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With previous lives as an advertiser and a journalist, CMCI faculty members Erin Schauster and Pat Ferrucci draw on their distinct perspectives to examine the changing face of media moral reasoning.

Film scholar Hunter Vaughan spent years scouring through film archives and directors’ reports, touring studio lots and interviewing execs and local film crews. He discovered an industry culture in which extravagance and waste have been not only allowed but celebrated, even as other industries have been pressured to conserve.

Short for fermentation, the small-scale bakery, Ferment, is a start-up enterprise that Andre Gruber, an engineering major, and Rafaelo Infante, a strategic communication major, launched in the spring while most of the state was shut down.

In the summer of 2017, Joel Holton was one of nearly 600 personnel fighting the Keystone Fire, from which he narrowly escaped. A few years later––as a senior studying information science––he teamed up with classmates to develop new navigation aids with the needs of wildland firefighters in mind.

When he and his co-founders launched Boulder Media House, Jeremy Elder (CritMedia’20) was still a full-time student. Today, the young crew of CU graduates behind the boutique production company has created content for businesses from luxury expedition vehicles to high-end fashion, and they continue to elevate their game.

What’s cooler than getting a good grade on an assignment? For Nicole Cattin (StratComm’20), it was a paid internship her senior year and the opportunity to see her work featured in stores.

It’s unlikely that any level of planning could have prepared organizations for COVID-19 and the other crises 2020 unleashed. But whether it’s a global pandemic, an economic crisis or a wildfire, practicing how to navigate group communication and decision making can help prepare for future crises, says Associate Professor Matt Koschmann.

With a brief glance at a single face, emerging facial analysis software can now categorize the gender, race, emotional state and even identity of individuals with remarkable accuracy much of the time. Yet when information science PhD student Morgan Klaus Scheuerman dug into this new technology, he discovered a dangerously subtle form of systemic bias.

CMCI was founded in 2015 at a moment of revolutionary change in the ways we communicate and see ourselves as a society. To mark the milestone of five years—cover to cover—this issue of CMCI Now features the designs, images and stories of over 25 students and recent alumni.