds teach about race, they must deliver instruction that acknowledges the challenges surrounding the topic while facilitating the learning of undergraduate and graduate students. Bowe's chapter, "When the faculty is a majority," discusses the importance of (and strategies for) white faculty when engaging with the topic. The book was published by Rowman and Littlefield as part of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communications' master class series.

 

Nourhan El Abbassy Appointment

Faculty Member Featured: Nourhan El Abbassy
November 11, 2021

Adjunct Faculty Nourhan El Abbassy was appointed as assistant secretary-general of the Youth Secretariat of the Homeland Defenders Political Party (Homat ElWatan), led by lieutenant general Galal Haridy.

 

UNESCO's Remote Radio Week

Faculty Member Featured: Kim Fox
November 11, 2021

Professor of Practice Kim Fox was a panelist on the final day of UNESCO's Remote Radio Week on November 5. As part of a block of programming on "Audio Everywhere," Fox spoke about producing a podcast on a budget. You can view the replay here.

 

Nadia Mounier's Curation

Faculty Member Featured: Nadia Mounier
November 11, 2021

The 6 Bab Sharq art space in Alexandria recently hosted the photography exhibition Oblivious to me, curated by Nadia Mounier. It showcased the nine projects that were produced in the first round of the Photography Lab during the last two months. The opening of the exhibition was on October 31 at 6 Bab Sharq and concluded on November 8.

The exhibition's participants included Rowan Hamdy, Sarah I. El Raghy, Salma Hatem, Salma Nabil, Mariam Sobhy Afifi, Manar Maher, Menna Khaled, Nourhan Abdel Lateef, Hagar El Hady.

 

 

ECREA Call for Papers

JRMC Department
November 11, 2021

Call for papers for the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA) conference to be held in Aarhus, Denmark in October 2022. The theme for the 9th European Communication Conference (ECC) will be “Rethink Impact”.

This is a great opportunity to collaborate with JRMC/GAPP colleagues, JRMC grad students, DMJX colleagues (they are one of the hosts).

Submissions will be accepted until Monday, January 17, 2022. For specific calls by the sections, networks and temporary working groups, visit this link.

 

Audio Production Students Visit New Media-Related Exhibit in the AUC Library

Faculty Member Featured: Kim Fox
November 4, 2021

On October 31, audio production students visited the AUC Rare Books and Special Collections Library (RBSCL) new media and communication exhibit. The exhibit opened as a part of the inauguration festivities for AUC's new president Ahmad Dallal. In addition to sharing tips on recording oral histories, which the audio production students will conduct in the coming weeks, Steve Urgola, AUC's archivist, provided some historical background of many of the media artifacts that are a part of the new exhibit. The visit was arranged by Kim Fox.

 

JRMC MMJ Alumna and Kerning Cultures Editor/Producer Gave a Guest Lecture in the Introduction to Podcasting Class

November 4, 2021

Nadeen Shaker, (MMJ alumna - 2013) was the guest lecturer for the Introduction to Podcasting class on October 31. Shaker is an editor and producer for Kerning Cultures, a Middle East podcasting network as well as an editor at The Cairo Review. She spoke to the students about generating ideas for podcasts, pitching podcast ideas as well as research and fact-checking as a part of the podcast production process. She showcased her work on the Escape to Cairo episode and shared her experience of producing the piece.

 

Mojo Workshop Invited Speaker: Kim Fox

November 4, 2021

Kim Fox was an invited speaker for the Mojo Workshop on September 24. She presented with WTOP's Neal Augenstein on "Reporting on Mobile." You can view a replay of the session on YouTube.

 

JRMC's Maya Aboelnasr Receives the Best of Show Student Audio Award at BEA's On-Location Creative Competition

November 4, 2021

Maya Aboelnasr (MMJ) received the Best of Show award at the Broadcast Education Association's (BEA) On-Location Creative Competition. The awards program took place virtually on October 7 and Abouelnasr tied for the top recognition in student audio for her audio feature "The Musical Magic and Scorched Legacy of Cairo's Khedivial Royal Opera House." The piece was produced this past Spring in Kim Fox's Audio Production course. 

Alumnus Bassel Hanna (MMJ) also received an award of excellence for his audio feature "The Colescott Quest of Discovering Himself." The audio feature was also produced for the Audio Production course in Fall 2020 and was also a part of the Robert Colescott: The Cairo Years Exhibit at AUC in February and March of 2021.

The full list of student winners can be found here; you can search 'Cairo' to find our student award winners.

 

And the Ballon d'Or goes to

Faculty Member Featured: Alaa Abdel-Ghani
October 27, 2021

Alaa Abdel-Ghani writes on whether Liverpool's Egyptian forward Mohamed Salah can win this year's Ballon d'Or, world football's top individual award. Read the story on Al-Ahram Online.

 

Motivational Keynote Speech at Media for Peace Symposium

Faculty Member Featured: Shahira Fahmy
October 27, 2021

On October 21, Shahira Fahmy delivered a keynote address at the 2021 Media for Peace Symposium at the Center for Digitization and Technology Research of the Bundeswehr in Munich, Germany. The aim of the Media for Peace event was to contribute to social developments that promote peace by strengthening independent, de-escalation, and conflict-sensitive reporting. 

During the symposium, participants dissected the theoretical frameworks around journalism and conflict; had a look at debates on (post-) conflict societies and interventions in the Global South; examined the media systems in Lebanon and Afghanistan, and explored the potential of Social Media analysis, as well as Media Interventions. Panelists and experts were from Lebanon and Afghanistan, and practitioners from relevant national and international media NGOs.

 

Media for Peace: Impact of Conflicts, Crises on Media Systems

Faculty Member Featured: Sara El-Richani
October 27, 2021

Sarah El-Richani also took part in the symposium held at the University of the Bundeswehr, Munich as part of the Media for Peace project focusing on peace journalism in Lebanon and Afghanistan. El-Richani’s intervention focused on comparative media frameworks and the impact of crises and conflicts on media systems. “In Lebanon, the media has almost always been closer to the world of politics than to the world of business; however, in times of crisis - even the little commercial logic that might have been - is suspended and the media falls back into its particularistic and political trenches,” she said.

 

JRMC 3315 Hosts Creative Director

Faculty Member Featured: Rania Fouda
October 27, 2021

Executive Creative Director of Momentum Egypt Summer el Bosraty gave students of the JRMC 3315 Introduction to Advertising class a brief background on how an advertising agency is structured and its different departments.

The focus of the class was on copywriting in specific, and the difference between headlines, slogans and taglines. She also showcased different ads between print and TV. El Bosraty also covered how to write a big idea and the difference between concept, idea and execution.

 

Invitation: Zoom In/Out

The Photographic Gallery
October 27, 2021

You are cordially invited to the Photography Gallery at the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication which will host an exciting new exhibition of student photographic works, Zoom In/Out, produced on the Photography Foundations courses. Made over the Spring semester 2021 the group show departs from the expected to reflect their experience of student life under COVID.

 

The Media Economy in Practice: Guest Speaker A.Shebl- FP7 McCann

Faculty Member Featured: Mireille Barsoum
October 20, 2021

On October 16 and 18, guest speaker Ahmed Shebl, head creative director at FP7 McCann Cairo, joined the Media Economics JRMC 3390 section 2 and 3 to share his journey in advertising with the students. Shebl has more than 25 years of experience in the field and has successfully handled more than 100 campaigns during his career in advertising agencies in Egypt.

The session included a glance at his experience in media and advertising in Egypt, and a discussion of the industry’s top firms and dynamics. Shebl shared the main challenges the industry has been facing in the era of COVID-19 and highlighted some unexpected market opportunities during the pandemic that left the class in awe. He discussed new media trends and illustrated the changing economics of the industry. The students got a chance to bridge the gap between theory and practice and get a practical glimpse of how the different factors discussed in class actually affect work in real life!

Shebl gave the students some useful tips on how to advance with their careers and how to build the necessary skills needed for their advancement within the industry. Students shared very positive feedback about the session and expressed interest in applying to summer internships at FP7 McCann, to which Shebl graciously shared appropriate contacts.

 

Documenting Egypt's Unseen Communities

Faculty Member Featured: Ronnie Close
October 20, 2021

Mohamed Mahdy, one of the most important young documentary photographers in the country whose work concentrates on the unseen communities in Egypt, was a guest speaker in Ronnie Close's Photography Foundations course. Mahdy is a Magnum Agency fellow, Sony Middle East ambassador and his work has been exhibited in Tintera, Cairo, the Paris Biennale, and the Ian Parry scholarship in London and in Photoville in New York.

Mahdy believes that it is by immersing himself in disparate communities and revealing these stories that he is able to permanently place them within the context of the larger community. In 2018 he was named by the NY Times Lens blog as one of 12 emerging photographers to know. Mahdy is the recipient of several grants, scholarships and awards and in 2021 was awarded the Magnum Foundation, Photography and Social justice fellowship.

To know more about Mahdy, click here.

In the meantime, The Photographic Gallery hosted additional talks over the course of the past two weeks:

Q and A session with Photojournalist Nariman Al Mofty

Associated press photographer and Pulitzer Award winner Nariman Al Mofty shared her experience as a female war photographer in a Q and A session with the students of photography.

El-Mofty is an Egyptian-Canadian photographer with a sensitive eye for portraiture that highlights the humanity of people struggling to survive amid a society in collapse. In 2019, she was part of an Associated Press team that won the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for work uncovering the effects of Yemen's devastating war.

 

Land of Unrealized Dreams Exhibition: Talk with News Photo Editor Stephanie Heimann

News Photo Editor Stephanie Heimann reviewed Land of Unrealized Dreams exhibition, currently on view at the Photographic Gallery, in a public zoom session.

Stephanie Heimann is the photo director for The New Republic based in New York City. She has garnered several awards for the magazine including a National Magazine Award nomination in 2018 and the 2017 Magazine Picture Editor of the Year award from the National Press Photographers Association. She has worked on many international and domestic editorial titles including Newsweek, Time, New York, Scientific American, and Fortune Small Business and was Al Gore’s photo editor on the sequel to his book Inconvenient Truth. Her career began as a photojournalist covering post-Soviet culture and the first war in Chechnya, and she spent almost ten years as an expatriate photo editor based in Moscow, Hong Kong, and Europe. She is the founder of the nonprofit Fovea Exhibitions, where in a volunteer capacity she oversees photojournalism exhibits on topical and social issues. Active as a teacher at the International Center of Photography, and an Advisory Member on the Rory Peck Trust, she has also curated many exhibits and has been included on magazine and photo juries and portfolio reviews around the world.

 

The Photographic Gallery in The Cairo Review

The Cairo Review of Global Affairs has published an article about the Land of Unrealized Dreams exhibition which just closed at the gallery.

 

Hesham Dinana Recognized

Faculty Member Featured: Hesham Dinana
October 20, 2021

Hesham Dinana was recognized during a ceremony held by the Egyptian Institute of Directors (EIoD) and the World Bank (International Financing Corporation – IFC) for his contribution to the development of Egyptian companies board of directors members Corporate Governance practices.

 

Shahira S. Fahmy Presents Two Research Papers in Budapest and Lisbon

Faculty Member Featured: Shahira Fahmy
October 20, 2021

On September 30, Shahira Fahmy presented a research paper for the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (EU COST) conference in Budapest, Hungary. Earlier in mid July, she presented a research paper for the International Political Science Association (IPSA) World Congress of Political Science in Lisbon, Portugal.

The first paper, co-authored with Spanish colleague Rocío Zamora Medina, looks at storytelling on TikTok to reduce political complexity. The exploratory study focuses on Spanish political parties’ communication strategies and provides an insight into how political parties integrate the social media platform into their daily political activity.

Her second paper, co-authored with Rocío Zamora Medina, and Marta Rebolledo, also focused on applying visual social media analysis of online campaigns. It specifically examined  political candidates' use of Instagram to strategically frame their images during general elections in Spain.

 

BEA Conference

Faculty Member Featured: Kim Fox
October 20, 2021

Kim Fox participated in the Broadcast Education Association's (BEA) On-Location Conference which took place virtually October 7-12. Fox was a part of two sessions, both on October 7: The first was as a panelist on the "Manage Session Enhancing Digital Media Production: Podcasts' Role in Student Media and Media Curriculum" where she presented on "Podcasts' Role in the Undergraduate Curriculum."

Her second participation was a part of a research poster session where she and her co-author David Crider presented their research-in-progress: "The Symbolic Annihilation in WXPN’s 2020 All-Time Greatest Songs Countdown". The paper focused on the lack of diversity in the music countdown for a public radio station in the US and the outrage that ensued on Twitter.

 

MMJ alumna Deena Sabry Talks to Multimedia Writing and Production Students

October 20, 2021

On October 3, multimedia journalism (MMJ) alumna Deena Sabry spoke to Kim Fox's Multimedia Writing and Production course. This past May, Sabry completed her master's of journalism (MJ) degree at the University of California Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism in the multimedia track. Her thesis project was on endometriosis. She is based in San Francisco and is currently employed by McClatchy as well as Kerning Cultures.

Sabry spoke about her college career at AUC, JRMC and UC Berkeley, the intersections of social media and journalism in addition to her multimedia and data-based thesis project. Finally, she was one of 600 journalists who reported on the Pandora Papers, which were released last week.

 

Rana Kandil speaks to JRMC 2202 students

Faculty Member Featured: Nadine El Sayed
October 20, 2021

Public relations (PR) expert Rana Kandil gave a talk to Associate Professor of Practice’s Nadine El Sayed’s two Multimedia Writing and Reporting (JRMC 2202) sections on October 10. Kandil is the chief executive officer of Ajour Consultancy, a PR, branding and communication consultancy agency specialized in luxury products.

Kandil spoke to two classes of 20 students from Multimedia Journalism (MMJ), Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) and Communications and Media Arts (CMA) majors on how to package a press release to cut through the media clutter. She shared her expertise working with lifestyle magazines that include “Elle Arabia,” “Vogue Arabia” and “Marie Claire Arabia” on both the advertorial and the editorial sides of the industry. Students were live-Tweeting the event using the hashtag #JRMC2202Series, a hashtag dedicated to guest speakers at El Sayed and Professor of Practice Kim Fox’s sections of the JRMC 2202 course.

 

Lobna Khairy Joins the Women’s Supreme Advisory Council for Afro-Asian Union

Faculty Member Featured: Lobna Khairy
October 20, 2021

Lobna Khairy was last week selected to join the Women’s Supreme Advisory Council for Afro-Asian Union, which is composed of 22 country representatives.

The Council tackles various issues hindering the empowerment of women in African and Asian countries, through which policies will be derived and their consequent action plans to close the gender gap.

 

On Chinese Media

Faculty Member Featured: Marwa Azab
October 6, 2021

Adjunct Faculty Marwa Azab hosted guest speaker Martina Fuchs, the Europe Business Correspondent for Chinese state news agency Xinhua, in the JRMC 2250-01 Global Media Systems class on September 30.

Fuchs explained that China has one of the world’s most restrictive media environments, relying on censorship to control information in the news, online, and on social media. She also explained how the Chinese government blocks many US websites including Facebook, Instagram and some Google services. Students discussed with her several issues regarding the communist media system applied in China and whether this system is acceptable to the Chinese people.
Fuchs also joined Azab's other class JRMC 2203 Media Ethics and Responsibilities class, where students asked her several questions regarding the use of codes of ethics; she briefed them on issues related to ethical and unethical practices in the foreign media. Video of the lectures can be found here.

 

The Sarah Seif Foundation

Faculty Member Featured: Sarah Seif
October 6, 2021

Adjunct Faculty Sarah Seif launched the Sarah Seif Foundation, a media youth empowerment foundation that aims to develop and empower careers for youth in the media and communications, on September 29.

The foundation kicked off its activities by launching a job opportunity website for fresh graduates, students and juniors, as well as an Online Career Consultation Service.

She has also appeared on the official TV channel for the Ministry of Education (Madrasetna) talking about her foundation, as well as having press coverage by Cairo24, which can be found here.

 

Coffee Talk

Faculty Member Featured: Ahmed Taher
October 6, 2021

Ahmed Taher hosted guest speaker Mariam Georges, the marketing director of Mamiba, who was in his JRMC 4430 agency operations class. Georges briefed the class about Abano Di Parma coffee and Saskia Spa Products for the teams to develop a full IMC campaign for both product lines.

 

JRMC's Young Leader on Egypt’s Economy Surviving Corona’s Bumpy Ride

JRMC
October 6, 2021

JRMC graduate Christine Guirguis, recipient of the Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellowship Fund (Sylff) in 2020, was congratulated by dean Adham Ramadan on September 30 for publishing an Op-Ed on the Sylff website. The article, published last April, examined how Egypt was one of only three countries in the region to maintain positive growth in 2020.

Guirguis is now at Aarhus University in Denmark on a semester exchange.

 

Cairo's Ultras

Faculty Member Featured: Ronnie Close
September 30, 2021

Ronnie Close's book, Cairo's Ultras: Resistance and Revolution in Egypt's Football Culture, has been reviewed by Lyton Ncube of the University of Johannesburg, South Africa in the journal, Critical Arts.

 

Sensationalizing Suicide in the Media

Faculty Member Featured: Nadine El Sayed
September 30, 2021

Associate Professor of Practice, Nadine El Sayed has contributed an editorial column to the Al-Shorouk newspaper discussing the media coverage of the recent incident.

The suicide of a young woman in City Stars mall was covered widely on social media platforms and mainstream media, often featuring surveillance footage of the incident or still shots from the video in an attempt to compete with a growingly crowded space. El Sayed’s column argued that the industry of journalism is a crossroad and can either choose to play the same game as social media users or rise above the allure of the instant share and sensationalism to compete in their own league for a second chance of survival.

Al-Shorouk newspaper was founded in 2009 by Dar El Shorouk and is one of the leading Arabic newspapers in the region with a circulation of 150,000 copies and more than 5.5 million followers. Arabic Post was founded in 2015 as the Arabic edition of the Huffington Post, named HuffPost Arabi, but a change of ownership led to renaming it to Arabic Post later in 2018. The website has 7.5 million followers on social media channels.

 

JRMC SHORTLISTED AS BEA Finalists

Faculty Member Featured: Kim Fox
September 30, 2021

Two JRMC students were recently shortlisted as finalists in the Broadcast Education Association's (BEA) On-Location Creative Competition for student audio. Specific awards (Award of Excellence or Best in Show) will be announced live during the 2021 On-Location Creative Competition Virtual awards on Thursday, October 7, 2021 from 11:00 - 11:30 pm Cairo time.

• The Colescott Quest of Discovering Himself — Bassel Hanna, multimedia journalism major
• The Musical Magic and Scorched Legacy of Cairo’s Khedivial Royal Opera House — Maya Aboelnasr, multimedia journalism major

The student's audio pieces were produced as a part of Kim Fox's audio production course.

 

Digital Media and Information Security

Faculty Member Featured: Lobna Khairy
September 30, 2021

Adjunct Faculty Professor, Lobna Khairy was hosted on “Saba7 tech” radio show of “Al Shabab w Al al Ryada” public radio station on September 25. She spoke about the relationship between digital media and information security.

The episode link is available on YouTube

 

Book Review

Faculty Member Featured: Kim Fox
September 23, 2021

Kim Fox recently published a book review in the Newspaper Research Journal (NJR). The review of the book Akron’s Daily Miracle: Reporting the News in the Rubber City was published last month.

 

Science Meets Journalism

Faculty Member Featured: Heba Elshahed, Tara Alkadi
September 23, 2021

On September 19, Adjunct faculty Heba Elshahed and Tara Alkadi participated in a panel discussion as part of the Science Meets Journalism Conference at Goethe Institute in Cairo. The panel addressed issues relating to science journalism ethics, a topic that has become increasingly relevant in the age of the pandemic. With the flood of scientific researches being published, media coverage has developed a notorious reputation as a result of fake news, invasion of privacy, spreading propaganda, serving certain agendas.

The discussion centered on how to cover such timely scientific issues more ethically on the part of journalists and how to educate the public and social media users in an era of misinformation where often misleading research exists.

 

Land of Unrealized Dreams Exhibition at The Photographic Gallery

The Photographic Gallery
September 23, 2021

The Photographic Gallery has opened its first exhibition for the fall semester: Land of Unrealized Dreams, a duo exhibition by emerging Egyptian photographers Ali Zaraay and Ahmad Gaber, who documented life under the Covid 19 pandemic. The exhibition features two sets of photographs: Dream-like imagery of the global lockdown and a photo reportage of the Black Lives Matter protests in New York, USA.

The exhibition is on view until October 14. 

Gallery hours: Sunday - Thursday (10:00 am - 4:00 pm)

Join us next Sunday, October 3, at 7:00 pm Cairo Time for the exhibition talk with guest speaker Stephanie Heimann.

Stephanie Heimann is the photo director for The New Republic based in New York City. She has garnered several awards for the magazine including a National Magazine Award nomination in 2018 and the 2017 Magazine Picture Editor of the Year award from the National Press Photographers Association. She has worked on many international and domestic editorial titles including Newsweek, Time, New York, Scientific American, and Fortune Small Business, and was Al Gore’s photo editor on the sequel to his book Inconvenient Truth. Her career began as a photojournalist covering post-Soviet culture and the first war in Chechnya, and she spent almost ten years as an expatriate photo editor based in Moscow, Hong Kong, and Europe. She is the founder of the nonprofit Fovea Exhibitions, wherein a volunteer capacity she oversees photojournalism exhibits on topical and social issues.  Active as a teacher at the International Center of Photography, and an Advisory Member on the Rory Peck Trust, she has also curated many exhibits and has been included in magazine and photo juries and portfolio reviews around the world.

Remember to register here for the talk.

For more information about the exhibition, visit The Photographic Gallery on AUC website.

 

Board of Directors of the International Internet Advocacy Organization Global Voices

Faculty Member Featured: Rasha Abdulla
September 16, 2021

Rasha Abdulla, professor of journalism and mass communication at The American University in Cairo (AUC), has joined the board of directors of the international Internet advocacy organization Global Voices. Global Voices is a well-respected diverse, multilingual community of academics, writers, translators, and human rights activists. Together, they work to leverage the power of the Internet to build understanding across borders and across cultures. Media and Non-governmental Organization (NGO) partnerships are also a key component of Global Voices’ work as a community, a media organization, and a network of free expression advocates. Through writing and translating stories, the Global Voices community of contributors provides a breadth of local knowledge and connects like-minded individuals and initiatives around the world. The community is comprised of hundreds of volunteers, and the stories are translated into dozens of languages.

Nani Jansen Reventlow and Rasha Abdulla join Global Voices board on Global Voices
Rasha Abdulla Joins the Board of Directors of Global Voices announcement 

 

JRMC faculty participate in AEJMC conference

Faculty Members Featured: Rasha Allam, Shahira Fahmy, Kim Fox, Nadine El Sayed, Brian J. Bowe
September 16, 2021

JRMC faculty were well represented in the recent annual convention of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC). Faculty members won several awards, presented seven papers, and participated in at least five panels, while also serving the organization in a variety of ways. 

Rasha Allam, assistant professor, and associate chair presented a research paper titled “Configuring the Usage of Audience Analytics on Journalism Practices Inside Egyptian Newsrooms” in the Media Management, Economics and Entrepreneurship Division. 

Shahira Fahmy earned two awards for her paper, “Revealing the Veil in Internet Memes and GIFs: A Comparative Framing and Stereotyping Analysis,” which was co-authored with AUC alum (MA, 2019) Omneya Ibrahim. This paper won the Visual Communication Division’s top paper award (first place), as well as the Deborah Gump Research Award from the Newspaper and Online News and Scholastic Journalism Divisions. 

Fahmy served as a panelist in the session “Fulbright Scholars Studying Visual Communication,” sponsored by the Visual Communication Division. She also appeared as part of a pre-conference workshop session sponsored by the Newspaper and Online News Division and Graduate Student Interest Group titled “Eyeing the Job Market as a Doctoral Student.” 

Fahmy also served as a discussant for two sessions, a moderator for another session, and participated in meetings of the AEJMC Publications Committee, the mass communication, and society journal editorial board, the journalism and mass communication quarterly editorial board meeting, and the visual communication quarterly editorial board meeting as well as the visual communication division annual meeting as the membership chair. 

Kim Fox presented a paper, participated in two panels, organized a session, was a discussant for a session, and attended the AEJMC Board of Directors meeting as a member of that board representing AEJMC’s Commission on the Status of Women (CSW).

Fox presented the paper “Egyptian Female Podcasters: Creating Social Change Through Public Pedagogy” in AEJMC’s Electronic News Division.

Fox won the Small Programs Interest Group’s Dalton Landon Foundation Award for service to SPIG and the 2021 Robert Picard Award for Books and Monographs for "The Rowman and Littlefield Handbook of Media Management and Business." Fox contributed a chapter in the book on podcasting. Fox facilitated the CSW Business Meeting.

Fox also served on the panels “The Black Effect: How Podcasting Could Help Diversify Our Students’ Storytelling and Prepare Them for the Podcasting Marketplace” and “Bridging the Communication Gap from Behind the Digital Mask.” She also organized the panel  “International Women in Podcasting.”

Associate professor of practice Nadine El Sayed participated as a Kopenhaver Center Fellow in the pre-conference workshop titled “Women Faculty Moving Forward: Leading the Future of Academia.”

Associate professor Brian J. Bowe presented four papers. He also moderated a panel discussion titled “Radio as Resistance: Aesthetics, Culture and Information Intertwined.” Bowe’s papers included:

• “The Future of the Field: Journalism Degree Motivations, Roles and Relevancy of the Field,” co-authored with Lucinda D. Davenport (Michigan State) and Robin Blom (Ball State).
• “Digital Natives, Nascent Democracy: Tunisian Pre-Professional Journalists’ Uses and Perceptions of Social Media,” co-authored with Carolyn Nielsen (Western Washington) and Arwa Kooli (L’Institut de presse et des sciences de l’information). 
• “Tunisian and US Journalism Students: A Comparison of Journalism Degree Motivations and Role Conceptions,” co-authored with Robin Blom, Carolyn Nielsen, and Arwa Kooli
• “Internship Practices in Journalism and Mass Communication Programs: A review of ACEJMC-accredited programs,” co-authored with Robin Blom and Elena Lazoff (Ball State) 

Bowe also participated in the Religion and Media Interest Group’s annual meeting as the incoming head.

 

Media Hub

Faculty Member Featured: Sarah Seif
September 16, 2021

Adjunct faculty Sarah Seif was recently hired at the Biggest Media/Advertising Agency: Media Hub - Saadi Gohar as an Account Supervisor, following being an associate state minister of Information for Communication Affairs.

 

Stirring up the Hornet’s Nest at the Olympics

Faculty Member Featured: Alaa Abdel-Ghani
September 9, 2021

Adjunct faculty Alaa Abdel-Ghani recently published an article in Ahram Weekly on US gymnast Simone Biles withdrawing from competition for mental health issues.

 

Muslim American advocacy

Faculty Member Featured: Brian J. Bowe
September 9, 2021

Brian J. Bowe recently published a new co-authored study about Muslim American advocacy in the Q1 Journal of public relations research. The article, “An appeal to shared values: framing and moral persuasion in the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ press releases,” was co-authored with Derek Moscato of Western Washington University and Mariam Alkazemi of Virginia Commonwealth University. 
This study explores the confluence of moral reasoning and strategic framing in more than 700 press releases issued by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) during the first year of the Donald Trump presidency. While much attention has been paid to the ways in which news media both represent and misrepresent US Muslims through the ways stories are framed, much less work has been devoted to Muslim self-framing in public discourse.
For religious-civic organizations, the moral frames embedded in public relations are a crucial component of their message construction, as they connect spiritually guided values with civic discourses. CAIR used four strategic frames – Islamophobia reactions, legal responses, public sphere engagement, and interfaith solidarity – that presented narratives and counter-narratives of Muslim experiences in the United States, while simultaneously reshaping the civic discourses in which such issues are consumed. In this sense, CAIR has continued a longstanding tradition in the United States in which faith-based communicators situate advocacy and public relations activities at the confluence of public interest, rhetorical dialogue, and moral action. Click here for the article.

 

Islamophobia in the 2018 US Election

September 9, 2021

Bowe also recently published the article "Influencers, Amplifiers, and Icons: A Systematic Approach to Understanding the Roles of Islamophobic Actors on Twitter" in journalism and mass communication quarterly. The article was co-authored with former Kamal Adham Center directors Lawrence Pintak and Jonathan Albright of Columbia University. 
This article examines the Twitter discourse in the runup to the 2018 US midterm elections, in which an unprecedented number of American Muslims ran for public office, including the first two Muslim women elected to Congress. This study analyzes the anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant Twitter discourse surrounding Ilhan Omar, one of these two successful candidates. The results identify three categories of accounts that linked Omar to clusters of accounts that shaped the Islamophobia/xenophobic narrative: influencers, amplifiers, and icons. This cadre of accounts played a synergistic and disproportionate role in raising the level of hate speech as a vast network containing a high proportion of apparently inauthentic accounts magnified the messages generated by a handful of provocateurs.

 

Sexist Commentary During the Olympics

Faculty Member Featured: Nadina El Sayed
September 9, 2021

In her first column for Al-Shorouk, Nadine El Sayed discussed the sexist commentary female players received at the Olympics from Arabic commentators. The article criticizes how the commentator describes the beauty and grace of the top female gymnasts in the world, as opposed to their strength and technical performance as he does with their male counterparts. Her second column discussed the importance of not focusing on women’s apparel, be it conservative or otherwise when discussing their successes. 
It argues that doing so is a sign of patriarchal societies and shifts the focus away from their achievements. The column received more than 180 comments on the newspaper’s social media platforms and was shared 28 times. Her latest column for Al-Shorouk argued that banning women from places because they wear a hijab or shaming them for not wearing one are two sides of the same coin: A society that is obsessed with women’s bodies and objectifies them.
She has also published an editorial article for an Arabic post arguing that while Egypt managed to vaccinate around 5% of its population, the country saw a significant awareness gap between people from different backgrounds and age groups that the local mainstream media failed to fill. This gap, in turn, led to the most vulnerable segments of the population sometimes being left behind because they did not receive adequate awareness from local media on why they should get vaccinated and how.
Al-Shorouk newspaper was founded in 2009 by Dar El Shorouk and is one of the leading Arabic newspapers in the region with a circulation of 150,000 copies and more than 5.5 million followers. Arabic Post was founded in 2015 as the Arabic edition of the Huffington Post, named HuffPost Arabi, but a change of ownership led to renaming it to Arabic Post later in 2018. The website has 7.5 million followers on social media channels.

 

Algerian Wildfires and Global Climate Change

September 9, 2021

El Sayed also published a news feature last week discussing Algeria’s wildfires in the global climate change context. The feature looks at how this summer’s wildfires in Algeria and Tunisia serve as warnings against the potential effects of global warming.  
International researchers from Algeria and around the world discussed how the current environmental events reflect the urgency of the United Nation’s latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. The report warns that at the current rate, global warming will hit 1.5 degrees celsius within the next 15 years, as opposed to the international agreement to reach that level by the end of the century. 
Nature Middle East was established in 2010 and covers science and research in the Arabic-speaking Middle East. It is the regional arm of the international science journal Nature, the world’s leading science journal. Nature is a weekly journal that was founded in 1869 and has an impact factor of 42.778.

 

Shahira S. Fahmy presents two research papers in Paris and Shanghai

Faculty Member Featured: Shahira Fahmy
July 8, 2021

In June 2021, Fahmy presented two papers at the international forum on China’s image and global communication in Shanghai, China, and the communication power of global citizens and politicians conference in Paris, France. 
The first paper is co-authored with Fahmy’s former graduate students Basma Taha and Hasan Karademir. The comparative study examined the visual tweets in the personal accounts of Yemeni and non-Yemeni journalists who are affiliated with news organizations based in different countries to explore the extent of personalization and the different visual narratives used in reporting the Yemen civil war on Twitter. Results showed journalists fluctuated in their roles between being neutral observers and moral agents and these fluctuations were likely influenced by individual level and organizational level factors.
The second paper is co-authored with Spanish colleagues Rocío Zamora Medina and Marta Rebolledo. The work opens a dialogue in communication research because it bridges a gap in the political communication discipline by applying visual social media analysis of online campaigns. Specifically, the research examined how candidates used Instagram to strategically frame their images during the two last 2019 general elections in Spain.

 

Hate Speech and Journalism in crises

Faculty Member Featured: Naila Hamdy
July 8, 2021

Within the scope of a collaborative project between the American University in Cairo and the City University of London, a series of roundtable discussions were held with local journalists and editors during the last week of June 2021 to raise awareness against hate speech and help address the challenges faced from the increasing levels of hate-mongering speech in the media. The roundtable meetings also aim to help journalists in Egypt identify hate speech in their reporting and engage with them in developing guidelines to help them tackle this phenomenon in their story narratives and news production. The project will also lead to joint research with Zahera Harb at City University.
The project is a continuation of previous work sponsored by the Ethical Journalism Network (EJN) and led by Naila Hamdy in 2015. Hamdy engaged adjunct faculty member Caroline Elias and alumni Ahmed Montasser who were also involved in the authoring and launching of a hate speech glossary.

 

Egypt TV takes on Hate Speech

Faculty Member Featured: Caroline Elias
July 8, 2021

Channel 2 TV anchor Atef Kamel, who attended the roundtable, was so inspired by the project that he invited adjunct faculty Caroline Elias to discuss hate speech and bullying in local media. The discussion was mostly based on the glossary produced by EJN and the Egypt Media Development Program under Naila's supervision.
For the interview, click here.
For the glossary, click here.

 

Platform Content Moderation

Faculty Member Featured: Rasha Abdulla
June 17, 2021

Rasha Abdulla, professor of journalism and mass Communication was featured in a special interview on platform content moderation in the global South for the Columbia Journalism Review's Galley platform. The full interview is featured here. 

 

Nile Pharma Company Board of Directors

Faculty Member Featured: Hesham Dinana
June 17, 2021

Hesham Dinana has been appointed by HE Hisham Tawfik, Minister of public enterprise sector, to the board of directors of the Nile Pharma Company representing the Holding Company for Pharmaceuticals Industries (HoldiPharma) In this Covid-19 era, the restructuring, and revitalization of the Egyptian pharma industry is of utmost importance and it is a matter of national security.
Dinana will bring to the board extensive experience in marketing and in healthcare.

 

Beijing University of Technology

June 17, 2021

Hesham Dinana has been invited to chair the technical committee for The 12th International Conference on E-business, management and economics that is organized by Beijing University of Technology, China from July 17 to July 19 in collaboration with the University of Wisconsin.

 

Fulbright Scholar Shahira S. Fahmy wins the Champions of Editing’s First Research Competition at AEJMC 2021

Faculty Member Featured: Shahira Fahmy
June 17, 2021

Shahira Fahmy has won the champions of editing’s first research competition for “Revealing the Veil in Internet Memes and GIFs: A Comparative Framing and Stereotyping Analysis”.
The research prize recognizes each year’s top AEJMC conference paper that brings newfound clarity and insight to the field of editing. All of the AEJMC divisions, commissions and interest groups, after completing their own review process, as usual, selected their top paper and forwarded them to the selection committee, which conducted a separate review process for the prize. 
Fahmy’s work co-authored with former AUC graduate student Omneya Ibrahim, looks at memes and GIFs to unravel the frames and stereotypes of the hijab in these online visuals tools following the 2019 attacks on mosques in New Zealand.

 

MMJ Student Wins Top Award in the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ)

Faculty Member Featured: Kim Fox
June 17, 2021

Nesrien Abdelkader has won the top award in the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) Mark of Excellence (MOE) awards for her audio piece "Choose to Refuse: Escaping the Cycle of Addiction."
This might be the first time that a JRMC student has won a National SPJ award, recognized as the best in student journalism. SPJ MOE winners and finalists were previously recognized by receiving first-place in one of the SPJ’s 12 regional competitions. Each first-place regional winner advanced to the national competition. We are proud of her success.

For a full list of SPJ MOE winners click here.
Abdelkader audio feature was produced in Kim Fox's audio production course in fall 2020.

 

Guiding Principles of Diversity of Content Online

Faculty Member Featured: Rasha Abdulla
June 10, 2021

Rasha Abdulla spoke at two sessions at RightsCon 2021, which is being held from June 7-11 as a 24-hour online conference. Abdulla was an invited speaker on a high-level strategy panel organized by the government of Canada. The session was entitled “Moving Forward – Guiding Principles of Diversity of Content Online” and featured a round table of 25 experts on online content moderation from around the world. Abdulla also spoke on another panel entitled "Are we in this together? COVID-19 and digital rights in the MENA region," which featured presentations on issues of fake news, disinformation, and misinformation in the MENA region during the COVID-19 pandemic. RightsCon is the biggest annual meeting of Internet-related issues worldwide. In its tenth round this year, it featured more than 8500 participants from 150 countries.

 

Decolonize The Lens Webinar Series

The Photographic Gallery
June 10, 2021

The Photographic Gallery at the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication organized a series of webinars that considered ways to decolonize the imperial gaze. Over the course of the four-part series, photographic experts and scholars have looked at the local history of photography in Egypt and Northeast Africa and have presented different approaches to rethinking the dominant narratives in the history of photography. Decolonize the Lens is a joint research project between faculty in Journalism and Mass Communication, the History Department, and the Photographic Gallery.

The webinars are now available on The Photographic gallery’s Youtube channel:

Street Sounds: Listening to Everyday Life in Modern Egypt
Camera Time: Photography and Local Modernity in Egypt
Image Matters: Contemporary Photography in and of Egypt
Visual Testimonies: Photography, ‘Sudanese’ Soldiers, and Origin Stories in German East Africa’s Colonial Army

 

El-Richani’s CMA Seniors Present Capstone Projects

Faculty Member Featured: Sarah El-Richani
June 3, 2021

Final CMA capstone presentations were held on May 20 and included four groups of CMA senior students who had worked on their projects under the supervision of Sarah El-Richani. They presented their campaigns before a large audience consisting of friends, family, and a panel of judges. The judges included AUC associate professor of practice Nadine El Sayed and International Committee of the Red Cross communications coordinator, Mirella Hodeib.
The campaigns tackled a variety of topics of societal relevance to Egypt, ranging from the adoption of “Balady” dogs to career-related gender inequality and sexual myths and misconceptions in the region.
As the event came to a close, the judges announced the winning group to be the “Le3betek Kowetek,” an awareness campaign about the challenges facing female athletes.

 

Nicolas Hamelin Co-Authors New Publication Analyzing Subliminal Static Images and Words Using Eye Tracking Techniques

Faculty Member Featured: Nicolas Hamelin
June 3, 2021

Nicolas Hamelin and Anish Babu Zacharia have co-authored a piece in Developing Digital Marketing based on research using a Phenomenography approach of Eye Tracking to study the Biometric changes when participants were subjected to eight static subliminal images hidden in seven differently designed packages. Embeds or static subliminal stimuli in the form of pictures and words were hidden in seven different perfume packages and were used to study the changes experienced between the two groups, one of which was subjected to subliminal stimulus. A total of 46 healthy participants were separated into two groups, with one group shown image packages with static subliminal stimulus while the other group was shown image packages without any subliminal stimulus. Eye Tracking data was collected using iMotions. A detailed analysis of the Area of Interest (AOI), Fixation and Heat Map revealed that only a percentage of the participants visited the AOI with the hidden subliminal stimulus, but the participants who noticed the AOIs with the subliminal stimulus especially the male participants spent more time in the AOI indicating that they could be consciously processing the subliminal static stimulus. A statistical analysis of the time to first fixations (TIFF) revealed that the subliminal stimulus was not the first point of attraction.

 

Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC) Capstone

Faculty Member Featured: Sherin Moody
June 3, 2021

Sherin Moody invited Wunderman Thompson (WT) as the panel for the JRMC 4425 “Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC) Capstone” during a two-day zoom presentation that was held on May 18 and 19. After a full semester of research and creativity, eight groups presented their creative strategies and final campaigns. Seven projects were repositioning campaigns for “Lambada Biscuit”, “Jelly Cola”, “Africano Park”, “Rebranding 7UP”, “Bon Appetit”, “Metro Transportation” and “Chixo Chocolate”, the last project was a start-up that created an e-commerce app called “Salva.” In the end, each group received an award for their respective projects. The winning groups, “Africano Park” and “Metro Transportation” received the Wunderman Thompson Award of Excellence which is the most prestigious award. The winning groups are given an opportunity to attend the WPP NextGen Leaders 2021 series of training, a 10-week virtual experience for early talent to learn and connect with leaders and experts across the WPP network.

 

Bowe to Present Four Papers at AEJMC

Faculty Member Featured: Brian J. Bowe
May 20, 2021

Associate professor Brian J. Bowe will be presenting four papers at the upcoming Association for Education in Journalism Education (AEJMC) conference in August.
Two papers were based on an ongoing project Bowe is conducting with colleagues at L’Institut de Presse et des Sciences de l’Information (IPSI) in Tunisia, which is supported by a grant from the US state department. One paper, titled "Digital Natives, Nascent Democracy: Tunisian Pre-Professional Journalists’ Uses and Perceptions of Social Media," was written with Carolyn Nielsen (Western Washington University) and Arwa Kooli (IPSI). The other paper, "Tunisian and US journalism students: A Comparison of Journalism Degree Motivations and Role Conceptions," was written by Bowe, Kooli, Nielsen and Blom (Ball State University).
Bowe and Blom collaborated with Ball State graduate student Elena Lazoff on a paper titled "Internship Practices in Journalism and Mass Communication Programs: A review of ACEJMC-accredited programs."
Bowe and Blom collaborated with Lucinda D. Davenport (Michigan State University) on a paper titled "The Future of the Field: Journalism Degree Motivations, Roles and Relevance of the Field."
The AEJMC annual conference will be held virtually this year, as a result of the ongoing pandemic.

 

Students Present MMJ Capstone Projects

Faculty Member Featured: Khaled Ezzelarab
May 20, 2021

Students in the Multimedia Reporting Capstone (JRMC 4480) taught by associate professor of practice Khaled Ezzelarab, presented their final projects on May 18, before jury members JRMC professor of practice Kim Fox and Sky News Arabia Senior Multimedia Journalist Maissoun Benguega. Associate professor Brian J. Bowe and associate professor of practice Nadine El Sayed attended the session and gave valuable feedback to students.

 

Fulbright Scholar Shahira S. Fahmy Wins Top Faculty Award at Prestigious US Conference

Faculty Member Featured: Shahira Fahmy
May 20, 2021

Fahmy was awarded a competitive top faculty award (first place) at the most prestigious Journalism and Mass Communication academic conference in the United States. The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) promotes the highest possible standards for journalism and mass communication education, to cultivate the widest possible range of communication research, to encourage the implementation of a multi-cultural society in the classroom and curriculum, and to defend and maintain freedom of communication in an effort to achieve better professional practice and a better-informed public. Fahmy’s work co-authored with former AUC graduate student Omneya Ibrahim, looks at memes and GIFs to unravel the frames and stereotypes of the hijab in these online visuals tools following the 2019 attacks on mosques in New Zealand.

 

Thesis Defense Supervised by Shahira Fahmy

May 20, 2021

MA student Mohamed Magdy Salama successfully defended his thesis “Normalization through the visual: How international media depicted the Abraham Accords” on May 18, 2021. The thesis was supervised by Shahira S. Fahmy. Special thanks to Naila Hamdy from AUC, and Adel Saleh from the British University in Egypt (BUE) for serving as readers on the thesis committee and for their insightful comments.

 

MMJ Seniors Win Regional Journalism Competition

Faculty Member Featured: Kim Fox
May 20, 2021

The Society for Professional Journalists (SPJ) announced their Region two winners in the annual Mark of Excellence (MOE) for student journalism. Several Multimedia Journalism students were placed in the radio competitions. The top winners in each category will move to the next level of the competition: competing against other regional winners in 12 regions in their respective categories. The students produced the audio projects for the Audio Production course taught by Kim Fox.

Radio Feature

Winner: Educational journey: Educational Journey: From Qena to Cairo - by Reem Elmaghraby
Finalist: Psycho-education in the classroom in Egypt - by Nada Wahba AlNaggar

Radio In-Depth Reporting

Winner: Choose to refuse: Escaping the cycle of addiction - by Nesrien Abdelkader.

 

Impact of Apple's New Podcast Subscription

May 20, 2021

Professor of practice Kim Fox co-authored an article "Apple threatens to upend podcasting’s free, open architecture" on how Apple's new podcast subscription service will impact the podcasting ecosystem.
The article was originally published in The Conversation and republished in Creative Commons and in the Canadian Journalism Project.

 

Egyptian Female Podcasters

May 20, 2021

Kim Fox and her research collaborator Yasmeen Ebada had their research project accepted as a part of the AEJMC annual conference in the Electronic News Division (END). They will present their paper titled "Egyptian Female Podcasters: Creating Social Change Through Public Pedagogy" at the virtual conference in August.

 

Guest Speaker on Advertising and Marketing Communications

Faculty Member Featured: Naila Hamdy 
May 20, 2021

Alumnus Hussam Moro '00, Journalism and Mass Communication,  joined Naila Hamdy’s Introduction to mass communication course on May 9 to update students on the latest in advertising and marketing communications. Moro is a highly experienced former president and chief creative officer at Impact/BBDO working on global accounts such as Pepsico, Visa, GM, Mercedes, ExxonMobil, Vodafone, Orange, and IKEA.

 

Decolonize the Lens

The Photographic Gallery 
May 20, 2021

'Decolonize the Lens' is a four-part webinar series that will run through May and early June. It considers ways to decolonize the "imperial gaze" of the photographic lens in modern Egypt and Northeast Africa. For those who missed the first guest speaker, Ziad Fahmy on Wednesday 5 May, here is a video recording of the event. 
More details on the discussion series can be found here.

 

IMC Students Propose Advertising Campaigns for Tarek Nour Client ValU

Faculty Member Featured: Tara Al-kadi
May 12, 2021

Tarek Nour (TN) team members had a joint session with Tara Al Kadi’s JRMC 3355 creative strategy and advertising copywriting section on May 10.
Students were previously assigned an actual brief given to TN by one of its clients, ValU, which was seeking campaign ideas to celebrate its third anniversary in operation.
Feedback to all ten teams focused on the gap between market needs and student output. The top three winners were acknowledged for their creativity as well as overall coherent plan to meet the unique selling point(s) mentioned in the brief.

 

US Fulbright Scholar Shahira S. Fahmy Gets Research and Fulbright Panel Accepted at AEJMC 2021

Faculty Member Featured: Shahira Fahmy
May 12, 2021

Shahira S. Fahmy has refereed research accepted for presentation at the prestigious and highly competitive annual Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication’s (AEJMC) annual convention scheduled to take place in August 2021. 
As a US Fulbright Scholar, Fahmy will also discuss her research and creative activities on a panel of US Fulbright Scholars at the most prestigious Journalism and Mass Communication academic annual conference in the United States.

 

Thesis Defense Supervised by Shahira S. Fahmy

May 12, 2021

MA student Hend Abdel Gaber Ahmed successfully defended her thesis “A feverish spring: A comparative analysis of COVID-19 news framing in Sweden, the United Kingdom, and Egypt” on May 9. The thesis was supervised by Shahira S. Fahmy. Special thanks to Brian Bowe and  Ahmed Taher for serving as readers on the thesis committee and for their insightful comments.

 

Ali Ali as a Guest Lecturer

Faculty Member Featured: Rania Fouda
May 12, 2021

Adjunct instructor Rania Fouda’s JRMC 3315 Introduction to Advertising class hosted AUC alumnus Ali Ali as a guest lecturer sharing with the students his experiences and 'the top 10 things I learned in advertising".
He took the class through case studies, including some of his most challenging/out-of-the-box creative ideas and the highlights of his career. He spent time discussing how these ideas were developed, the effect of research (or no research) on the creative minds, the importance of simplicity in creative development, challenging situations with clients and how the creative work should meet client briefs.
The students were impressed by Ali, and some of them knew of him from before as an icon in the advertising industry. His lecture brought a fresh practical perspective to some of the academic concepts introduced in class. As a special gesture, he will provide internship opportunities for interested students.
Ali is an AUC graduate with a major in computer engineering. However, he swiftly shifted fields to advertising and built a global career first as an art director then as a creative director for the likes of Leo Burnett, JWT, McCann, before finally topping it off as ECD of DDB-Berlin in 2012.

 

A Super Embarrassment?

Faculty Member Featured: Alaa Abdel-Ghani
May 6, 2021

JRMC adjunct faculty member Alaa Abdel-Ghani published an article on Football's dead-on-arrival Super League in Ahram Online on April 27. "A half-carton of milk in a fridge lasts longer than the ill-fated European Super League (ESL) which fizzled out spectacularly," he writes. 
His latest article about the European Super League can be found here.

 

Shahira S. Fahmy Publishes on Media Convergence in Q1 Journal

Faculty Member Featured: Shahira Fahmy
May 6, 2021

Shahira Fahmy’s latest publication in the Q1 journal of Media International Australia examines journalists’ understanding and perceptions about convergence in Pakistan’s media industry and its influence on journalistic practices and routines. The work, which contributes to the media convergence literature by providing insights from an emerging non-Western media system, is co-authored with students in the United States and Pakistan.

 

Thesis Defense supervised by Shahira S. Fahmy

May 6, 2021

MA student Hasan Karademir successfully defended his thesis “Visual messages of conflict reporting on Twitter: Visual frames and ethical standards” on May 5, 2021. The thesis was supervised by Shahira S. Fahmy. Special thanks to Sarah El-Richani, and Hesham Dinana for serving as readers on the thesis committee and for their insightful comments.

 

The Photographic Gallery Decolonizes the Lens

The Photographic Gallery
May 6, 2021

Decolonize the Lens is a series of discursive events that brings together photographic experts and international scholars to reflect on rethinking the dominant narratives in the history of photography. Over the course of four webinar talks, guest speakers will look at Egyptian and Northeast African visual cultures in both historical and contemporary settings. Decolonize the Lens brings into focus issues of politics and how photography has empowered the citizen/subject to bring about a richer understanding of difference. These events set out to challenge Neo-Orientalist assumptions that perpetuate and reproduce stereotypical visions and to provide a deeper understanding of the cultural role of the image. The series also considers how typically Western approaches to visual history can be de-centered by histories of other senses, such as aural/sound histories. What emerges from our history if we listen to the past instead of looking at it through an allegedly objective photographic lens?
Decolonize the Lens is a joint research project between faculty in the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication, the History department and the Photographic Gallery.

 

Programs

Street Sounds: Listening to Everyday Life in Modern Egypt

Guest Speaker: Ziad Fahmy Moderators: Mark Deets and Dina ElDeeb 
Wednesday, May 5, 5:00 pm CLT
Register here

Camera Time: Photography and Local Modernity in Egypt

Guest Speaker: Lucie Ryzova Moderators: Ronnie Close and Dina ElDeeb
Wednesday, May 19, 5:00 pm CLT
Register here

Image Matters: Contemporary photography in and of Egypt

Guest Speaker: Heba Farid Moderators: Ronnie Close and Dina ElDeeb 
Wednesday, May 26, 5:00 pm CLT
Register here

Visual Testimonies: Photography, ‘Sudanese’ Soldiers, and Origin Stories in German East Africa’s Colonial Army

Guest Speaker: Michelle Moyd Moderators: Mark Deets and Dina ElDeeb
Wednesday, June 2, 5:00 pm CLT
Register here

 

On Social Media Content Creation

Faculty Member Featured: Samar Abdelaal
April 22, 2021

Adjunct faculty Samar Abdelaal's JRMC 3355 copywriting and creative strategy section hosted digital marketing director Ismaeil Rousdhy, commercial director at the Media Republic agency, to speak about social media content creation and campaign design to ensure brand resonance, reach and call to action.

 

Nadine El Sayed Publishes a Book Chapter in Routledge Handbook on Contemporary Egypt

Faculty Member Featured: Nadine El Sayed
April 22, 2021

Associate professor of practice Nadine El Sayed published a chapter in the newly released book Routledge Handbook on Contemporary Egypt. The book was edited by Robert Springborg and Naomi Sakr, among others, and was published in March. It investigates key features of contemporary Egypt’s modern history, politics, economics, the legal system, environment, and its media and modes of cultural expression. 
El Sayed’s chapter is titled “The rise of indie music from the heart of Tahrir Square: Politics and popular music in Egypt” and is part of the media and popular culture section, edited by Sakr. Her study examines the themes of popular songs on Anghami, YouTube, and leading music radio station Nogoum FM to analyze the content in terms of the messages behind them and the most popular themes to consider whether and how the economics of music-making in Egypt affect the messages conveyed. 
The chapter also looks at the growing population tuning into music-streaming services, and how that allowed the space for younger, independent record labels to boom and stray from the strictly mainstream topics and lyrical content to introduce underrepresented issues and segments of society. 

 

Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study

Faculty Member Featured: Kim Fox
April 22, 2021

Professor of practice Kim Fox was one of the discussants for SpokenWeb's "Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study." The hour-long session took place on April 20 and there were more than 60 attendees. SpokenWeb is based in Canada.

 

Broadcast Education Association Annual Convention

April 22, 2021

Kim Fox also participated in several panels as a part of the Broadcast Education Association's (BEA) Annual Convention held virtually April 13 to April 15. She served as a moderator for the Best Practices for Teaching Students Audio Production panel; as a panelist for the Top JRAM Research Article: "A Curriculum for Blackness: Podcasts as Discursive Cultural Guides, 2010-2020" discussion, and was also a panelist and moderator for the Radio and Audio Media Division's Top Paper Presentations: "From COVID to Black Lives Matter: Daily news podcasts and the reinvention of audio reporting".
On the last day of the convention, Fox was a panelist on the Hidden History: Celebrating Radio's Lesser-Known People and Events discussion, and participated in the panel featuring the Audio and News competition winners: "One Day in January 2011". 
Kim Fox also participated in the panel on "Teaching Podcasting: What Works, What Doesn’t, and Lessons Learned".

 

Driss Slaoui Talks to JRMC Students

Faculty Member Featured: Nicolas Hamelin
April 22, 2021

Nicolas Hamelin and teaching assistant Nourhan Zayed hosted in his JRMC 3315 and 3366 sections guest speaker Driss Slaoui, the founder and CEO of Welovebuzz, the digital media company for millennials in the Arab World. Welovebuzz reaches up to three million people per day and is considered to be the leading platform for youngsters in Morocco.
Driss, one of Nick's former students at Al Akhawayn University in Morocco, started Welovebuzz at 17 from his dorm room. Every month, Driss reaches millions of people across various platforms. Giant brands, like Nike, Samsung and P&G, rely on Welovebuzz to share their message and inspire the younger generation. Welovebuzz's vision is to be a millennial favorite on the internet. Welovebuzz benefits from Morocco's relative freedom of speech and openly discusses subjects that were once judged taboo such as Nabil Ayouch's film, Much Loved (Zine Li Fik). 
JRMC chair Firas Al-Atraqchi introduced Driss to the 74 students who attended the talk.

 

Rasha Allam Serves as a Judge at the Oxford Media Law Program

Faculty Member Featured: Rasha Allam
April 15, 2021

Rasha Allam was invited to serve as judge in the International Annual Monroe E. Price Media Law Moot Court Competition on April 13. The Price Media Law Moot Court Competition is a joint program between the Faculty of Law at the University of Oxford and the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights. 
The program brings international students from eight regions of the world and aims to foster and cultivate interest in freedom of expression issues and the role of the media and information technologies in societies around the world. It was established by the program in Comparative Media Law and Policy at the University of Oxford in 2008.

 

JRMC faculty team win third place in FYC competition

Faculty Member Featured: Nadine El Sayed, Kim Fox
April 15, 2021

Professor of practice Kim Fox and associate professor of practice Nadine El Sayed won third place in the Futurize Your Course pitch competition, organized as part of the Research and Creativity Convention on March 31. The competition included 10 teams of faculty members from different departments across AUC presenting their visions of futurizing a course of their choice to fit the needs of 2040.
Fox and El Sayed presented a plan to develop their Multimedia Writing and Production (JRMC 2202) course, introducing artificial intelligence (AI) components to the course to help equip their students for the future of the industry. Their plan included training students on using AI to understand audiences and trends, to collect and understand data as well as in reporting and writing.
Yasmine Soheim and Alyssa Young, instructors at the Department of Rhetoric and Composition, won first place with their new “Impact Through Research” course. Naglaa Samir Ismail, associate professor of practice at the Department of Arts, Hoda Mostafa, professor of practice and director of the Center for Learning and Teaching, and Magda Mostafa, associate professor of practice at the Department of Architecture, won second place with their new interdisciplinary course titled “Progressive Design: The future by Design."

 

General Manager of FP7/McCann speaks to JRMC 2202 students

Faculty Member Featured: Nadine El Sayed
April 15, 2021

Associate professor of practice Nadine El Sayed hosted Sondos Effat, the general manager of FP7/McCann Cairo advertising agency, who spoke to students in the Multimedia Writing and Production (JRMC 2202) course on Wednesday, April 7.
JRMC 2202 students live-tweeted the talk, pushing the hashtag #JRMC2202series and #SondosEffat to trend as number one and three on the local Twitter respectively.
Effat, who is a graduate of the IMC program, talked to students about formulating advertising messages based on market insight, with a focus on public service announcements (PSA), discussing a number of case studies from campaigns students are familiar with, including campaigns by the UN, Coca-Cola and others. She has 15 years of experience in the industry and has a master of arts in marketing from the University of Westminster in London. Effat has been with FP7/McCann for 12 years and was a part of. Several teams that won prestigious industry international awards, including D&D, LIA, The Andys, AdFest and The One Show. FP7McCann Cairo is part of the global McCann Worldgroup, the world’s largest advertising network.
This session comes as a part of a series El Sayed and professor of practice Kim Fox launched collaboratively for their JRMC 2202 students, hosting industry experts of different specializations. Professor Fox had previously hosted JRMC alumni Nadine Awadalla, a Reuters correspondent, and Nadine El Guiddawi, an expert in public relations who gave students a practical insight into the field.

 

Rawan Lasheen Speaks to JRMC 3339 class

Faculty Member Featured: Sally Kandil
April 15, 2021

Adjunct Faculty Sally Kandil hosted CMA alumna Rawan Lasheen, a TV presenter on Al-Ghad TV and junior member of the Egyptian Parliament on April 8. She talked about her six years of experience as an anchor, the dos and don'ts of presenting, and reviewed some of the students' work and gave them her feedback.

 

Social Media and the Age of Polarization

Faculty Member Featured: Rasha Abdulla, Naila Hamdy
April 8, 2021

Rasha Abdulla, professor of journalism and mass communication, participated as a panelist in the GAPP webinar "Social Media and the Age of Polarization". The webinar panel also featured Hedayat Heikal of Harvard Law School and Gabriele Cosentino and author of "Social Media and the Post-Truth World Order." It was hosted by dean Nabil Fahmy and moderated by Naila Hamdy. Abdulla tackled the effects of polarization on social media as perpetrated by fake news and hate speech, and emphasized the importance of media literacy and teaching diversity and tolerance. She discussed the multi-stakeholder approach to Internet governance as advocated by entities such as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the Internet Governance Forum, of which she was a member of the Multistakeholder Advisory Committee, appointed by the Secretary-General of the United Nations.

 

IMC students design Ramadan Turkish coffee campaigns for Cilantro

Faculty Member Featured: Tara Al-Kadi
April 8, 2021

On April 5, Cilantro’s marketing team had a joint session with Tara Al Kadi’s JRMC 3355 Creative Strategy and Advertising Copywriting students.
Students were assigned a formal brief by Cilantro detailing requirements for a Ramadan advertising campaign. All teams were offered thorough feedback on their work and what elements were key in today’s competitive coffee market. Winners were selected based on creativity, applicability and adherence to the original brief.

 

 

Shahira S. Fahmy joins AUC SpeakUp with her most recent Q1 publication on Digital Persuasion in the #MeToo Era

Faculty Member Featured: Shahira Fahmy
April 8, 2021

Shahira Fahmy’s latest work in the International Journal of Communication (IJOC) examines the use of persuasion appeals in the most viral MeToo memes on Twitter. The work is co-authored with Fahmy’s former graduate student Omneya Ibrahim, who worked on the project during her first year of her MA program at AUC.
In her work, Fahmy examined MeToo memes during the week in which sexual misconduct allegations were made against Judge Brett Kavanaugh, then-nominee for the US Supreme Court. Findings revealed anti-MeToo memes significantly focused more on the emotional appeal and less on the logos and ethos appeals than pro-MeToo memes. Overall, the work contributes to the developing area of digital feminism research and adds to the limited research that explores the different persuasion appeals in the contemporary digital media environment.
IJOC is a Q1 journal published by USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. An earlier version of this work won the Top Scholar to Scholar Award for the best visual communication division paper at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) annual convention in Toronto, Canada in August 2019.

 

The Media Economy in Practice: Guest Speaker A.Shebl

Faculty Member Featured: Mireille Barsoum
April 1, 2021

Adjunct faculty Mireille Barsoum invited guest speaker Ahmed Shebl, head creative director at FP7 McCann Cairo, on March 28 to speak to her online media economics class to share his journey in advertising with the students. Shebl has more than 25 years of experience in the field and has successfully handled more than 100 campaigns during his career in six advertising agencies in Egypt.
The live session included a glance at his experience in media and advertising in Egypt, and a discussion of the industry’s top firms and dynamics. Shebl shared the main challenges the industry has been facing in the era of COVID-19 and highlighted some unexpected market opportunities during the pandemic that left the class in awe. The students got a chance to bridge the gap between theory and practice and received a practical glimpse of how the different factors discussed in class actually affect work in real life. Students shared very positive feedback about the session and expressed interest in applying to summer internships at FP7 McCann, to which Shebl shared appropriate contacts.

 

Egypt Retail Summit 2021

Faculty Member Featured: Tara El-Kadi
April 1, 2021

Adjunct faculty professor Tara El-Kadi moderated the panel titled Innovative Marketing: Redefining Customer Loyalty, as part of the Egypt Retail Summit 2021. The event was held at the Nile Ritz Carlton Hotel on March 27.
Panel members included Dahlia Ezzat, Head of Media Planning at Media Hub - Saadi Gohar; Mostafa Medhat, Enterprise Manager at Tradeline- Apple Premium Reseller; Mohamed Dawood, CEO of MARKIT; Abdurrahman Ata , Fashion Retail Expert; and Tarek ElKoussy, sales director for operations at Majorel Egypt.

 

Shahira S. Fahmy to join the Advisory Board of Journal of Global Communication and Online Media

Faculty Member Featured: Shahira Fahmy

\April 1, 2021

The Immediate Past Editor of Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly (JMCQ), Louisa Ha and founding editor of a new online journal sponsored by the School of Journalism and Communication at Shanghai International Studies University (SISU) invited Shahira S. Fahmy on March 25 to join the advisory board of her new journal. 
The journal is planned to officially launch in early 2022. Its policy is one board member from one university. All board members will be invited to Shanghai or other cities in China to attend its annual editorial board meeting and conferences organized by SISU, such as its NCA Shanghai Dialogue Forum in 2022. 
The journal’s mission is to bring the best research on global communication and global online media platforms including social media and mobile applications to the world with its bilingual Chinese and English format and multi-language version abstracts based on official UN languages (Arabic, French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, English). 
Half of the articles will be translated from best-published pieces in non-English language communication journals from around the world with one of them being a review on the state of research in a region or a country. The other half of the articles will be open submissions of English language original research on digital platforms such as blogs, online news sites, review sites such as TripAdvisor, Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter WeChat, TikTok, Whatspps, Line, that have global implications.
The journal welcomes quantitative, qualitative and critical approaches to the study of global communication and digital platforms and strives to maximize the access and international impact of the scholarship published. Empirical studies are preferred over conceptual articles. Descriptive studies with national representative samples for benchmarking will also be considered.

 

Kim Fox Receives Multiple Research Accolades

Faculty Member Featured: Kim Fox
April 1, 2021

Over the past few weeks, professor of practice Kim Fox has received multiple accolades related to her research commitments. The first two will be highlighted in separate panel discussions at the Broadcast Education Association (BEA) virtual conference in mid-April 2021.
Broadcast Education Association Radio and Audio Media (RAM) Top Paper (tied)
"From COVID to Black Lives Matter: Daily news podcasts and the reinvention of audio reporting"
Journal of Radio and Audio Media - 2020 Outstanding Research Article (tied) "A Curriculum for Blackness: Podcasts as Discursive Cultural Guides, 2010-2020" recently named to the Journal of Radio and Audio Media editorial board.

 

JRMC/ALI Launch Arabic Language Webinar Series

JRMC Department
April 1, 2021

The Journalism and Mass Communication Department in collaboration with the Department of Arabic Language Instruction (ALI) hosted the first webinar in a series focusing on the importance of Arabic for AUC students after graduation on March 25.
Titled عربي ما بعد التخرج: يا ترى ليه؟ (Arabic After Graduation, Why?), the webinar's panelists included actor and alumna Yosra El-Lozy, JRMC's Mervat Abou Oaf and adjunct faculty Mona Salman, and ALI Senior Instructor Montasser Al Qaffash. The webinar was moderated by Rasha Allam.
The Zoom webinar was recorded and is available here.

 

Students Attend Feature Writing Workshop

Faculty Member Featured: Nadine El Sayed
March 25, 2021

Twenty-two students from across AUC attended the two-hour feature writing workshop hosted by the Journalism and Mass Communication Department on March 1.
The workshop, taught by associate professor Brian J. Bowe and associate professor of practice Nadine El Sayed, hosted 22 students from the JRMC department, as well as various majors, including economics, film, political science, engineering, management and literature.
The students were given the basics of generating feature ideas, differentiating between features and hard news, and writing different features.
The workshop is part of a larger JRMC initiative to boost students' communication skills and pique their interest in the world of media and styles of writing, using multimedia and social media channels and honing journalistic skills.
The department will host another session focused on interviewing and research skills for feature writers that will also be open to all students across AUC. The session will be moderated by Bowe and El Sayed, and presented by Maurice Chammah, staff writer at The Marshal Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the US criminal justice system. Chammah’s first book, Let the Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty, won the 2019 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Book Award.

 

Elections Put MCA Back on Track

March 25, 2021

Farid Tadors, an Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC) major, has won the presidential election for the Mass Communication Association (MCA) with a total of 83 votes. In total, 113 JRMC voted in the poll held on March 5, marking the highest student turnout in years and the second-highest association elections turnout across the university.
Three teams had initially qualified for the elections, but one team withdrew, leaving Tadros and the one other team, Rawan Ibrahim and her running mate Sondos Karara, in the race.
Tadros is a member of Community Integration in the Student Union. He is the marketing brand coordinator at Mintra, and interned as a data analyst at Dale Carnegie. He was also a coordinator at BrushIt Coordinator. He is also a member of the AUC swimming team and has won the bronze medal at the Cairo Championship and represented the Gezira Sporting Club at the Egyptian National championship.
The MCA is a student-led organization that serves all students of the JRMC department, providing academic and logistical support and acting as a bridge between JRMC students and the department as well as the professional field. The association offers various services to students and represents students of all three JRMC majors, organizing workshops on topics of interest to the students and providing guidance to navigate the different majors.

 

Social Media and Disinformation

Faculty Member Featured: Rasha Abdulla
March 25, 2021

Rasha Abdulla, professor of journalism and mass communication, participated as a speaker on a panel organized by the Atlantic Council on social media and disinformation 10 years after the Arab Spring. Entitled, "The Arab Spring: Precursor to the disinformation age?", the panel was hosted by the Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East and the Digital Forensic Research Lab. Abdulla was joined by veteran journalists Andy Carvin and Borzou Daragahi. Carvin is currently resident senior fellow and managing editor of the DFRLab. Daragahi is international correspondent for the Independent and Nonresident Fellow at the Middle East Program. The panel was moderated by Tuqa Nusairat, deputy director of the Rafik Hariri Center and Middle East program.

Podcasting Workshop

Faculty Member Featured: Kim Fox
March 25, 2021

On March 16, Professor of Practice Kim Fox facilitated a podcasting workshop for Egyptian journalists on the AUC New Cairo campus. The 4-hour workshop was organized by AUC's media relations team in the Office of Marketing Communication and Public Affairs. 925 was there and wrote about the workshop.

 

New Chapter on Lebanese Media

Faculty Member Featured: Sara El-Richani
March 25, 2021

Sarah El-Richani’s chapter Lebanon: A Faltering Mesh of Political and Commercial Interests has just been published as part of a new open access book entitled "Arab Media Systems" (edited by Carola Richter and Claudia Kozman). El-Richani’s chapter assesses the state of the boisterous Lebanese media from its inception to the present day, taking stock of the legal and political framework and the challenges encountered. 
The chapter also considers the prospects for media in Lebanon as the country grapples with an unprecedented economic and political crisis. It argues that the Lebanese media will have to contend with both the invisible hand resulting in the closure of non-profitable media outlets as well as the visible and forceful hand clamping down on free expression.

 

On Images and our Exhausted Bodies

Faculty Member Featured: Nadia Mounier
March 25, 2021

Adjunct faculty Nadia Mounier held a talk at Cairo Photo Week called “On images and our exhausted bodies”. It was a performative talk that lasted for one hour at the factory, the main venue for Cairo Photoweek located in downtown Cairo.  The talk was related to Mounier’s long-term project “Was that really you?” and looks into different forms of censorship in relation to our self-image production. 
Mounier also took part at an exhibition called The Everyday Projects, featuring the work of 25 photographers who contribute to Everyday Egypt, Everyday Africa, and Everyday Middle East. It was curated by Peter DiCampo, Cofounder of Everyday Africa and The Everyday Projects.

 

Word on the Street

Faculty Member Featured: Ronnie Close
March 18, 2021

Ronnie Close hosted Zeina Dowidar from podcasters Kerning Cultures to speak to his JRMC 3380 digital storytelling class on March 15 about her audio feature on streets that have been renamed, Word on the Street. This program was reviewed by the students and it examines the history of cities like Tehran and Khartoum. Kerning Cultures was founded in 2015 and is the first venture-funded podcast company in the Middle East. It features a lineup of award-winning immersive Arabic and English podcasts for curious listeners.

Word on the Street Podcast

 

Beyond the Pandemic

Faculty Member Featured: Hesham Dinana
March 18, 2021

Hesham Dinana was invited to participate as a moderator in the Marketers League Conference 2021, March 13-14, under the theme Beyond the Pandemic: New Era. Dinana moderated a session about the Role of Digital Infrastructure and Service Platforms Post the Pandemic.

 

Creative Conceptualization

Faculty Member Featured: Rania Fouda
March 18, 2021

Adjunct professor Rania Fouda's JRMC 3315 Introduction to Advertising class hosted Summer El Bosraty - executive creative director at Momentum Egypt - on March 14.
El Bosraty spoke to the students about how to come up with a creative concept for an advertisement based on a brief from the client, the creative execution and the creative process, using real-life examples from her agency.

 

PodFest Cairo 2021 Success

Faculty Member Featured: Kim Fox
March 11, 2021

More than 70 people attended Podfest Cairo, Egypt's and Africa’s first podcasting conference on Sunday, March 7, 2021 on Zoom. The event was hosted by AUC’s Department of Journalism and Mass Communication (JRMC) and provided simultaneous translation.
The two-and-a-half-hour event, also known as PFC 2021, brought together Egypt’s podcast listeners and creators. The line-up featured keynote speaker Linah Mohmmad from the Washington Post’s Post Reports Podcast, who spoke about growing up in Jordan before moving to Texas and her introduction to audio via National Public Radio (NPR) in the US Mohammed ended her segment by discussing her recent audio essay, “Bachelorette in Arlington” that was published on This American Life. Other sessions included “The Road to a Successful Podcast” with Noran Morsi, host and producer of the recently launched Egyptian Streets Podcast along with Heba Shunbo, the host of Mommy’s Happy Hour Podcast, which launched last year. They spoke of the successes and challenges they’ve experienced with their new podcasts. 
Professor of practice Kim Fox, the founder and conference organizer said that the spotlight segment was new this year and highlighted three local podcasts and podcasters. The conference also hosted a speed networking session - three rounds were held in the breakout rooms to give the participants a chance to meet a few other podcasters and podcast listeners. Fox said that Podfest Cairo is hoping to host other online events in Arabic and English in the coming months and is more hopeful to host PFC 2022 in person next year.

 

Is Cyberspace Safe?

Faculty Member Featured: Khaled Ezzelarab
March 11, 2021

Associate professor of practice Khaled Ezzelarab moderated the latest Speak Up Dialog Series: How to Stay Safe in Cyberspace? Is "Private" Really "Private".
The session explored the increasing online harassment trend facing internet users and featured speakers Dina El Serafy, international cooperation specialist at the National Council for Women, Hani Mohamed Kamel, content operation director for North Africa at TikTok, Sylvia Musalagani, safety policy manager for Africa at Facebook, and Ahmed Khatter, computer Engineering graduating senior and president of AUC's computer science and engineering association.

 

Manuscript on Neuroscience and Data

Faculty Member Featured: Nicolas Hamelin
March 11, 2021

The Australasian marketing journal has accepted to publish Nicolas Hamelin's manuscript entitled "Forecasting Advertisement Effectiveness: Neuroscience and Data Envelopment Analysis".

 

Adham Center for TV and Digital Journalism and JRMC Students Win Awards

JRMC Department
March 4, 2021

Our JRMC undergrads and Adham Center graduates won awards in the prestigious Broadcast Education Association (BEA) Festival of Media Arts competition in several categories.

Audio Winners:

• 1st Place: Nesrien Abdelkader, Student International Audio category for “Choose to Refuse: Escaping the Cycle of Addiction” 
• Award of Excellence: Reem Elmaghraby, Student Educational Audio category for "Educational Journey: From Qena to Cairo" 
• Award of Excellence: Haidy Badreldin, Student Podcast category for "#AUCdiaries: A Stormy Weekend Throughout the COVID-19 Pandemic"

Video Winners:

• First Place: Mariam Elbanna, Mathilde Teddy Christensen & Radoslav Penkov, Danish School of Media and Journalism & The American University in Cairo, Student International Documentary Short-Form for “Welcome to Pork Country” | A Documentary About Danish Pig Farmers
• First Place: Nouran Abdel Ghafar, Student International Television News category for "The Tale Behind Egyptian Brick"
• Award of Excellence: Assem Khaled, Student Documentary Micro-Documentary category for "Desert Rain"
• Award of Excellence: Sarah Sadek, Student Documentary Short-Form Documentary category for "Child of Happiness"
•  

Kim Fox Wins BEA Award

Faculty Member Featured: Kim Fox
March 4, 2021

Kim Fox, Faculty International Competition, Audio – Short-Form Production - Best of Competition: “One Day in January 2011”

 

Future of Technology Applications in Egypt

Faculty Member Featured: Hesham Dinana
March 4, 2021

Hesham Dinana was recently featured on the MBC network's Al Hadath news channel to discuss the future of digital technology applications and data analytics in Egypt.

 

Exceptional Reporting Award

JRMC Department
March 4, 2021

Multimedia journalism alumna Deena Sabry has won the prestigious University of California at Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism's 2020 Robert Whittington Award for Exceptional Reporting for her co-authored piece Portraits of Essential California Workers.

 

Photographic Tribute

JRMC Department
March 4, 2021

The Academy of Liberal Arts Department of Rhetoric and Composition in collaboration with The Photographic Gallery in the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication presents Stories of Displacement - A Tribute to Jacob Lawrence. This Exhibition will feature (reproductions of) the Migration Series created by the late and revered Lawrence, who chronicled the flight of millions of African-Americans fleeing the “Jim Crow South” from 1910-1960.

Over 80 years ago, Lawrence, then a young artist, having partaken in a migration journey of his own, created an epic body of work consisting of 60 small tempera paintings narrating the Great Migration of African-Americans in the United States of America. More than 70 years later, Lawrence’s paintings are displayed along with the Syrian Migration Series by Lebanese American artist Helen Zughaib. Zughaib connects with Lawrence across time and space and draws her inspiration from his art to depict a parallel story about people in search of safety and freedom as they escape the ravages of war.

In stories of displacement, Lawrence and Zughaib present visual narratives from two distinct geographic regions and time periods. The exhibition will also feature photographs, documentaries and panel discussions. When combined together they form a narrative about current events that establish connections and construct meaningful interpretations about our relentless quest for human dignity today.

Exhibition Events:

Exhibition Talk: question and answer with photojournalist Max Hirzel
Wednesday 10 March 2021, 5:00 pm CLT, online
Virtual Panel Discussion: Framing a Familiar Past and Present – Quest for Safety and Freedom
Nora Niedzielski-Eichner, Belachew Gerbrewold, Helen Zughaib 
Thursday 11 March 2021, 5:00 pm CLT, online
Gallery visits are by appointment only, to book an appointment, send an email
Events registration links are available here

 

Shahira S. Fahmy to Continue her Service as an Editorial Board Member for Media, War and Conflict SAGE Journal

Faculty Member Featured: Shahira Fahmy
February 18, 2021

Shahira Fahmy has served on the board since the journal’s inception in 2008 and was selected to edit a special issue of the journal in 2010 on Images of Conflict. Media, War and Conflict is a major international, peer-reviewed journal that maps the shifting arena of war, conflict and terrorism in an intensively and extensively mediated age. 
Currently, Fahmy serves on the Publications Committee of The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) in the United States. The committee is responsible for the oversight of the three association-wide journals: Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, Journalism and Mass Communication Educator and Journalism and Communication Monographs. Fahmy is further the associate editor of the flagship Journal of Communication (JOC) and presently sits on edi­torial boards of multiple Q1 journals in the communication discipline, including journalism and mass communication quarterly, mass communication and society, as well as other top communication journals including and visual communication quarterly.
Fahmy has served as evaluator of manuscripts for more than 40 different refereed journals and research and policy institutes, including the Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies at George Washington University, Communication Yearbook, Oxford Bibliographies/Communication, Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media (JOBEM), New Media and Society, International Communication Gazette, International Journal for Public Opinion Research (IJPOR), Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism, Asian Journal of Communication and The International Journal of Press/Politics. Fahmy also evaluated manuscripts for book proposals and awards such as the AEJMC Tankard Book Award, Sage, Routledge: Taylor and Francis Group in the US and the UK, Palgrave Macmillan, and Oxford University Press, among others.

 

Renamed Streets

Faculty Member Featured: Ronnie Close
February 18, 2021

Ronnie Close was interviewed by Kerning Cultures for a podcast on two infamously renamed streets, one in Tehran and the other in Khartoum. Part of his PhD research looked at the relationship between Irish Republicans and the Islamic Republic of Iran. In Tehran there is a street named after Bobby Sands the 1981 Hunger Striker and this narrative is explored in the podcast.

Listen to the episode Word on the Street here

 

Science and Research Consciousness

Faculty Member Featured: Nicolas Hamelin
February 18, 2021

Nicolas Hamelin was selected to be a member of the science and consciousness research group along with academics from eminent universities. His research focuses on the role of PAA (predictive anticipatory activity) in decision making.

 

What we Talk about when we talk about Photography

JRMC Department
February 18, 2021

The Photographic gallery is happy to announce that the first two webinars of the series What We Talk About When We Talk About Photography are now available on the gallery's youtube channel.
Subscribe to the gallery’s YouTube channel

Capturing Pandemics

By Aladin Abdel Naby and Ahmed Hayman

Photojournalists Aladin Abdel Naby and Ahmed Hayman reflect on the risks involved in the practice of photojournalism during a deadly outbreak, and how the ethics of capturing death by camera have evolved along the years. The video includes presentations of the coverage of the Swine flu pandemic in Egypt in 2009, and coverage of the Ayaat railway accident which took place in 2002.
Disclaimer: video includes disturbing images

Will the Black Lives Matter end up on a supermarket shelf? By Nicolas Hamelin

Nicolas Hamelin discusses the cultural appropriation of the Black Lives Matter movement by brands, in light of the recent BLM protests, questioning how genuine and impactful will the BLM movement remain once it is posted on tomato ketchup bottles, ice cream boxes and dental plaque removers.

  

Serving on Editorial Boards of Communication Journals

Faculty Member Featured: Hussein Amin
February 11, 2021

Hussein Amin, professor and director of the Kamal Adham Center for Television and Digital Journalism, was invited to serve on the editorial board of the Journal of Mass Communication Research published by Al-Azhar University. Amin also accepted the invitation to continue his service on the editorial board of Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly (JMCQ), a Q1 journal published by SAGE. Amin currently serves on editorial and advisory boards of academic media and communication journals including: Journalism and Mass Communication Educator, a Q2 journal published by SAGE; Journalism Practice, a Q1 journal published by Routledge; The Journal of African Media Studies, a journal published by Intellect; The Journal of Media, War and Conflict, a Q2 journal published by SAGE; The Journal of Middle East Media; and the Cairo Review. He served on the boards of the Journal of International Communication, a Q2 journal published by Taylor and Francis Ltd.; The Journal of Global Media and Communication, a Q2 journal published by SAGE; and he was the editor of the Global Media Journal-Arabic Edition, in addition to serving on its board. He is the editor-in-chief of Arab Media and Society, a Q2 journal published by the Kamal Adham Center for Television and Digital Journalism.

 

An Erasmus and EU Grant

Faculty Member Featured: Shahira Fahmy
February 11, 2021

Shahira S. Fahmy from the School of Global Affairs and Public Relations (GAPP) secured an Erasmus and International Credit Mobility (ICM) Programme between AUC and the University of Murcia (UM) in Spain for two consecutive years. The recently awarded Erasmus and EU Programme allows cooperation and exchange of several faculty and graduate students between the two universities for the 2021-22 and 2022-23 academic years.
The agreement includes three international mobility grants for JRMC faculty (five days each) and two international mobility grants for JRMC graduate students (five months each) to study at the Faculty of Communication at UM in Spain. Similar international mobility grants for UM faculty and students, to study at AUC will be available. The Erasmus and mobility grant will fund travel costs and daily allowances for all participants.
During the mobility exchange, the professors will choose between classroom lecturing, research mentorship, and/or collaborating in joint international research with local faculty. For graduate students, they will have the opportunity to attend regular classes, and/or the possibility of conducting research projects for their final theses. 
As the main partner, the UM has already launched the Erasmus and International Credit Mobility (ICM) Programme project online and uploaded all the relevant information and application material 
The upcoming application deadline for this Erasmus+ 2021-2022 Programme is March 1, 2021.

 

India Global Dialogue

Faculty Member Featured: Hesham Dinana
February 11, 2021

Hesham Dinana participated as a speaker in the India Global Dialogue – Session 2- on January 28, 2021. The second session was titled India-GCC Relations: Examining Future Possibilities.
The sessions included many prominent speakers and my talk focused on the role that India can play in the future development of the Digital Economy in the GCC region.

 

The Phileas Club podcast

Faculty Member Featured: Kim Fox
February 11, 2021

Kim Fox was a recent guest on The Phileas Club Podcast. The discussion centered on podcasting and the Internet in Egypt, Russia and Alexey Navalny, COVID in Germany and Egypt, news from the US and more! The Phileas Club Podcast is a weekly conversation podcast about international news with guests from all around the world.

 

Shahira S. Fahmy Gets two Research Papers Accepted for ICA 2021

Faculty Member Featured: Shahira Fahmy
February 4, 2021

Shahira S. Fahmy has had two papers accepted for presentation at the International Communication Association (ICA) annual convention scheduled to take place in Denver, Colorado in May 2021. ICA is the premier international academic association for scholars engaged in the study, teaching, and application of all aspects of communication.
One of the papers is co-authored with Fahmy’s former graduate student Basma Taha. It analyzes the representation of women in online news in three countries that rank differently along the gender equality continuum: the United Sweden, and Egypt. Results of the study suggest that women continue to be underrepresented in the news of the three countries examined and that stereotypical patterns continue to be dominant online, although significant differences in gender portrayal among countries were noted.
The second paper co-authored with a researcher from Pakistan is one of the first empirical attempts to analyze visuals of conflict on social media through the perspective of war and peace frames. Based on a content analysis of the 674 visuals of the Mastung terrorist attack on Twitter, the findings suggest the domination of war visuals. Most of the tweeted photographs were related to the afflicted victims and the visiting elites. Results also showed significant variations in the war and peace narrative over time. Overall, the findings of the study resonate with previous scholarship that social media promote an escalation of conflicts and that the exponents of peace journalists were not correct in predicting that digital platforms would lead to a strong peace framing approach.

 

Shahira S. Fahmy to Continue Service as a Fulbright Specialist Program Peer Reviewer in 2021

February 4, 2021

Shaira Fahmy will be part of the Fulbright Specialist Peer Review Team in 2021. Fahmy has served on the review team for several years. Fahmy was awarded two Fulbright grants to work with the NATO Strategic Communication Center of Excellence in the Baltics in 2015 and UNECA in Africa in 2014.
The Fulbright Specialist Program is a program of the US Department of State. It is a unique opportunity for US academics and established professionals to engage in project-based exchanges at host institutions across the globe.

 

Shahira S. Fahmy to Continue Service as a Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly Editorial Board Member

February 4, 2021

Shahira Fahmy was invited last week by the incoming editor Daniela Dimitrova from Iowa State University to continue her service as an editorial board member for Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly (JMCQ), flagship of The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC). Fahmy has served on the board of this Q1 peer-reviewed journal for several years. Established in 1924, it is the oldest refereed scholarly journal in mass communication and provides leadership in scholarship for the field. 
Currently, Fahmy holds an AEJMC association-wide leadership position and at this time is a member of the AEJMC Publications Committee.

 

Wherefore art thou, democracy?

Faculty Member Featured: Firas Al-Atraqchi
February 4, 2021

Professor of practice Firas Al-Atraqchi published a piece in Arab Media and Society analyzing the regional reaction to the January riots by pro-Trump forces at the US Capitol. While US media coverage comparing the chaos at the Capitol to scenes in Iraq or Afghanistan is inaccurate and offensive, Al-Atraqchi argues that the regional ridicule of US democracy is also unfortunate. "It remains that a valuable moment may have been squandered to genuinely examine the divisiveness ripping through American society ... and learn from it."

 

The Annual Crain's NewsPro Top Educators

Faculty Member Featured: Kim Fox
February 4, 2021

In January, Kim Fox was selected as one of 10 educators who are featured in the annual Crain's NewsPro Top Educators article.

 

Lebanon's Deepening Socio-Economic Crisis

Faculty Member Featured: Sarah El-Richani

February 4, 2021

Sarah El-Richani was cited in Ahram Online on the anti-lockdown protests in Lebanon and the deepening socio-economic crisis. While for El-Richani, things are unlikely to improve without international pressure “the unrest may indeed push the self-serving, negligent and seemingly oblivious political class to at least resume the talks on the formation of a new government,” she said.
The full article written by Bassem Aly and published on February 2 can be found here.

 

Variations of Democracy Project

February 4, 2021

El-Richani has once again served as a country expert for the variations of democracy project run by the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. The project assesses the concept of democracy around the world in a nuanced and multidimensional manner.

 

Highest Honors for Dissertation

Faculty Member Featured: Sherin Moody
February 4, 2021

On January 31, Sherin Moody’s PhD defense was held at the Department of Communication and Media Sciences, Faculty of Arts, Ain Shams University. After the defense, Sherin was awarded with the highest honors for her thesis titled  “Women’s Portrayal in Egyptian TV Channels Advertisements and its Impact on Female University Students Self-Perception.”

 

Students Interviewed by Local Media

February 4, 2021

Students of Sherin Moody's JRMC 4425 IMC Capstone course (fall 2020) were recently interviewed by local media for their final project about renovating the Aquarium Grotto garden in Zamalek.
Led by group leader Fagr Osama, they were interviewed by Al Watan news and the Al Hadath Al Youm TV channel.

 

Debate Over Future of Big Tech in the US after January 6

Faculty Member Featured: Khaled Ezzelarab
February 4, 2021

This week, associate professor of practice Khaled Ezzelarab published the third of four media articles looking into the debate that is taking place in the United States around the future of Big Tech, following the storming of the Capitol on January 6. The first article looked back at how the current legal framework governing the responsibility of internet companies for third-party content, came into being in the 1990s with the aim of protecting the nascent internet industry from expensive legal challenges. The second article looked at how this framework allowed for the rise of social media platforms, and how it became subsequently evident that some kind of content moderation was necessary. Responsibility for this moderation was left to the internet companies themselves, but shortcomings were abundant. The third article looks at the resulting rise in calls to repeal and replace the existing legal framework.
The articles are being published on the Egyptian news website Masrawy and can be viewed here.