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Welcome to AdhamOnline,
which takes the Adham Center's website into a new, more journalistic format which
is reflected on our new homepage. News about the Center, its faculty, staff, students
and above all its alumni and Associates (friends in the industry and/or public
life honored as honorary faculty) will be uplifted online as any quarterly journal.
So this is the fall 2002 issue of the re-named AdhamOnline at www.kpd-online.info.
Transnational Broadcasting Studies, AdhamOnline's sister professional publication,
continues to be available at www.tbsjournal.com.
At the same time AdhamOnline
will continue and expand the archival commitment of the previous format. Simply
look to the top for the usual as well as new departmental sections that provide
the reader with Adham Center faculty and staff profiles (and photos), including
the Sony Gallery with its greatly expanded Virtual Gallery section -each quarter
there will be at least one new Sony Virtual Gallery show with accompanying catalogue
texts. This issue of AdhamOnline introduces a Van-Leo In Memoriam section - this
too will be expanded in coming issues.
The new format also symbolizes
the recent changes in Adham Center publications staff and the shared vision and
continuity involved in those changes. Both AdhamOnline and its sister virtual
publication, TBS were nurtured by our former manager of publications Sarah Sullivan
for a period of more than four years. No other individual deserves as much credit
for the excitement and creative flowering of both publications as she does (and
I say that in my own proud capacity as publisher of both virtual journals and
as senior editor, along with Dr. Hussein Amin, of TBS).
I allude to continuity
because the idea of a journalistic format for the homepage was first developed
by Sarah as a way of providing guests attending our annual awards dinner last
June with a new, livelier annual report on the Adham Center than a hard-copy annual
bulletin, one that would tempt them to go beyond the headline and lead paragraphs
of the home page and go for the whole Adham Center story by going online. That
experiment was a success and firmly believing that one should jump at any sure
success and run with it, the idea of a more journalistically formatted AdhamOnline
followed.
This summer Sarah has
moved on and given the marvelous landscaping in Washington DC, I don't mind describing
(as I might in ordinary circumstances) her new work environment as greener pastures.
Sarah is now Web/Publications Manager of the Arab American Institute, where she
is working very hard, as usual and enjoying her work immensely, also as usual.
But she keeps a hand in,
serving as TBS's Washington DC Contributing Editor. We also hope she will play
at being an occasional correspondent for AdhamOnline, keeping us posted on USA-based
alumni and related developments in DC.
Taking over as Manager
of Publications, which includes serving as Managing Editor of TBS as well as directing
the publication of AdhamOnline is Dr. Humphrey Davies, who brings so many skills
to his work that I advise the reader to click immediately on his profile.
Working with Dr. Davies
is our new Web Designer Mayada Wahsh who also serves as Managing Editor of AdhamOnline.
Mayada was the beneficiary of intensive training even before her graduation from
AUC, first with our TBS Creative Director, Prof. Shems Friedlander, as a star
student in his graphic design courses, and then here at the Adham Center working
with Sarah Sullivan. We are all delighted by the commitment of this new team and
we hope the reader will be making increasing use of the product they now generate.
In the end this particular
column has turned out to be an introduction, and not as our heading would have
it, an editorial. But in future issues "From the Center: An Editorial" will deal
with issues that effect television journalism education in general and the Adham
Center for Television Journalism in particular, notably within the context of
the Adham Center's role in the eyes of our late patron Sheikh Kamal Adham - "to
serve as a bridge between the Western and Eastern worlds of broadcast journalism
and to be a center for dialogue between these two worlds." That goal, set for
us by our Sheikh, inspires TBS and will provide focus for editorials "From
the Center."
S. Abdallah Schleifer.
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