Spectrum

Freelance journalist Tania Rashid says covering human tragedies can take a psychological toll on reporters who face human misery day-after-day. She says it is immensely distressing to see people suffering, through no fault of their own, simply because of their race or ethnicity. Rashid has spent a great amount of time covering the Rohingya refugee crisis as the Rohingya people flee Myanmar into Ba...

Author and election analyst Kyle Kondik, from the University of Virginia Center for Politics, says the latest poll results are tipping toward favoring impeachment because voters can more easily grasp the issues comprising the Ukrainian controversy. The elements surrounding President Trump asking Ukrainian officials to provide political dirt on his potential Democratic opponent Joe Biden are much e...

President Donald Trump’s newly announced withdrawal of American troops from Northeastern Syria opens the door for Turkey to attack America’s Kurdish allies in the region, says Dr. Nukhet Sandal, Chair of the Political Science Department at Ohio University. The potential of Turkey attacking an unprotected U.S. ally is dangerous at many levels, according to Dr. Sandal. Primarily it sends a message t...

Chris Thile is an acclaimed musician and songwriter, as well as the host of American Public Media’s nationally syndicated live, weekly variety show “Live From Here.” WOUB’s Emily Votaw speaks with Thile about the creative process behind his work for “Live From Here”, what it’s like to host a live radio show in 2019, and what he enjoys about performing on college campuses. Besides being a solo arti...

College and university student enrollments are in a downward spiral because of multiple factors including parents and students questioning the value of a college education, according to Dr. Richard Vedder, author, historian, columnist, and emeritus professor of economics at Ohio University. Demographically, there is a decline in the number of traditional college eligible students born during a per...

Ohio University researchers and students are fighting to prevent the dreaded Chagas disease in Ecuador and its spread to the United States. Each year, according to the World Health Organization, over 8 million people are infected with Chagas disease mostly in Latin America. However, nearly 300,000 people in the United States are also infected. The disease kills nearly 20,000 people each year. Addi...

Amy Nordrum, a veteran science journalist, feels that fact-based science reporting helps an audience navigate through new technologies and new discoveries that will impact people’s daily lives. Nordrum currently is news editor of “IEEE Spectrum,” an award-winning technology and engineering magazine based in New York City. She also is a frequent guest on Public Radio’s “Science Friday” with Ira Fla...

Most entertainment news is generated on the east or west coasts and not in the heartland. Yet, John Kiesewetter spent 40 professional years at the “Cincinnati Enquirer” and three decades as its “Television Critic” writing everything from local criticism to major features. After his job was eliminated at the Enquirer, his career continues to this day. He is now the TV/Media reporter for Cincinnati...

Science reporting and writing has become the mainstay of award-winning journalist Maria Gallucci. She feels that factual writing about the environment and in-depth science reporting is important and necessary in a world clouded with concepts of “alternative facts” and “spin.” Gallucci is a bi-lingual reporter who has had global experience with an emphasis on reporting about energy and the environm...

Throughout his 31 years as an astronomer on the faculty at Harvard Dr. Robert Kirshner has been a leader in using supernovae to map the universe and chart the universe’s expansion over time. Some of his discoveries gave him Science Magazine’s Breakthrough of the Year Award in 1998 and led to a Nobel Prize in Physics in 2011. He is one of the leaders in the concept that the universe is not only exp...

As storms, tornadoes and flooding ravage the Midwest and The Plains and as a new and scary hurricane season approaches, more and more people rely on The Weather Channel and the Weather Group to provide them live coverage of major weather events. We count on up-to-the-minute, live weather storytelling to keep us abreast of the latest developments and whether we, or our friends and relatives, are in...

“The Wall: Unknown stories. Unintended consequences.” is a Pulitzer Prize winning multimedia series from USA Today Network and Gannett that delves into life along the southern border of the United States – the same border where President Donald Trump proposes to build his wall. “The explanatory report, led by then Arizona Republic’s vice president of news and editor Nicole Carroll, recently named...

A new podcast will launch on Memorial Day – “Defining Moments Podcast: Conversations about Health and Healing. The podcast is created by Dr. Lynn Harter and is produced by WOUB Public Media. Dr. Harter is a Communication Studies professor, Emmy-winning documentarian, storyteller and the co- founder of the Barbara Geralds Institute for Storytelling and Social Impact in the Scripps College of Commun...

Listening is the key to important and difficult conversations, according to Al Letson the current host of “Reveal,” the first hour-long public broadcasting show and podcast produced by the Center for Investigative Reporting and the Public Radio Exchange (PRX). He claims with the explosion of social media and cable news shows that Americans have lost the ability to listen to each other. We talk pas...

Dr. Venki Ramakrishnan, a molecular biologist, is president of the Royal Society in Great Britain, the same organization formerly headed by Sir Isaac Newton and Ernest Rutherford. He feels it is the duty and obligation of top scientists to explain, in understandable terms, their discoveries to the general population to extend understanding and knowledge. Dr. Ramakrishnan, in this Spectrum Podcast,...

Despite covering major stories in over 100 countries, award winning photojournalist Jeff Widener is best known for his iconic photograph of a lone Chinese protester standing in front of a column of tanks during the Tiananmen Square protest in Beijing, China in 1989. The ‘Tank Man’ photo won Widener worldwide acclaim. He was a Pulitzer Finalist and his photo was picked by America Online as one of t...

Kashmir is a region located high in the Himalayan Mountains between two historical adversaries: India and Pakistan. It was partitioned in the 1940’s at the end of British colonial rule but it remains a point of unrest even today. Over the past decades, Kashmir has been a battleground for skirmishes and armed conflict between the two nuclear powers of India and Pakistan. It is part of the geo-polit...

Tania Rashid views storytelling focusing on human rights and women’s issues through her own personal lens of experiences. Her life encounters have molded her into the journalist and filmmaker that she is – tracking down stories of the enslaved, the impoverished, and women who are abused, raped, trafficked and discounted by various societies. As a young girl, Rashid grew up in Saudi Arabia where sh...

Jennifer Rudick Zunikoff believes in the power of stories and storytelling to build communities and to bridge cultural and religious divides in our country. Zunikoff is a storyteller, poet, educator, facilitator and coach and is the founder and director of The Golden Door: Storytelling for Social Justice. “It is an organization that brings storytellers and facilitators to schools to coach teachers...

A group of reporters at The Cincinnati Enquirer worked together to create a multimedia series that would tell the real story of one week of the heroin epidemic in the Cincinnati metropolitan area from many different aspects. To tackle this voluminous task, it would take the commitment of the whole newsroom, says Dan Horn the leader of this reporting and photographic entourage. Once the group got a...

Whether you like the content of his tweets or not, President Donald Trump will go down in history as one of our most transparent Presidents, according to Philip Elliott, a veteran Washington correspondent for Time, Inc. Elliott claims that people know what the President is thinking or focusing on in real time if one follows the nature of his tweets on Twitter. This is especially true of this past...

Until about 1920, rural women in the United States outnumbered urban women and they were the genesis of many historic women’s movement initiatives. For example, rural women took the lead in temperance, women’s suffrage and gaining educational opportunities for women, according to Dr. Katherine Jellison, the Chairwoman of the History Department at Ohio University. Dr. Jellison also is co-chair of t...

The recent conflict between Pakistan and India makes an already volatile region of South Asia even more unstable. Over the past two weeks, the two countries have battled with air strikes into each country provoked by a suicide bombing that killed 40 people in India on February 14. It was executed by a terrorist from the often contested Kashmir region. This rare use of air power is a major concern...

Decades long protections afforded media against libel actions are being threatened to be upended by the duo of President Donald Trump and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. President Trump repeatedly has said that is should be easier to successfully sue the news media for libelous stories and that protections now afforded the media should be eradicated. He claims he will lead that charge....

When the dust settles from U.S. troop withdrawals in Syria and Afghanistan and troop build-ups in Iraq, the primary target of American hostility in the Middle East is Iran, according to Dr. Ziad Abu-Rish, an expert in Middle East history, social movements, popular protests and U.S. Middle Eastern policy. He says, that while other troops are coming home, some of President Donald Trump’s advisors ar...