Director's Report

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Students benefit from new initiatives

We are entering a particularly exciting period for our school, with many more opportunities for students in all media and communication fields to put to work what they are learning in their classes.

After nearly two years of effort, we are ready to open the Roy Howard Community Journalism Center, a first-of-its-kind newsroom housed on the first floor of College Hall. The Center, under the direction of former television news director and USM alum Nichole Cyperian, is the result of a $3 million grant from the Scripps Howard Foundation.

Our school was selected after an intense, competitive process involving at least 18 other universities across the country. The entire Mississippi journalism community came together to make this happen, including Mississippi Today, Mississippi Public Broadcasting, Mississippi Association of Broadcasters, the Mississippi Press Association and many others.

The $3 million grant will pay for a full-time staff of seven, including five journalists, new equipment, three vehicles to support news gathering, and put up to 16 students to work. You can learn all about the RHCJC here. Please follow their social media as Nichole and her crew work to cover Southeast Mississippi in new and exciting ways.

The school also is taking part in in the $3 million Rural Digital Forensics Initiative, a new program from a team of USM professors, including our own Dr.  Brent Hale. The Center will feature the RDFI lab, a fully-functional digital forensics lab housed in the School of Criminal Justice, Forensic Science and Security (which will be available to local law enforcement), and the RDFI studio, a video production studio on the second floor of College Hall that will be used to create nationally-distributed training materials for law enforcement to better engage in digital forensics and assist in crime investigations.

A third effort is underway on our Gulf Coast campus, where the Film Studies program is assisting in a $3 million program to elevate the coastal economy through film and video projects, as well as executive and media training.

Our students, from freshmen to Ph.D., from digital journalism to strategic communication to film, video, sound and communication studies, are involved in all these projects, which are in addition to the daily work of our Student Media Center, student groups, and traditional internships.

These projects and more to come, I am hopeful, exemplify who are we – a home where our students are challenged to put to work what they are learning.

As I tell all our students, we will have good days and bad days, triumphs and frustrations. We will make mistakes. But, we can be perfect in some things… our intent to create a better world, our will to finish what we begin, and our courage to try what has not been tried before.

Whether you are interested in these new initiatives or simply want to know more about the exciting fields available in communication studies, broadcast, stratcom, orgcom, video or any of the other majors or tracks you will see on our programs pages, get in touch and ask for a tour or simply come by for a visit. You can email me directly at edgar.simpsonFREEMississippi or call (601) 266-4014.

Dr. Edgar Simpson, Ph.D.,

Director, School of Media & Communication