Q&A: Meet the School of Journalism's two new professors

The University of Arizona School of Journalism is welcoming two new faculty members, Assistant Professors Josh Anderson and Zicheng Cheng, this fall. 

Anderson received a Ph.D. in advertising in 2024 from the University of Texas at Austin, where he previously studied biology as an undergraduate before earning a master’s degree in life sciences communication at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Cheng also graduated with a Ph.D. this year from Pennsylvania State University and holds a master’s degree from Boston University, both in mass communications. She is originally from China, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in business management from Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou. 

“We are thrilled to welcome our new faculty members to the School of Journalism. Their exceptional experience will undoubtedly enrich our program and inspire our students. We look forward to the innovative perspectives they will bring to our community,” Director Jessica Retis said. 

Read more about the School of Journalism’s two incoming professors in the Q-and-A below:

Question: What is your main area of interest for research and which research topics are you looking forward to pursuing while at the School of Journalism?

Josh Anderson: I’m really interested in science communication and especially science journalism. The question that I'm really interested in answering with that [research] is how we can make the systems of science journalism work better for people it hasn't traditionally worked for — largely people of historically marginalized identities — and how we can adapt that to a changing media ecosystem.

The specific topic of what I'm interested in has narrowed in to climate resilience, specifically how people are adapting to a changing climate and how science journalism can cover that in southern Arizona. 

Q: How will your previous experience and research in science communication inform the ways you teach and mentor students as a professor?

J.A.: I’ve never worked as a practicing journalist, so where a lot of my ability to instruct students will come from will be from my career as a researcher working with journalists. The class I taught at the University of Wisconsin was called “Science and Storytelling” and it was about teaching students to think about how to take science information and make it understandable and interesting to their audiences when they communicate. When it comes to teaching people to be journalists who are capable of writing about science issues, one of the biggest things that they need to know is how to take that information, which is inaccessible to a lot of people, and make it more accessible. 

Secondly, journalism is in a more precarious place than it has been for a very long time in the United States and it's my belief that if we are to responsibly train people to be journalists at the university, we have to teach them survival skills and we have to teach them how to survive in this changing media ecosystem where the profit isn't there from the way we have funded journalists and journalistic institutions in the past. If you look at the research, that's especially true of science and environmental journalism. 

Q: How are you feeling about stepping into this new professor role? 

J.A.: I'm very excited and I feel extraordinarily lucky to have found a tenure-track position at an institution that I feel is a good fit for me. A lot of the people here [at the school] have similar perspectives to the way that I see the necessary steps we need to take to ensure the future of the institution of journalism.

Q: What about living in Arizona are you most excited for? 

J.A.: I’ve already found a lot of interesting things to do here, especially things to do outdoors. One of the biggest selling points during my campus visit was the beautiful view of the Santa Catalina mountains. That’s an unequivocal positive. 

Q: Which journalism-related research topics are you most interested in?

Zicheng Cheng: The first line of my research is about how people consume and engage with news, particularly on social media. The second line is about the social impact of news consumption online, which includes the impact on political attitudes, political beliefs, and political behaviors. Lately, I've been looking at the topic of journalism on TikTok and my research is about audience engagement with TikTok news content. I study the emotional valence of the news videos and how the second person camera view of a video affects the audience engagement by measuring the counts of liking, commenting, and sharing on TikTok. 

Q: How will your previous experience and research inform the ways you teach and mentor students as a professor?

Z.C.: I believe I can bring my theoretical and methodological expertise to the classroom and share this knowledge with my students. Most importantly, I hope to help them learn how to connect media communication theories with real-world practices so, for example, they can learn to understand why certain media messages and content work or don’t work for certain audiences. 

Q: How are you feeling about stepping into this new professor role? 

Z.C.: After being a student for pretty much all my life, transitioning now into a professor, I think, may be challenging but it's also very exciting. I just hope to share my expertise with my students, collaborate with the faculty members here, and hopefully I can work with my students on some research projects that they are interested in. 

I think this job is a very good fit for me. I love journalism, and although I am not a traditional reporter, I really enjoy researching on journalism-related topics, especially how journalism audiences perceive news content and how it might affect their cognition, behavior, attitudes, and so forth. I think journalism has a very big role in democratic society, so that's why I really enjoy what I've been researching and I hope to share that expertise with the university community and beyond. 

Q: What about living in Arizona are you most excited for? 

Z.C.: I am very excited about this new role and this new place. I have never lived in Arizona before and here is a place full of sunshine, diverse cultures, amazing food, and landscapes. As a first-generation student and now a professor, I’d really love to contribute to the diversity of this community. I’m also excited for the mild winters, which means no more shoveling snow.