Journalism

Melissa Wall

MWallphoto
Professor
Email:
Phone:
818-677-5677
Office location:
MZ 330

Biography

Professor Wall studies citizen/participatory journalism and is the editor of the book, Citizen Journalism: Valuable, Useless or Dangerous. Within this line of inquiry, she created the Pop-Up Newsroom, a temporary, virtual newsroom for citizen and student journalists.  Pop-Up Newsroom has collaborated with universities around the world to produce collective coverage with journalism programs in the Armenia, Brazil, Bulgaria, India, Netherlands, Taiwan and UK.  Some of the studies about the project can be found at the MIT Civic Media Project, the MILD Yearbook, Journalism Practice.

Her other research stream focuses on refugees and their information practices, particularly Syrian refugees and their cell phone usage. You can read her summary of this research at The Washington Post.  

Prof Wall has also taught journalism and conducted research in Lebanon, where she was a Fulbright scholar in 2012. She was an Open Society International Scholar to Ukraine in 2015 where she worked with the Mohyla School of Journalism and interviewed Internally Displaced Persons. She has also taught journalism in Ethiopia, studied township newspapers in Zimbabwe, and produced a radio documentary about the media reform movement in Taiwan. She was selected for a Berglund Fellowship for internet studies and a Poynter fellowship at Indiana University for journalism professors.

Her research  has been published in journals such as New Media & Society; Journalism; Media, Culture and Society; Digital Journalism; Journalism Studies; Journal of Communication Inquiry; Journalism Practice; International Communication Gazette; International Journal of Communication; Popular Communication; Rhodes Journalism Review; Journal of Development Communication; Javnost: The Public; Journal of Middle Eastern Media. She is on the editorial board of Journalism Practices and Digital Journalism.

In addition to academic publications, her photographs have been published in Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance and From Act Up to the WTO: Urban Protest and Community Building in the Era of Globalization, along with the Washington Post Magazine. Her photo of the Shrine of Sayyide Ruqqaya in Damascus, Syria was selected for a media station as part of The World of Islam exhibit  at the Ethnological Museum in Berlin, Germany and another of her photos of a Damascus newsstand is the cover for an Intermediate Arabic language textbook, Al-Kitaab Fii Ta'Allum Al-'Arabiiyya, published by Georgetown University Press.

Prof Wall has worked as a staff writer at The Charlotte Observer in North Carolina and has written for Real Change, Seattle’s homeless newspaper. She has produced audio content for the Pacifica outlet KPFK’s Indymedia on Air. 

Her BA is from the University of Virginia and MA and PhD from the University of Washington. 

The syllabi for her classes are available on Moodle.

Twitter: @MelissaWall | Instagram: @Wallscapes