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College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Iowa State University
www.las.iastate.edu

6-15-09

Contacts:
Michael Bugeja, Greenlee School, (515) 294-0481 (bugeja@iastate.edu)
Steve Jones, Liberal Arts & Sciences Communications, (515) 294-0461 (jones@iastate.edu)

Greenlee School’s Bugeja wins media ethics research award for second time

AMES, Iowa – The head of Iowa State University’s Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication has won a media ethics research award for the second time.

Michael Bugeja, professor and director of the Greenlee School, has won the 2009 Clifford G. Christians Award for Research in Media Ethics for his 2008 book, “Living Ethics Across Media Platforms” (Oxford University Press).

The award, from the Carl Couch Center for Social and Internet Research, recognizes scholarship about important theoretical issues in the areas of ethics, mass communication theory, and the relationship between media and technology and culture.

In 2005 Bugeja won the Christians Award for his book, “Interpersonal Divide: The Search for Community in a Technological Age,” also from Oxford University Press.

Both books combine Bugeja’s scholarship in ethics and research in the Internet and other new media with his journalistic background.

“Since the late 1990s, we have heard so much about technological convergence in journalism – combining television with text and audio on the Web – but so little about ethical principles,” Bugeja said. “So I decided that we needed a moral convergence in the news as much as a technological one.

“But both ‘Living Ethics’ and ‘Interpersonal Divide’ approach communication technology from a philosophical and computer scientific perspective. That makes the work stand out because we look at digital journalism from the viewpoint of a skeptical social scientist. Once we see how technology is programmed, delivered or accessed via interface, we can adjust for those factors and use Internet for the greater good in journalism and in education, for that matter.”

The award honors Clifford G. Christians, who was a professor of communication, professor of journalism and professor of media studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Christians devoted his entire career to the study of media ethics.

The Carl Couch Center for social and Internet research is a non-profit organization established to promote Carl Couch’s scholarship in sociological and communication inquiries and work on information technologies. A sociologist, Couch was a native Iowan who was a University of Iowa faculty member from 1965 to 1994. He died after retirement in 1994.

The award will be presented at the 2009 Annual Convention of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, Aug. 5-8, in Boston. The award plaque that will bear Bugeja’s name a second time resides at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

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