School of Journalism and Strategic Media, University of Arkansas

You're Invited!
Take a break this week and join us for Happy Hour Thursday, March 12 -- just drop in after 5:30 p.m. Co-hosted by the Lemke Journalism Alumni Society and the Society of Professional Journalists Ozarks Pro Chapter, this is a great opportunity to visit with fellow SJSM alumni and local industry professionals. See you there!

Last Thursday's Career Conversations Day did NOT disappoint 🎉 So grateful for the amazing turnout and all the incredible connections made at the School of Journalism and Strategic Media, University of Arkansas. To everyone who came out, thank you for making it such a great time!

🚀 DAY 5 RECAP: Jonathon Modica on Building Critical Thinking & Taking Action
For our final day of Media Literacy Week, we heard from Jonathon Modica — U of A triple-grad (BA in Journalism, MA, EdD in Education) who went from Razorback basketball player to VP of Human Resources at Intuit. His message? ACT on your preparation, take calculated risks, and trust the process.

What we talked about:
🏀 His journey: Modica played basketball at U of A while studying broadcast journalism. He pursued graduate degrees not because he had it all figured out, but because he believed if he kept learning practical skills, things would eventually align. He was right.

💼 Transferable skills from journalism:
Project management: "Putting together a piece for a news segment is a mini project management process — get the material, edit the material, timeline, deadline. These are skills that don't care what environment you're in."
Poise & communication: "Whether you're a physicist, engineer, finance person, HR person, teacher — most jobs require you to stand up with poise, confidence and articulate your point in ways people can understand without losing the complexity."

📊 His career path: Started as a recruiter at Walmart, got promoted, then took a major risk in 2015 — moved his family from Bentonville (where both he and his wife had stable jobs and just bought a home) to the Bay Area to work in tech. He worked at Uber, Cisco, Adobe, Splunk and now Intuit.

🧠 On critical thinking:
"Critical thinking is even more important now with content overload from social media. Can we agree on facts anymore? Can we agree on what information is reliable?"
"I'm on Instagram, I see something presented as news, and the old school researcher in me says, 'Let me go do a little extra digging to corroborate if this is real.' Oftentimes it's not."

Final wisdom: "No matter where you're from or what you sound like, if you can help solve problems and people can learn from you, you can build the life you want. Silicon Valley is full of people from MIT, Harvard, Stanford — people who like constructive debate. Prepare yourself to compete at any level."

📢TOMORROW: Media Literacy Week concludes with DAY 5 - ACT

Media literacy without action is just knowledge. Action is where change happens.

Tomorrow at 10:45 a.m. in Kimpel 203 as we conclude media literacy week with Jonathon Modica, who will speak on building critical thinking.

📸DAY 4 RECAP: Lara Farrar on Impactful Media Projects
Today, award-winning investigative journalist Lara Farrar (20+ years experience in national and international reporting) joined us to discuss how journalists CREATE meaningful work that drives real change.

What we talked about:
📰 Creating investigative journalism: Farrar shared her experience working on a multi-year investigation — showing students that impactful journalism doesn’t happen overnight. It requires persistence, patience and showing up repeatedly. “I attended 3-hour board meetings every six weeks for years, just listening, asking questions and following the story.”

🎯 The creative process in investigative work:
• Collecting and analyzing hundreds of pages of documents
• Finding patterns in data that regulators weren’t tracking
• Building relationships with sources over time
• Repeatedly asking the same questions until people pay attention
• Creating narratives that make complex systems understandable

“I could tell things were changing because suddenly lawmakers were asking the same questions I had been asking for years. The public might not know it was because of my reporting, but I could see it.”

Her final message:
“It’s exhausting, but it’s an exhaustion of passion. You still want to get up the next day and do it. We’re entering an era of even more complex misinformation with AI, but I hope people still have that yearning for the real, and I think they do.”

Big takeaway: Creating impactful journalism means persistence, community connection and a willingness to follow stories over years, not just news cycles. The creative work of journalism isn’t just writing — it’s building systems to track data, connecting people and making complex issues accessible.

⚖️ DAY 3 RECAP: Rachell Sanchez-Smith on Credibility & Community Journalism
Today we heard from one of our own! Rachell Sanchez-Smith (BA'24) — now a newsroom fellow at WBUR (Boston's NPR station) — came back via Zoom to share her journey from U of A grad to covering major stories in one of the country's top news markets.

Her journey:

📰 AP byline at 19: During COVID, Sanchez-Smith started translating for a story about poultry workers in Arkansas. That led to witnessing a historic strike at a Springdale factory — Arkansas hadn't seen a strike of that magnitude in 20 years. Working with prof. Rob Wells and the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism, she helped publish a full investigation for the Associated Press. "The second I got paid for journalism, I was sold," she said.

🎓 Why U of A: Sanchez-Smith chose Arkansas because she could do things here she couldn't do elsewhere — freelance work, student journalism, building skills with professors who genuinely cared about filling gaps in her experience. And it was nationally accredited.

📊 Data journalism breakthrough: Sanchez-Smith said she started out not tech-savvy at all but learned coding basics through that initial investigation. Then, she did Dow Jones News Fund data training and absorbed the basics. "It's harder to lie with numbers. It pushes your work from already good to bulletproof."

🎯 What she covers now: Everything from Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor's visit to stories about farmers and SNAP benefits. "It's anything on a given day. I'm never bored." She works with editors who were on the Boston Globe's Spotlight team.

Sanchez-Smith was chosen from of pool of 200+ applicants and got her dream job. From Arkansas to Boston NPR — the path is possible.

📰DAY 2 RECAP: Dr. Bobbie Foster on Equitable Media Literacies
Today, SJSM Professor Dr. Bobbie Foster (whose book “Equitable Media Literacies” drops in December) joined us to discuss how we ANALYZE media and challenged us to think deeper about the process, not just the outcomes.

What we talked about:

📚Is “media literacy” even the right term? Foster discussed how the term has become a catch-all for everything — tech literacy, news literacy, information literacy, film literacy — so many literacies that it’s losing meaning.
One of her co-authors is even exploring “media anti-literacy” as an alternative.

👥Understanding your audience:
There’s often a disconnect between what educators think is “good” or “bad” media versus what students actually use.
TikTok today, rock and roll decades ago - every generation has their “thing” that older people distrust.

📲Digital culture is NOT a beat — it’s everything:
Whether you’re covering sports, business or politics, you need digital culture competencies. Remember GameStop and meme stocks?
That was Reddit changing the economy.

💼The invisible labor of content:
Think being a YouTuber is easy?
Foster breaks down how a 2-minute video requires 2-3 hours of planning, shooting and editing.
Content creation is a full-time job with less than minimum wage per hour when you calculate it out.

🎓What teachers really need:
Resources. Pre-made, plug-and-play lessons that educators can adapt. They’re overworked and underpaid … handing them ready-to-use materials is invaluable.

📌Big takeaway: Media literacy can’t be a scapegoat for avoiding deeper conversations in media. You need both the skills AND the willingness to have hard conversations.

📰 DAY 1 RECAP: Ann Carrns on Financial Literacy & Media
Today, NY Times columnist Ann Carrns joined us to discuss how financial literacy and media literacy intersect.
What we talked about:

📱 Social media financial advice: How do you know who to trust? Ann gave us journalist-level vetting strategies:
1. Check credentials on FINRA.org
2. Ask: what’s their vetting process?
3. Understand the difference between personal experience and expertise

💸 Buy now, pay later apps: Marketed as debt-free, but they use “dark patterns” and “frictionless” design to make overspending dangerously easy. She shared a story of someone who went $50K+ into debt stacking these apps - taking 10-15 years to recover.

🤖 AI in journalism: The Times uses AI to help analyze data (cutting investigative timelines from years to months), but humans are still writing the stories and fact-checking everything.

📊 Career reality: Journalism jobs have declined 3-4%, but opportunities exist. Her advice: get published work with your name on it, prioritize internships with good editors, and build multimedia skills.

🔒 Ethics matter: As a financial reporter, Ann can’t invest in individual stocks, accept outside payments, or take free meals/stays. Credibility requires boundaries.
📖 Her reading list: NY Times, WSJ, Washington Post, The New Yorker, The Atlantic

📌Big takeaway: Understanding how money and media intersect helps you spot manipulation, whether it’s in an app or an Instagram post.

📺 The Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences and The School of Journalism and Strategic Media, University of Arkansas is excited to welcome visiting national journalism leader Jacque Smith to campus this week!

🏆 Jacque Smith, an award-winning journalist with a 17-year career at CNN, will be coming to campus this week as a visiting professional in the Center for Media Ethics and Literacy. She will speak to about 350 students, faculty, staff and local professionals over the course of the week, including two public events, training sessions for student media and local journalists, and multiple class presentations.

📅 The first public event is this Thursday, October 2nd at 12:30 p.m. in Kimpel 102 and is a roundtable session on digital storytelling featuring local journalists co-sponsored by the Society of Professional Journalists and moderated by Bret Schulte, director of the School of Journalism and Strategic Media.

For a full list of public events Smith will be at and the workshops she will lead, click the link below ⬇️
https://bit.ly/4pT1FHW

Attention Lemke Alumni:

Join us a Friday, Sept. 26, at Big Red’s Rooftop! The Hogs play Notre Dame on Saturday, Sept. 27, and the night before we’re meeting to network across generations at the largest outdoor sports bar in college football.

Register using the QR code or use this link (https://www.arkansasalumni.org/s/1429/bp20/interior.aspx?sid=1429&gid=1&pgid=7998&cid=18633&ecid=18633&crid=0&calpgid=1738&calcid=11193).

Space is limited, so act fast.

The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette / ArkansasOnline.com’s High Profile featured SJSM alum Joy Secuban this week.

HIGH PROFILE: Joy Secuban used her gifts to follow the example of a life-changing act of kindness by a bureaucrat | Arkansas Democrat Gazette The American Dream exists in many forms and formats. For some it is the attainment of something, be it a career, a new start, a fair shake. For others, the American Dream is an ethos, a way of living one's life that stands for the good of others, the welfare of less fortunate neighbors and the advan...