Letter from the Executive Director
The McGee Applied Research Center for Narrative Studies was established at a time of great upheaval and transition, with public trust in institutions at precarious lows. We have more content choices than ever before, and yet the media industry is facing an uncertain future due to declining audiences, failing business models, and risks to free expression. Against this backdrop, the McGee Center has spent the past year building infrastructure to support research and programs that serve our mission to equip people with the critical skills to navigate the uncharted territory of the 21st-century media environment.
From my many conversations with people across demographics, I know they are overwhelmed by having to sift through endless choices to find quality information and by feeling skeptical of “old” media while still nostalgic for the limited gatekeepers of pre-social media news. The narratives dominating our public discourse may be coming from a growing number of hot takes and TikTok stitches, but we can identify patterns in their rhetorical structure and purpose that are as old as the pamphlets of early American revolutionaries. We can look to the past to help understand our present, and the Vanderbilt Television News Archive is a tremendous McGee Center and university asset that enables us to chart historical trends back to the early days of the most influential 20th-century news medium.
It’s never been more important to help people build media literacy skills that empower them to filter and discern credible and trustworthy information and become confident and ethical creators themselves. To do this while keeping pace with the changing landscape and ensure we use AI in concert with our human reasoning skills, not in place of them, are monumental tasks. The tools and tactics we use to achieve these goals must be nimble and adaptable, and they must be based on a deep knowledge of people’s media habits. We are looking beyond time spent on platforms, clicks and likes to gain a better understanding of how audiences actually engage with information and why they value certain voices over others.
Our first annual report highlights the great strides we’ve made in increasing the McGee Center’s visibility in furthering research, developing partnerships and convening conversations. We’re building a community of students, scholars and storytellers who are eager to come together to tackle some of the most pressing challenges of our time. We look forward to significantly growing these efforts in the coming year.
Kristy Roschke
Executive Director
Highlights
Events & Engagements
In spring 2025, the McGee Center celebrated the launch of its space in the Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries’ Central Library with donor and Board of Trust member Suzanne Perot McGee and welcome remarks from Chancellor Daniel Diermeier.
We hosted the inaugural events in the McGee Center’s speaker series, which during the 2025–26 academic year is exploring the changing nature of expertise in our complex information environment. Speakers engaged more than 100 Vanderbilt students, faculty and staff in thoughtful conversation.
Campus Events:
- The Future is Local: Rebuilding Trust in News
- Andrew Heyward, former president of CBS News | With an ever-growing array of news organizations and independent creators to turn to, our media environment is more fragmented than ever. What is lost when we no longer share a common set of facts about current events? This interactive Q&A with former president of CBS News and media expert Andrew Heyward explored the challenges facing legacy media and the role local news can play in experimenting with new forms of storytelling to rebuild trust.
- Building Expertise in Community: How Nashville Severe Weather Became a Most Trusted Source in the Storm.
- Andrew Leeper, weather expert at Nashville Severe Weather | If you live or work in Williamson or Davidson counties, chances are you are spending time with the Nashville Severe Weather team. What started as a hobby in 2009 has grown into a full-fledged weather reporting operation with tens of thousands of followers. In this Q&A session, Andrew Leeper, who joined the team in 2015, discussed the evolution of NSW’s expertise and how their commitment to helping the community stay “prepared, not scared” is changing how we think about weather reporting.
- The Evolution of Content Moderation on Digital Platforms
- Dr. Philip Napoli, director of the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy at Duke University | With an ever-growing array of news organizations and independent creators to turn to, our media environment is more fragmented than ever. What is lost when we no longer share a common set of facts about current events?
- Finding Community in Online Spaces
- Vanderbilt Student Panel | Social media has been redefining online community for more than 20 years. And though digital spaces help break many of the barriers of joining in-real-life communities, our reliance on technology can also lead to deep feelings of isolation. Advances in AI are further complicating this; recent reports state that a primary use case for advanced AI is companionship. This had us wondering—what does community mean today? In this workshop, we explored what it means to make human connections at a time when most of our interactions are mediated by technology. We started with a student panel discussion that set the stage for small-group conversations. Our goal was to identify some tips for fostering supportive communities that bridge online and offline spaces.
- The McGee Center also partnered with other campus organizations, including the Program in Culture, Advocacy and Leadership and Dialogue Vanderbilt, to foster conversations about the impact of narrative and the importance of media literacy.
Amplify Youth Summit
The McGee Center and the Heard Libraries hosted the inaugural Amplify Youth Summit in partnership with the Digital Wellness Lab at Boston Children’s Hospital and the National Association for Media Literacy Education. The summit welcomed more than 100 youth, nonprofit and tech leaders from across the country to “explore what it takes to support mental, social and emotional health in the online environments where young people live, learn and connect.”
Conference Presentations and Invited Talks
- Keynote speaker, “Communication, Trust, and Information Environments During Crisis Response,” Wisconsin Governor’s Meeting on Emergency Management and Homeland Security.
- Panel moderator, “Trust in Artificial Intelligence,” American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting.
- Guest speaker, “Media Literacy and Community Trust,” Center for Homeland Defense and Security.
- Presenter, “Media Literacy and Civics Education,” National Association for Media Literacy Education annual conference.
- Presenter, “Opportunities and Adversaries: The Emergence of AI in Emergency Management,” Center for Homeland Defense and Security Joint Federal Committee workshop.
- Presenter, “Contextualizing Trust: Geo-ethnic Media, Relatable Storytelling, and Audience Trust.” Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication annual meeting.
Thought Leadership
Advisory Committee
We assembled an impressive group of leaders in media, psychology, technology, law and public policy to serve as the inaugural McGee Center Advisory Committee:
- Clifford B. Anderson, director of the Divinity Library, Yale University
- Nora Benavidez, senior counsel and director, Digital Justice and Civil Rights at Free Press
- Paul Fagan, director of Democracy Programs, McCain Institute
- Liza Fazio, associate professor of psychology and human development, Vanderbilt University
- Theresa Peterson, vice president of Thought Leadership Research, Edelman Trust Institute
- Subramaniam (Subbu) Vincent, director, Journalism and Media Ethics, Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, Santa Clara University
- Jena Wuu, global tech policy and public affairs expert
Student and Faculty Research Engagement
A notable research highlight was working with three undergraduate Vanderbilt Buchanan Library Fellows to investigate television news coverage of higher education using the Vanderbilt Television News Archive (TVNA). Working with Namrah Khan, the McGee Center’s Hearst Fellow for Media Analysis, and John Geer, Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair, the fellows learned how to search the TVNA and use computational analysis to explore key themes and narrative depictions of U.S. higher education since 1968. The fellows used other research, including public opinion polls, to develop digital library exhibits illustrating an aspect of the news coverage.
Along with TVNA staff, the McGee Center also hosted a Databricks media analysis workshop for faculty at the Vanderbilt Owen Graduate School of Management to share tips and techniques for conducting computational research with the archive.
Other Scholarly Research
- Moon, Y. E., Hays, C., Roschke, K., Xu, Z., & Kwon, K. H. Contextualizing Trust: Geo-ethnic Media, Relatable Storytelling, and Audience Trust (2026, forthcoming). Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly.
- Moon, Y. E., Paik, S. H. W., Roschke, K., Nelson, J. L., & Lewis, S. C. (2025). Engagement + Expertise = Trust? Comparing Pathways to Credibility for Journalism and Healthcare. Journalism and Media, 6(2), 46.
- Roschke, K. & Bartlett, T. (2024). The Dangers of Low Literacy for American Democracy: The Promising Role of Public Institutions as Community Conveners. Adult Literacy Education, 54.
- Simeone, M., Roschke, K., & Walker, S. (2024). Evolutionary Biology as a Frontier for Research on Misinformation. Politics and the Life Sciences, 1-3.
- Garland, J., Coleman. J. B., Benesch, S., DeDeo, S., DiResta, R., Eissfeldt, J., Ha, S., Irons, J., Kempes, C., Lovato, J., Roschke, K., Smaldino, P. E., Stephenson, A. B., Wheatley, T., & Semenova, V. The Case Against Efficiency: Friction in Social Media. Nature Complexity [in production].
- Simeone, M., Roschke, K., Walker, S., & Garland, J. Value and Vulnerability: A Framework for Understanding the Complexity of Misinformation Use [under review].
- Roschke, K. & Khan, N. (2025). Narrating Immigration Policy: Thematic Shifts in U.S. Television News Coverage [manuscript in preparation].
- Contant, J. & Roschke, K. (2025). The Shift in Partisan Coverage by Television Networks: How Political Events Altered America’s News Media Bias in 2024 [manuscript in preparation].
Looking Ahead
In the coming year, the McGee Applied Research Center for Narrative Studies will continue to build momentum through strategic partnerships, global engagement and innovative research initiatives. We will expand the capabilities of the Television News Archive and explore new media collections as well as extend our media research footprint with the addition of a Canadian Fulbright Scholar. We have plans to significantly advance our understanding of the characteristics young people value in their experts and how they choose to become informed through deep qualitative analysis, which will inform media and AI literacy programming that we are co-developing with national and community collaborators. Our speaker series will bring a selection of diverse thought leaders to campus and, importantly, we plan to scale up our student engagement by launching a storytelling fellowship in partnership with the Heard Libraries’ Studio 608.
These activities collectively advance the center’s mission to better understand and improve the information environments shaping public trust, civic life and democratic discourse.