Cool stuff about our grads

News about alums of our graduate program:

Seth Koury’s thesis project, the documentary, “Sounds of Beirut”:

• won a Park City Music Film Festival Gold Medal for Excellence
• was nominated for Best Documentary-Political and Best Cinematography at the Action on Film Festival in Pasadena
• won an “Award of Merit” from the Los Angeles Cinema Festival of Hollywood
• was accepted at the Flagstaff Film Festival; the International Film Festival of Ireland; and the Kansas International Film Festival.

Watch the trailer for the film.

Claire Rietmann-Grout’s thesis project, the documentary, “Dear Devils,” about her time on a Swiss softball team, screened at the All Sports Film Festival in Los Angeles, and on a local television channel in Half Moon Bay.

Sahar El Zahed has been accepted into the PhD program in Cultural Studies at Claremont Graduate School for this fall.

Liz Ohanesian, a writer with LA Weekly online, was invited to guest blog with  Boing Boing.

A study of geotagging conducted by Bangkok U’s Treepon Kirdknark  (& me) was presented at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication conference in Denver in August.

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Shout-outs to CSUNis. CSUNers? CSUNistas? Whatever.

Truth be told, I was feeling discouraged lately, what with the devastating cuts to higher education in California.  I don’t know what our future holds, but what I do know is that I work with some talented people:

• Grad student Kenya Young has landed a producer’s position with NPR‘s
  

  Kookie & Claire working hard on their theses

  “Weekend  All Things Considered” in DC.

• @Lizohanesian, an alum of our MA program,  was hired this month as reporter-editor on the webside of the LA Weekly.
• Esha Momeni, our grad student who was jailed in Iran last fall, will be speaking at Amnesty International’s  Southern regional meeting in Atlanta this weekend.  Esha will also speak at CSUN Monday Nov. 9 at the Northridge Center in the student union at 5:20 p.m.
• Graduate student Seth Koury showed a roughcut of his amazing documentary, “Sound  of Beirut” to some faculty members earlier this month.  Guess this means we gotta let the guy graduate.
• Graduate student Sara Alamdar will defend her thesis in a few weeks.  She studied coverage of Iran’s religious minorities by the government-controlled Tehran Times to see if the reporting changed under a reformist president versus a  conservative president.
• Colleague Linda Bowen is serving as President of the Los Angeles chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.  We attended the First Amendment Coalition’s event at Southwestern Law last Saturday where the LAT’s lawyers scared the beejebus out of journalists wanting to use Twitter or Facebook.
• Sandra Kukla‘s thesis comparing AP coverage of the Gaza crisis with Malaysia’s Bernama wire service is nearly finished.  Um, right?
• Claire Rietmann-Grout is busy editing and researching her upcoming thesis project, a documentary about her experiences as an American softball star who travels to Switzerland to play for a “club” and finds a different way of looking at the game and herself.

News about our grads

Anasa Sinegal

Recent CSUN grad Anasa Sinegal documents her search for a job in what may be the worst economic climate since the Depression on the wonkster employment blog, Workforce Developments, this week.   Anasa is one of our top students, an Emmy winning former television journalist, who won thesis of the year in our department last spring.  As HuffPost columnist Laura Chapin writes, the current 18-35 generation is facing a difficult economic future.   In the meantime, Anasa is continuing her public intellectual work and will join former classmates John Daquioag and Esha Momeni on a panel later this fall at Cal Poly’s Global Citizenship conference.

Sarah Rosenblum, a graduate from a few years ago, recently landed a new job as events coordinator at the G2 Gallery after an extensive search in the turbulent SoCal job market.  A very active gallery in Venice with lots of cool events,  G2 focuses on environmental issues.  Sarah’s former classmate, Treepon Kirdnak, who teaches at Bangkok U in Thailand, is the co-author of a new study (w/ me!) that I will present at a conference at UC Riverside on Saturday.  Treepon works a grueling schedule at his university and I’ve been amazed at how he’s still been able to come up with so many fresh insights.   Must be something in the Som Tom.

Another graduate of our program, Liz Ohanesian, who has been pounding LA’s streets as a freelance writer and racking up the bylines at LA Weekly, will talk about how she has built a free-lance writing career in one of my journalism classes tomorrow morning.  I am going to try to live stream with my cellphone via Qik.  Wish me luck!

Future journos: Promote yourself

As the competition for scoring journalism gigs soars, a panel of experts at CSUN today advised student journalists to use social networking to promote their work and to have a Plan B.

Liz Ohanesian,  a freelancer for the LA Weekly who specializes in pop culture, music, and LA

See austinevan's original photo here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/austinevan/3259931677/

subcultures,  advised:

• Go to online forums and chat.  It’s a good way to meet editors and writers and also to find sources.
• Have a good profile on Facebook, your blog, etc. that reflects your interests and includes links to your clips.
• As soon as your story comes out, make sure everyone instantly knows about it via your social networks.
• Respond to your audience – reTweet their posts, reply to comments on your blog,  link to them, etc.

You can find examples of how Liz does this on her pages at MySpace and Facebook as well as her Twitter page and BlipTV site.

Greg Lanier, TV drama writer, freelancer and former long-time print journalist, recommended students consider graduate school for the next couple of years until the economy perks up.   He suggested students have a Plan B and maybe Plans C (“something  to do with writing”), & D (“loading trucks”) as well.

Novelist and former journalist Paula Yoo, who likened the students to Hobbits rallying to save journalism’s future, recommended traditional networking with groups such as the Asian American Journalists Association.

No matter what the future of the journalism industry is, Lanier reminded students that for each of them, “You have to scratch and claw to make your own destiny.”