| Profile Joshua S. Fouts is the director of
the University of Southern California Center on Public Diplomacy, a
cross-disciplinary research, teaching and training center run jointly by
the USC Annenberg School for Communication and by the USC School of
International Relations, a school within the College of Letters, Arts
& Sciences. He is director of the "Public Diplomacy in Virtual
Worlds" project along with Annenberg School communication professor
Douglas Thomas. Prior to joining the Center on
Public Diplomacy in 2003, he was co-founder and director of the USC
Annenberg Online Journalism & Communication Program, a center for the
study of the global impact of the Internet-based journalism on policy,
journalism, ethics and society. He was also editor of the program's
flagship effort, OJR, the Online Journalism Review, which he grew from a
small university Web site to an internationally recognized leader in the
field of online journalism, read by almost 50,000 readers monthly,
rivaling the per article readership of many respectable U.S.
newspapers. Before joining USC, Joshua spent half
a decade at the Voice of America where he was Deputy Chief-of-Staff. He
worked on numerous public diplomacy projects throughout the world,
including developing the earliest iterations of the VOA Web site, (what
would become voanews.com); public affairs efforts at U.S. Embassy in
Brasilia, Brazil; negotiations with the former Soviet Republics to lease
transmitters formerly used to jam VOA signals; and development of the
first-ever TV/radio/Internet simulcast to Asia.
He has been a Web activist and new technology adopter, creating and
running grassroots Web campaigns, including "StopOverlay.com" a
successful effort to stop California phone companies from
"overlaying" and removing community "area codes." Among the awards Fouts has received are the
Presidential Management Fellowship in 1991, and other distinguished
service awards for his work in the U.S. government. In 2001 he was
recognized as one of the Digital Coast's "Top 100 Survivors" of
the digital community of the Western United States.
Fouts is a member of the Public Diplomacy Council at the George
Washington University. He serves on the board of the International
Visitors Council of Los Angeles, The UCLA Communications Board, and the
Friends of Washoe Foundation, and the Heidelberg Club International. He is
on the editorial board of Games and Culture: A Journal of Interactive Media
(Sage), and Place Branding (Palgrave Macmillan). |