Peabody Launches Media Center

Peabody is launching The Media Center at Peabody, a scholarly research center and digital media production arm of the Peabody Awards. The announcement was made by Jeffrey Jones, executive director of the awards program and new center.

Jones revealed the formation of The Media Center at an event last night in Los Angeles celebrating the 75th anniversary of the Peabody Awards attended by senior executives from the entertainment and media worlds. The evening also saluted the lifetime achievements of Norman Lear, a Peabody Award honoree, and featured a conversation between the television icon and producer Judd Apatow. 

The Media Center at Peabody is based at the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication.

“The Media Center is a natural extension of what the Peabody Awards set out to do 75 years ago,” Jones stated. “It provides a platform for elevating the currency, conversation around, and impact of each year’s best stories in television, radio and digital media. It furthers our goal of becoming a year-round organization that demonstrates how and why Peabody-winning stories are influencing the national dialogue about pressing social issues.”

The Media Center’s three primary areas of focus are:

Peabody Programs — The Media Center at Peabody will engage in programming that outwardly extends the yearly awards winners, as well as critical scholarly engagement with the changing media industry landscape. The Media Center is in the process of launching the Peabody Digital Network, a new digital media production arm of Peabody. Through alliances with a variety of distribution outlets, the network will produce and circulate content that illuminates the social and political relevance of award-winning stories and guide public engagement with them. Additional program initiatives include podcasts with award-winning screenwriters, showrunners and producers; and panel discussions, symposia and conferences that link storytellers with groups working to address such issues.

Peabody Archive — Peabody is home to the third largest archive of audiovisual materials in the United States. Through books, films and digital media productions, The Media Center’s Cultural Memory Project will connect past and present — recovering vital voices from yesterday’s storytellers and inserting them into debates over issues of the day. The Cultural Memory Project focuses on what these stories can contribute to current social discourse, as well as how they can inform a reevaluation of what constitutes cultural memory of who and what we are as a nation.

Peabody Academy — The Media Center will partner with industry organizations and previous Peabody Award winners to engage aspiring screenwriters, producers and filmmakers through master classes, seminars, workshops, internships and other educational activities. The academy’s focus is connecting Peabody winners with the storytellers of the future, with an emphasis on telling stories with the power to engage and transform.

Jeffrey Jones, executive director of the awards program and professor and Lambdin Kay Chair in the entertainment and media studies department at the University of Georgia, will direct The Media Center’s work. He is joined by a group of television and media studies scholars from across the country who serve as the inaugural class of Peabody Fellow Scholars (2017-19). They are: 

• David Craig, University of Southern California
• Aymar Christian, Northwestern University
• Jonathan Gray, University of Wisconsin, Madison
• Amanda Lotz, University of Michigan
• Jason Mittell, Middlebury College
• Barbie Zelizer, University of Pennsylvania