Alyssa Appelman, Ph.D., is an associate professor in the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Kansas.

Alyssa specializes in news accuracy and credibility. She tests the effects of journalistic norms and practices on readers. She has conducted projects on the effects of grammatical errors, stylistic errors and factual errors in news articles. More broadly, she’s interested in the effects of message characteristics in digital and social media.

 
Her work has been published in several peer-reviewed journals: 

• American Behavioral Scientist

• College Media Review

• Communication Research Reports

• Computers in Human Behavior

• Convergence

• Corporate Reputation Review

• Electronic News

• Journal of Media Ethics

• Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly

• Journalism Practice

• Mass Communication and Society

• Newspaper Research Journal

Her work has been presented at academic and industry conferences:

• ACES: The Society for Editing

• Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC)

• International Communication Association (ICA)

• International Conference on Data Science

• National Communication Association (NCA)

• Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ)

• World Journalism Education Congress (WJEC)

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Before coming to KU, Alyssa was a faculty member in the School of Media and Communication in the College of Informatics at Northern Kentucky University for eight years. She also worked for Freedom Communications as a copy editor and page designer for multiple publications, including the Northwest Florida Daily News and the Panama City News Herald. Alyssa interned at The Washington Times and The Washington Post, and she freelanced for Voices of Central Pennsylvania, the Atlantic Publishing Group, Inc., and Samsung Research America.

 

Alyssa earned her bachelor's and master's degrees in journalism from the Missouri School of Journalism at the University of Missouri-Columbia. She earned her doctorate in mass communications from the The Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications at The Pennsylvania State University.

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