Ricardo J. Valencia won third place in the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) Minorities and Communication’s student research paper competition for his study, partially funded by CLLAS, “At the border: A comparative examination of U.S. newspaper coverage about unaccompanied immigrant minors.” Valencia hopes to present the research in the AEJMC national conference in August 2016.
His study examines the reporting of the flow of Central American unaccompanied children in 2014, aiming to find if the concentration of foreign-born Central Americans could influence the journalistic routines of four U.S. newspapers. Valencia examined hundreds of articles and sources of information published in four U.S. newspapers. The project helps understand the dynamic between non-Latino and Latino sources and reveals who led the media narrative of this phenomenon.
Ricardo J. Valencia is a Ph.D candidate in the School of Journalism and Communication (Media Studies) at the University of Oregon, where he received the Promising Scholar Award in 2014. Among his research interests are media depiction of immigrants, strategic communications of transnational social movements, public diplomacy and political economy of media. Ricardo is also a former diplomat who worked for the Embassy of El Salvador in Washington D.C. Prior to his tenure in foreign services, he worked as a columnist, investigative reporter, senior editor, and assistant correspondent for various newspapers and agencies in El Salvador. He obtained a joint M.A.from the University of Hamburg and the University of Aarhus (Denmark), and holds a B.A. from the Central America University (El Salvador). Ricardo can be found on Twitter:@ricardovalp