James Ettema
- Overview
- Course
Professor James Ettema received his PhD from the University of Michigan, working as a filmmaker and photographer before pursuing doctoral studies. Ettema served for six years as chair of the Communication Studies Department and for ten years as the faculty coordinator of the MSC Program. His teaching and research focus on the social organization and cultural impact of mass media and new communication technologies. Ettema is a co-founder of Northwestern University’s Media, Technology and Society graduate program and teaches Contemporary Media in Business, Government & Society in the MSC curriculum. Among his books is Custodians of Conscience: Investigative Journalism and Public Virtue written with Theodore L. Glasser of Stanford University. The book won the Frank Luther Mott-Kappa Tau Alpha Award from the National Journalism and Mass Communication Honor Society, the Bart Richards Award for Media Criticism from Penn State University, and the Sigma Delta Chi Award for research on journalism from the Society of Professional Journalists. Ettema is also a leading expert in the area of research methods and survey development.
Contemporary Media in Business, Government & Society
This course concerns the many intersections between media – both old and new – and social institutions. These institutions include business, the not-for-profit sector, the professions, science and government. The focus of the course is on news and informational media broadly defined to include, for example, advertising and public relations. The behavior of audiences and their patterns of media use is also a topic considered in the course. The general orientation is social scientific analysis of the process and effects of mediated communication.
