Best of CASE District VI Award
 

Institution: University of Colorado Boulder

Title of entry: Fall 2023 CMCI Now Magazine

About this entry: When CU Boulder created the College of Media, Communication and Information in 2015, it charged the college’s leaders to not just teach those disciplines, but explore the areas where they overlap, to cultivate cutting-edge thought leadership and prepare students for new kinds of careers. The college magazine, CMCI Now, showcases how our students, faculty and alumni have confronted this brave new world and found ways to create impact.

Those changes, and how our community navigated them, were a central theme of the fall 2023 edition, and demonstrated how CMCI’s uniquely interdisciplinary focus offered valuable perspectives and insights on artificial intelligence, climate change and careers. So, as generative A.I. took the world by storm, we sought to answer the questions of alumni working in communications and media — not to mention the students studying these disciplines — and revisit the role of the professional storyteller in this new age. We asked respected thought leaders to find optimism in A.I., visited classrooms where students used Dall-E on projects and shared how researchers are building platforms to break algorithmic black boxes.

We heard from our community that our thoughtful, nuanced take on these dramatic changes helped cut through the noise that drummed up so much fear about the future. Shortly after it published, the controversy surrounding OpenAI’s CEO and board took place, and as people searched for what that meant, our readers at least understood the right questions to ask.