Julia Adams knew she wanted to be in sports broadcasting from the first time she noticed a woman on the field interviewing players after a college football game. “I looked at my dad and was like, ‘That’s their job?” she recalled. “‘I want to do that when I grow up.’”

Tinseled trees and snowy landscapes are not the only signs of the upcoming holiday season. Red kettles, staffed by men and women in street clothes, Santa suits and Salvation Army uniforms also telegraph Christmastime.

Conversations @ Annenberg: Newsmakers, thought leaders and change agents on leadership and the issues they care most about.

Graduate students in Professor Phil Seib’s JOUR 542 foreign reporting class have spent the past semester collaborating with The Pacific Council on International Policy (PCIP), a nonpartisan foreign affairs organization whose aim is to effect change on issues at home and abroad.

Patricia Dean, accomplished broadcast journalist, professor of professional practice and former associate director of USC Annenberg’s School of Journalism, died on Nov. 17 at the age of 72. A lifelong mentor to colleagues and students alike, Dean nurtured and inspired many throughout her career spanning more than four decades.

What happens when 6,595 people, 17 cats and dogs and two rare bonobo apes descend from the sky into Gander, a small town of 9,600 in Newfoundland, Canada? This is the basis of the musical Come From Away, opening at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles on Nov. 28. The play, set on Sept. 11, 2001 and the five days that follow, is a true story of the kindness of strangers and what transpired when 38 planes were diverted to Gander’s airport after the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C.

Since the launch of the long-form documentary program Impact in 2001, the show’s USC Annenberg undergraduate and graduate student journalists have given viewers an in-depth look at stories happening in and around the region. Now, they’re about to reach an even wider audience.

When the president of the United States disparages journalists and calls their work “fake news,” how should the Fourth Estate respond?