Index of Communication Arts

In 2012, upscale department store Barney's New York announced a holiday partnership with Walt Disney Co. Disney created holiday display windows for the famed store, including one in which a movie shows Minnie Mouse envisioning herself as a Paris runway model. During this short dream sequence,...

A reporter's job is to report. That means to tell what really happened, what people did and what they said. If a written report includes a quotation, it's exactly what the individual who is quoted said. Right? Well, not always. There's the matter of context, for example. In the interest...

If someone asked me to identify Mandy Moore, I might mention her lead role in the movie A Walk to Remember or date myself by offering a pitchy rendition of her hit song “I Wanna Be With You.” After attending the USAID Final Frontiers in Development conference this summer, I would also use...

In the summer of 1967, doing my best to become an adolescent pop-culture junkie in that media-starved era, I fretted over the fates of my favorite TV shows: Star Trek , The Man from UNCLE , The Wild Wild West , Get Smart , Batman and — yes, I admit it — The Monkees . I would have...

While trying to read a somber op-ed piece about the upcoming election and what Americans like and don't like about capitalism and blah blah blah on the New York Times website this morning, I kept being distracted by flashy moving ad that took up the right side of the page. There were blocks...

A news hook, supported by strong quotes, is not enough to carry a hard news story. It needs to be grounded in hard fact – in numbers. Building ratios and percentages into the article is one way to meet this credential. Throw in a colorful bar graph or pie chart and the facts become even more...

The dilemma facing the creative writer in a late-stage capitalist world: should one succumb to it, incorporate it or starve? This writer walks the fine line and still retains a modicum of dignity, although is aware of the issues therein. I am a copywriter by default, a novelist/creative...

Throughout the three years of media coverage of the Casey Anthony case, the nation's public became quite familiar with Nancy Grace, a justice-seeking prosecutor publicly convicting whoever she believed to be guilty in criminal trials. For years, she has come under fire for the behavior and...

The exiling of journalists has become a political and social trend witnessed across nations around the world as more and more journalists are condemned by their nation's governments. Journalists who participate in reform movements, whether through their publications or in actual...

It was recently revealed that the author of the "A Gay Girl in Damascus" blog was an American man living in Turkey. The blog chronicled the life of a supposedly Syrian-American woman named Amina Abdallah, who allegedly went missing in early June of 2011. Major news outlets covered the...