Jennifer Kowalewski

Jennifer Kowalewski, assistant professor, brought two things with her to the university: her love for teaching journalism and her desire to research political communication.

Kowalewski teaches the reporting and copy editing courses at the university, and she created and instructs a political communication course for upper-level students.

“I love being in the classroom,” Kowalewski said. “But I also love doing experimental and survey research on how the media influence public opinion.”

Kowalewski completed her doctorate in Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and came to the university in 2009.

Prior to that she instructed a news writing course at the UNC-CH, worked for 10 years at daily newspapers in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, and got her masters in Journalism and Mass Communication at Ohio University.

She got her undergraduate degrees in journalism and political science from Ohio University.

As a reporter, Kowalewski covered everything from dog-sled races to political stories.

Her favorite types of stories were political stories and breaking news stories.

“I didn’t like the stories where people died,” she said. “Overall, I liked the stories where you had a happy ending—where nobody dies.”

After several years as a reporter she decided she wanted to teach her craft, Kowalewski said.

“When I went back for my masters, I really wanted to teach journalism,” she said. “However, in my masters program I was involved with some very research-oriented people.”

Now she focuses her research on the media’s influence on public opinion, conducting surveys and experiments on public opinion formation, she said.

Kowalewski looks at shows such as “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” to see how they affect people’s knowledge and cynicism of the news. She also tries to determine whether people who watch these shows feel they have can have an affect on politics themselves.

She plans to teach during the school year and do research during the summer, she said.

In addition, she will be overseeing the first group from the Schieffer School that is going to Washington.

The Schieffer program affiliated with the Washington Center to send five students for almost full-time internships in the nation’s capitol, she said.

The students can earn up to 18 hours of credit, Kowalewski said.

“It’s an exciting time to get that program up and running,” she said. “It will be nice to show the students what D.C. is all about.”

Overseeing that program includes going to D.C. several times throughout the semester to make sure the students are keeping up with their internships, she said.