Members of CCR have kept up their winning tradition as Dr. Mike Yao and Prof. Chin-Chuan Lee have captured two more research paper awards this year. This follows a shining record established at the 2006 annual conference of the International Communication Association (ICA) in Dresden, Germany. Last year Prof. Lee and Dr. Zhou He won the Top Paper Award in ICA's Intercultural and Development Division, while Mike Yao was awarded a Top Three Paper Award in the Games Research Division, and John Erni was the winner of the Top Paper in the Cultural Studies Division.
This year, Dr. Yao, working with colleagues at the University of California– Santa Barbara, has won National Communication Association's (NCA) 2007 top Freedom of Expression Scholarship Award in Chicago. Their paper is entitled “Evaluating the Potential Secondary Effects of Adult Video/Bookstores in Indianapolis, Indiana.” They were the holder of the same award in 2006, with a paper entitled “Testing Supreme Court Assumptions in California v. la Rue: Is There Justification for Prohibiting Sexually Explicit Messages in Establishments that Sell Liquor?”
Meanwhile, Dr. Yong Zhang Volz of the University of Missouri (CCR Visiting Scholar, summer, 2006) and Professor Lee have been awarded the 2007 Asian Journal of Communication Award for International Communication Research. Their award-winning paper is entitled “American Pragmatism and Chinese Modernization: Importing the Missouri Model of Journalism Education to Modern China.” They received a certificate with a cash award of US$200 at the annual convention of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) in Washington, D.C from August 9 to 12.
Ms. Liu Qing, deputy director of administration at the Nanfang City Daily, and Mr. Fu Jianfeng, a senior reporter of the Nanfang Weekend, gave a CCR seminar on 14 March 2007. These two publications have been generally regarded as leaders in China's media reform. Their talk about Guangzhou's vibrant media competition in the larger context of Chinas marketization reform; they also cited their own experiences to analyze the opportunities and obstacles of investigative journalism.
Professor Shin Dong Kim of Hallym University (Korea) and Professor Tatsuro Hanada of Waseda University (Japan) each visited the CCR on 11 March 2007 to explore the possibility of collaboration.
Dr Zhou He, Dr Mike Yao, and Professor Chin-Chuan Lee were invited by the China Communication Forum (CCF) to organize a research panel when the national association held its third annual conference at Shenzhen University from August 19 to 20. Dr He reviewed the status of research on Chinese political communication, Dr Yao examined the impact of video games, and Professor Lee presented what he called top-down and bottom-up views of political economy to compare ideological diversity of U.S. and Chinese media systems.