As part of USC Annenberg's Economic Literacy and Entrepreneurship initiative and series of talks, Columbia University professor Michael Schudson (pictured) will sketch his vision for what the future news environment could look like at a Feb. 11 event at the Annenberg School.

The Jan. 29 issue of the Merced Sun-Star featured a front-page series on the foreclosure climate in northern California, reported by the USC Annenberg-based California HealthCare Foundation Center for Health Reporting headed by journalism professor Michael Parks. Parks, who is the founding director of the grant-funded Center, said the Sun-Star series "Houses of Blues" — focusing on how the recession is impacting issues of mental health — fit the greater mandate of the Foundation, which seeks to improve the way health care is delivered and financed in California by promoting innovations in care and broader access to information

CCLP report: Government financial support that has bolstered this country's commercial news business since its colonial days is in sharp decline and is likely to fall further, according to a report released today by USC Annenberg's Center on Communication Leadership & Policy. Because these cutbacks are occurring at the height of the digital revolution, they will have an especially powerful impact on a weakened news industry

The Los Angeles Times and USC Annenberg’s online news source Neon Tommy have begun a collaboration that enables student reporters to produce stories for The Times’ Homicide Report blog. The partnership offers students crime-reporting experience at one of the most widely circulated newspapers in the country while The Times receives content for a Homicide Report that tells personal stories of the hundreds of people murdered in Los Angeles County every year.

USC Annenberg and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) announced that applications are now being accepted for the sixth annual Arts Journalism Institute in Theater and Musical Theater. The institute, which will take place May 17-27, 2010, is an 11-day intensive workshop in theater and musical theater for critics, reporters, editors, and broadcast and online producers from all 50 states and Puerto Rico

Scientists of many nationalities routinely collaborate across borders to solve problems, opening dialog for diplomacy even between unfriendly nations

The latest Journalism Director’s Forum at USC Annenberg brought editors and producers from L.A.’s largest daily to discuss “What’s innovative at the Los Angeles Times.”

"The Norman Lear Center gets its name from a man whose belief in the power of entertainment to degrade and to do good, to demagogue and to uplift, to be both gloriously silly and urgently relevant, made him an industry pioneer," Lear Center director Martin Kaplan said. "It was launched ten years ago when he made an extraordinary gift to the USC Annenberg School to support a unique center of research and innovation. Its mission is to study and shape the impact of media and entertainment on society, and - immodestly - to illuminate and repair the world."