CAFe Speaker Series: Journalism & Data Roundtable

Date/Time: Wednesday, April 8, 2026 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm

Location: Virtual

UMD students, faculty, staff, alumni, and friends—join us for the CAFe Speaker Series. (Registration Required)

Abstract:

This roundtable convenes journalists to examine the relationships among newspaper archives, data practices, and evolving news infrastructures. Participants will discuss how reporting, preservation, and data reuse change over time, with attention to moments of institutional transition such as ownership transfers and the sale of media outlets. The discussion foregrounds the material and organizational conditions that shape archival continuity and access, and considers how these conditions influence the afterlives of journalistic records. By situating contemporary practices within longer trajectories of media change, the session offers a critical account of how news production and preservation intersect in an era of consolidation and restructuring.

Bio(s):

DeNeen L. Brown

DeNeen L. Brown has been an award-winning writer for The Washington Post for more than 37 years. Brown is a professor at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism, where she teaches Feature Writing, “Covering Social Justice Issues for Newspapers and Magazines,” and the “Power of the Writing Voice.”

Brown has written extensively about the country’s history of racial terror lynchings and massacres. After Brown’s 2018 story on the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre was published on the front page of The Washington Post, the mayor of Tulsa announced he would reopen the city’s search for mass graves of victims of the massacre. In October 2020, the city discovered a mass grave that may be connected to the massacre.

Brown’s work on Tulsa is featured in two documentaries:

“Rise Again: Tulsa and the Red Summer,” released on NatGeo TV and Hulu.
Tulsa: The Fire and the Forgotten for PBS.

From 2000 to 2004, Brown was a foreign correspondent for The Washington Post, and the first Black woman to cover Canada for The Washington Post. As a foreign correspondent, Brown traveled throughout the Arctic and the Arctic Archipelago, which consists of 94 islands, to write about climate change and indigenous populations. Many of her stories about climate change, which were first-hand reports about the fragile Arctic and thinning sea ice, are cited in scientific journals throughout the world.

Check out her author page on The Washington Post.

Rob Wells

Rob Wells is an associate professor at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, where he teaches data, reporting and is the Ph.D. Studies director. Wells returned to Maryland in January 2022 after teaching for 5 1/2 years at the School of Journalism and Strategic Media at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. He taught data journalism, journalism theory, business journalism, and led the Graduate Studies program. He led his students to produce the award-winning ArkansasCovid.com website, which published daily updates of data and news on the Covid-19 pandemic. Wells earned his doctorate in Journalism Studies at the Merrill College of Journalism in 2016. He is a journalism historian, specializing in business journalism, and also conducts research on data journalism.

Jeff Suess

Jeff Suess is a history columnist and librarian at the Cincinnati Enquirer. He is the author of several books on Cincinnati history, including Lost Cincinnati, Hidden History of Cincinnati, Cincinnati Then and Now, and Cincinnati: An Illustrated Timeline. He also wrote Tomorrowland: The Past, Present, and Future of Disney’s Most Changed Land, co-wrote The Cincinnati Bengals: An Illustrated Timeline with Rick Pender and The San Francisco 49ers: An Illustrated Timeline with Mark Purdy, and edited the Cincinnati Reds books Pete Rose: A Tribute to a Baseball Legend and Big Red Machine: Cincinnati’s Dynasty 50 Years Later. Jeff grew up in Modesto, California, and graduated from San Francisco State University. He lives in Cincinnati with his wife, Kristin, and their daughter, Dashiell.

Katherine Boss

Katherine Boss lives in Oslo, Norway, and is a head librarian and web archiving curator at the National Library of Norway. She previously worked as the Librarian for Journalism, Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. Her research focuses on the challenges of archiving born-digital news content and pedagogies in library instruction. She has served as co-chair of the Association of College & Research Libraries’ Communication Studies Committee, as well as the co-leader of the Archiving and Preserving News Applications working group of the Journalism Digital News Archive. She holds a bachelor’s in Journalism from Grand Valley State University, a master’s in Library and Information Science from Long Island University, and a master’s in Media Studies from The New School in New York City.

Additional Information:
Please contact infoevents@umd.edu at least one week prior to the event to request disability accommodations. In all situations, a good faith effort (up until the time of the event) will be made to provide accommodations.

For parking information and directions, please visit the Transportation Services website or view the campus map.

Speaker(s): DeNeen L. Brown, Rob Wells, Jeff Suess & Katherine Boss