January 13, 2025 | Kelly Youngblood Three experiential learning opportunities are being offered to students this spring including two new trips—one to the nation’s capital and another to two Scandinavian countries—as well as a return visit to the West African country of Sierra Leone. Washington, D.C., March 19-22 Colleen King, clinical assistant professor of journalism […]
April 24, 2024 Update June 4, 2024: Congratulations to the students who presented “Exploring Period Poverty in Sierra Leone” (pictured below) for receiving an award for Outstanding Exhibit at the Undergraduate Research Symposium from the Office of Undergraduate Research! Learn more about their trip to Sierra Leone. Students from the College of Media are participating in the annual […]
March 29, 2024 | Kelly Youngblood (Photos by Charles “Stretch” Ledford.) A group of journalism students heard harrowing stories from the local women they interviewed while filming a documentary about period poverty in Sierra Leone, West Africa, over spring break. “Girls talked of being bullied at school when they got their period. Mothers talked about […]
Classwork by students in JOUR 215: Multimedia Reporting, taught by Charles “Stretch” Ledford, associate professor of journalism, was featured on CU-CitizenAccess.org in May. The journalism students produced stories in Fall 2021 about how the nation’s pandemic-induced labor shortage has affected local businesses. Farrah Anderson, a sophomore in journalism, wrote the article that gave an overview of the projects. Students […]
Students in journalism and media and cinema studies produced a series of short documentaries chronicling the lives of local men commemorated in AIDS quilt panels, originally made in the 1980s and 1990s for the AIDS Memorial Quilt in Washington, D.C. The students’ short films are featured in the exhibit “Sewn in Memory: AIDS Quilt Panels […]
Journalism students in JOUR 215: Multimedia Reporting spent the Fall 2019 semester covering the Punkin Chunkin world championships, through print, audio, and video stories. They were selected to present their work at the 2020 University of Illinois Undergraduate Research Symposium. Below is an excerpt from the students’ application, as well as some of the videos and audio […]
For his final project in Associate Professor Charles “Stretch” Ledford’s JOUR 215: Multimedia Reporting course in Fall 2020, journalism student Owen Henderson created a piece on the Lory Theater in Highland, Illinois. Ledford helped his student submit it as a freelance piece to the Belleville News-Democrat. Henderson worked with the newspaper’s multimedia producer to get supplementary […]
Charles “Stretch” Ledford, associate professor of journalism, received the Illinois Student Government Teaching Excellence Award, which recognizes instructors for outstanding performance both in and out of the classroom. Honorees have demonstrated a commitment to teaching and to students in every capacity of their experience at Illinois. Ledford is a highly praised educator and critically acclaimed multimedia […]