Winter 2014

Mitch and Cam on Modern Family have a new neighbor: Asher, played by Jesse Eisenberg, an eco-judgey nightmare.

Gotta love that.

Social Media and the Politics of Personal Taste

Lear Center managing director and director of research Johanna Blakley traversed the globe in 2013 to speak about a myriad of Lear Center topics. In Turkey, she presented "Social Media and the Networked Consumer" at the MARKA branding conference. In Switzerland, she gave the keynote address at the Swiss Media Forum on the "Social Impact of Social Media," and in Colombia, Johanna participated in the Fractal'13 conference. Closer to home, she spoke at the Paley Center's International Council Summit and she gave her fourth TED talk at TEDxOrangeCoast on "The Politics of Personal Taste." Johanna is now preparing for speaking trips to the UK and Iceland and she will be judging the "Real Food Media Movie Contest" along with Alice Waters, Padma Lakshmi and Jamie Oliver.

The Art & Craft of the Obituary

Who gets an obit? How do obits frame and construct history? In partnership with the American Historical Association's National History Center and the Center on Communication Leadership & Policy, Marty Kaplan moderated a Washington D.C. panel with Adam Clymer from The New York Times, Adam Bernstein from the Washington Post and obituary historian Janice Hume.

The panel will be available on C-SPAN in February; excerpts are available here.

Sports & The LGBT Experience

How does USC athletic director Pat Haden feel about gay athletes? What about UCLA football coach Jim Mora? These were among the questions answered as openly gay professional athletes and reporters from ESPN and The New York Times gathered with LGBT sports scholars to examine the implications of sexual orientation and gender identity in sports. The three-day conference, sponsored by the USC Annenberg Institute for Sports, Media and Society, was co-directed by Adam Amel Rogers of the Lear Center. Watch video from the conference here and see pictures of the speakers here.

Hollywood, Health & Society

Grey's Anatomy and Days of Our Lives were among the big winners at the 14th annual Sentinel for Health Awards, which recognize exemplary achievements in TV storylines that inform and inspire viewers to make choices for healthier and safer lives. Norman & Lyn Lear were both on hand to present awards.

Kate Folb, a leader in entertainment and social impact, has been named director of HH&S, a Lear Center program, providing entertainment industry professionals with free, accurate and timely resources about public health, access to health care and climate change. Read more about Kate here.

The California Endowment awarded the Lear Center a $500,000 grant to make information about the Affordable Care Act and access to health care available to writers and producers of English- and Spanish-language entertainment.

Read about the grant here.

HH&S took 35 entertainment industry professionals to visit NASA-JPL and learn about climate change from top scientists. Climate experts were also on hand at the HH&S screening of the film, Inuk, which explores climate change in Greenland. The climate change initiative was also recently featured in Produced By Magazine.

Stanford professor Mark Granovetter discussed his classic work on "The Strength of Weak Ties" when he was awarded the 2013 Ev Rogers Award. Watch his talk here. Entries are now being accepted for the 2014 Rogers Award, which honors the author of "Diffusion of Innovations."

The Lear Center's new Media Impact Project, which kicked off in 2013, is participating in the upcoming Knight Foundation's Media Learning Seminar and Media Impact Focus: AIM and Shoot, a discussion of cutting-edge impact analysis methods sponsored by Media Impact Funders.

"Don't bring a data set to a food fight," said Marty Kaplan at a panel on "Narratives in Science Communication" at a Washington, D.C. conference on the science of science communication sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences. Watch highlights of Marty's panel here.

The Lear Center co-sponsored a talk by Robert McChesney and John Nichols about their new book, Dollarocracy: The Money and Media Election Complex That is Destroying America, at the USC Annenberg School. Watch the whole talk here.

Tent: Pop Music is a weeklong seminar in May that will bring together young musicians, producers and entertainment writers to explore the genre-blending history of Jews in the American pop music scene. To find out more and to apply, click here.

The Lear Center's Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture database reached 84,000 entries recently as director Joe Saltzman released a DVD video compilation of The Image of the Washington Journalist in Movies and Television, 1932 to 2013.

Be sure to follow what the Lear Center is up to in 2014 on these platforms:

The Norman Lear Center is a nonpartisan research and public policy center that studies the social, political, economic and cultural impact of entertainment on the world. The Lear Center translates its findings into action through testimony, journalism, strategic research and innovative public outreach campaigns. On campus, from its base in the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, the Lear Center builds bridges between schools and disciplines whose faculty study aspects of entertainment, media and culture. Beyond campus, it bridges the gap between the entertainment industry and academia, and between them and the public. Join our mailing list here.