Ginger Blackstone

Dr. Ginger Blackstone is an Assistant Professor at Harding University and News Director of the university's cable television station, HU16, where students produce a live weekday award-winning locally-focused newscast. The station also streams its signal 24/7 at streaming.harding.edu where people from all over can watch local programming, Harding home sporting events, and many other live and prerecorded programs. In 2016, Dr. Blackstone received her Ph.D. in Mass Communication from the University of Florida. She earned a M.A. in Journalism from the University of Arkansas in Little Rock in 2011, and her B.A. in Radio/TV Broadcasting at Harding University in 1991. Before her career in academe, Dr. Blackstone spent 19 years in the broadcast and cable news industry, including 13 years at CNN and CNN Headline News as a supervising/executive producer and producer. Prior to that, she held various management, producer, and on-air positions at TV stations in Arkansas, Tennessee, and Alabama. Her research interests are in the persuasive power of media, partisan bias and misinformation, and news acceptance/belief patterns of the public. Her research has been presented at annual conferences of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communications (AEJMC), Broadcast Education Association (BEA), American Journalism Historians Association (AJHA), National Communication Association (NCA), and International Communication Association (ICA). In 2017, she was named a Fellow for the Lillian Lodge Kopenhaver Center for the Advancement of Women in Communication; and in 2016, her dissertation received the Kenneth Harwood Dissertation Award from the Broadcast Education Association. Her professional career garnered an Emmy Award for CNN's coverage of the 9/11 attacks in 2001, two George Foster Peabody Awards for CNN's coverage of the political season in 2008 and the Hurricane Katrina destruction in 2005, a Columbia DuPont Award for the 2005 South Asia Tsunami Disaster, and an RTDNA Edward R. Murrow Award for Best Newscast in 2010. Her students were honored with two crystal pillar awards from the NATAS Mid-America Emmys in 2017. She hails from Dallas, Texas.

The future of news and information media