2022 in Review: Service & Partnerships

Editor’s Note: This is part of our six-part series highlighting stories produced by Grady College in 2022. The features include stories in each of the following subjects:

• Student Successes
• Faculty Honors
• College Headlines
• Research & Expertise
• Service & Partnerships
• Alumni Spotlight

This is not intended to be a comprehensive list, but instead highlight a sample of just a few of the hundreds of stories about accomplishments by our students, faculty/staff and alumni. We invite you to visit our Grady College News page for a full list of features posted in 2022.

Service and outreach, often through partnerships with organizations and other units at the University of Georgia, are pillars of what we do at Grady College. Adding to our long list, the following are a few examples of how Grady College expanded our service and outreach efforts in 2022: 

Grady College was named one of the nation’s first four solutions journalism hubs: In early August, The Solutions Journalism Network (SJN) named Grady one of the nation’s four inaugural solutions journalism hubs. This announcement designated Grady as a leader in the field and tasked the College with continuing to advance research and practice of solutions journalism, which is focused on rigorously reporting on responses to social problems, and function as a resource for students and professionals in the field. In an interview with the Grady Research Radio podcast, Grady College faculty members and solutions journalism scholars Dr. Amanda Bright, Dr. Kyser Lough, and Ralitsa Vassileva further explained what the designation means.

The Cox Center welcomed groups of foreign journalists: This year, the James M. Cox Jr. Center for International Mass Communication Training and Research welcomed more than 20 early-to-mid-career journalists from the country Georgia to Grady College to take classes in the area of digital media. Only a few months later, the center hosted seven career journalists from Sri Lanka at the College, where they spent the day touring facilities and taking classes on digital media and journalism in the United States. And in November, 17 international journalists from countries around the world, including Australia, Taiwan, South Korea, Sri Lanka and the Philippines, just to name several, visited Grady College through the Murrow Fellows program. 

AdPR Academy was revamped and renamed: The six-year-old educational outreach program, AdPR Academy, was revamped and renamed the Myra Blackmon AdPR Academy for Diversity and Inclusion, following a generous gift from long-time communications professional and former Grady College public relations instructor Myra Blackmon. The Academy is designed to amplify the power of diversity, equity and inclusion while growing the pipeline of diverse advertising and public relations professionals. Over the course of four days, students in the program receive over 35 hours of training and mentoring by experts working in the advertising and public relations industries, participate in daily networking opportunities with corporate executives and agency professionals, and compete in teams representing real-life clients.