Areas of Impact

CCLP maintains several areas of impact that guide the Center’s projects, research and efforts. Past projects and events are included below, and many of them were led by CCLP Senior Fellows. Please reach out to commlead@usc.edu with questions.

Politics, Power, and the Press

2016 – Present |  CCLP continues to host programming series to discuss the polarized American political landscape and to better understand how journalism continues to be impacted by election seasons and campaign coverage.

In the weeks following November 3, CCLP partnered with the Center for the Political Future and the USC Gould School of Law to host several conversations on the aftermath of the unprecedented 2020 election cycle and how political leaders, the courts, media, and citizen activists treated the returns.

In anticipation of the 2020 Presidential Election, the Center also helped host USC Annenberg’s Ballot 2020 series, whose 2020 programming included:

Leading up to the 2016 Presidential Election, events included trips to both the Republican and Democratic national conventions, visits for USC Annenberg students to the inauguration and Women’s March on Washington, a forum about how the executive orders of President Trump would affect USC, and a bipartisan panel about how the media functions in the Trump era. More recently, CCLP supported the publication of a report, by Harvard University Professor Tom Patterson and the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy, on the media coverage of the first 100 days of the Trump presidency. You can find the report here.

The Future of News

2007 – Present | CCLP is exploring new models that will sustain quality journalism from the international to the local level while leveraging partnerships and the opportunity to reach broader audiences through technological advances.  Currently, CCLP has partnered with National Public Radio (NPR) to address the crisis in local news through a series of Thought Leaders Meetings with industry leaders. CCLP co-published a report about creative solutions for the growing problems of “news deserts.”

Led by CCLP, our team has created a Los Angeles Times–Ahmanson Lab partnership to develop an augmented reality app. The first prototype of the app is in development and provides an immersive experience for viewers to see the Camp Fire’s trajectory over the topography of Southern California.

With a major grant from Carnegie Corporation, CCLP formerly explored the role of government in addressing the crisis facing the news business. The project documented current and historic government engagement in the media while assessing new policy proposals, including postal rates, tax policy, antitrust regulation, broadcast and cable regulation, and direct government support. CCLP returns to the project to continue investigating the investment of foundations and the philanthropic sector as a firewall against the disappearance of critical news and information. With the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, CCLP co-hosted a roundtable discussion in New York on the subject, drawing a cadre of leaders from major news organizations, foundations, nonprofits, publishers and universities. The roundtable addressed such issues as the evolution of nonprofit journalism; attracting additional foundation interest in funding journalism; the related ethical, regulatory and legal issues; educating news organizations on the subject; the creation of news services on specific topics; and other pressing issues on the future of news organizations, reporting and distribution.

CCLP maintains an educational website called Public Policy and Funding, which you can find here.

Women and Communication Leadership

2014 – present | CCLP’s Women and Communication Leadership initiative focuses on scholarly research, policy analysis, public engagement and education, and professional executive training. CCLP has completed and continues to work on many exciting and important initiatives aimed at empowering women in media and communications.

Women are playing a defining role in the reinvention of the media and communications industry. Through public-facing programming, CCLP has brought industry-leading women to USC to engage in thought-provoking conversations about the future of women and media, building off the expertise of many of our Senior Fellows. For the 2018-2019 academic year our programming included:

In addition to our programming, we support research to better understand the relationship between gender and the media and communications. Some of our current projects include an analysis of gender representation on media boards, a gender press freedom map, and survey of gender representation for major journalism awards (in partnership with the International Women’s Media Foundation).

Our Women and Communication Leadership Initiative is made possible by the talented group of Senior Fellows who have joined CCLP and are committed to advancing gender equity in media and communications.

Public Diplomacy

2011 – Present | Director of Washington Programs Adam Clayton Powell III hosts monthly lunches in Washington, D.C. that tackle broad themes of public diplomacy. Adam invites a wide range of non-profit leaders, figures of the political world, and academics to speak at the lunches. Additionally, CCLP holds monthly public diplomacy monitoring forums with leaders from the State Department, Capitol Hill and NGOs and advises the State Department on issues of cyber-security and digital media. Director Geoffrey Cowan recently had the chance to join a panel organized by the U. S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. about the continuing importance of the Voice of America. He discussed the same topic in a new report published by the USC Center on Public Diplomacy called “Why the Voice of America Remains a Vital Force in the World”.