Step By Step
May 6, 2008 - William Inman
For Leonard Teel, everything clicked the morning of Monday, Oct. 18, 1999. That’s when Lebanese journalist Najia Al-Houssari came away from a workshop sponsored by Teel’s Center for International Media Education (CIME) with the idea for a news story that would test Lebanon’s post-war commitment to a free press.
That workshop — designed to bring together the press and non-governmental organizations in hopes of addressing some of Lebanon’s societal needs in the aftermath of its 15-year civil war — was the first of a pilot to foster press-society workshops. Al-Houssari went on to publish a series of stories about a teenage girl’s account of rape, murder and false imprisonment that, as Teel says, validated the early efforts of CIME, which was founded in 1997.
Since that watershed moment, Teel, professor of communication, and the CIME have brought together hundreds of journalists, educators and students of mass media from around the world through dozens of workshops, forums and internships. Most recently, the center, housed in the College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Communication, has been moving toward becoming a mass media research center, and it has already undertaken some very significant research projects.
“Waheda Waheda”
“It’s pretty amazing how from this little place in Atlanta, this building, we’ve empowered a lot of people,” says Teel, sitting in his office on the sixth floor of One Park Place. The CIME director describes the center’s evolution as “waheda waheda,” Arabic for step by step.
For much of its 10-year existence, Teel says, most of the center’s research has been in the Middle East and North Africa, and one particular research project that took place in Egypt and Jordan truly embodies the notion of the center’s mantra.
The center undertook a project to document the gap between journalism education in the Arab world and the expectations of employers in the new, more high-tech world of journalism. How, essentially, are the schools in the Middle East keeping up with the profession? Teel says they documented a significant gap in Egypt and Jordan, which was published last spring in the International Gazette.
“That is a significant building block for what we’re doing now, which is creating standards of excellence for journalism in the Arab world,” he says. “Now we’re doing research on the status of various programs and helping them get to a higher level where their graduates are prepared for the ever-changing media world.We have universities all over the Arab world getting on board, and Georgia State was the leader.”
The CIME’s work in the Middle East is substantial. Teel is a cofounder of the Arab-U.S. Association for Communication Educators (AUSACE), and the center co-sponsors AUSACE’s international conferences and workshops.
“One of the main goals [of AUSACE] is to develop educational standards and to develop research initiatives in the Arab world where research is not encouraged,” Teel said. “We are facilitating this by holding forums.”
They also publish the Journal of Middle East Media, a peer-reviewed journal dedicated exclusively to research on media in the Middle East. The yearly publication provides a forum for studies, critical debates and multiple perspectives about the continually changing media in the Middle East. The journal tackles crucial research issues surrounding the media environment in the Middle East, such as the role of new media, women in the media and the implications of international Arab broadcasting.
“It’s published in both Arabic and English,” Teel says.
In addition to the journal, CIME also publishes the Atlanta Review of Journalism History, an annual peer-reviewed publication that showcases the best student media research. Teel says the submissions come mainly from Georgia State students, with one national submission. The review runs student papers that have first been presented at scholarly, competitive conferences.