From the Center: An Editorial

Welcome to AdhamOnline, which takes the Adham Center's website into a new, more journalistic format which is reflected on our new homepage. News about the Center, its faculty, staff, students and above all its alumni and Associates (friends in the industry and/or public life honored as honorary faculty) will be uplifted online as any quarterly journal. So this is the fall 2002 issue of the re-named AdhamOnline at www.AdhamOnline.com. Transnational Broadcasting Studies, AdhamOnline's sister professional publication, continues to be available at www.tbsjournal.com.

At the same time AdhamOnline will continue and expand the archival commitment of the previous format. Simply look to the top for the usual as well as new departmental sections that provide the reader with Adham Center faculty and staff profiles (and photos), including the Sony Gallery with its greatly expanded Virtual Gallery section -each quarter there will be at least one new Sony Virtual Gallery show with accompanying catalogue texts. This issue of AdhamOnline introduces a Van-Leo In Memoriam section - this too will be expanded in coming issues.

The new format also symbolizes the recent changes in Adham Center publications staff and the shared vision and continuity involved in those changes. Both AdhamOnline and its sister virtual publication, TBS were nurtured by our former manager of publications Sarah Sullivan for a period of more than four years. No other individual deserves as much credit for the excitement and creative flowering of both publications as she does (and I say that in my own proud capacity as publisher of both virtual journals and as senior editor, along with Dr. Hussein Amin, of TBS).

I allude to continuity because the idea of a journalistic format for the homepage was first developed by Sarah as a way of providing guests attending our annual awards dinner last June with a new, livelier annual report on the Adham Center than a hard-copy annual bulletin, one that would tempt them to go beyond the headline and lead paragraphs of the home page and go for the whole Adham Center story by going online. That experiment was a success and firmly believing that one should jump at any sure success and run with it, the idea of a more journalistically formatted AdhamOnline followed.

This summer Sarah has moved on and given the marvelous landscaping in Washington DC, I don't mind describing (as I might in ordinary circumstances) her new work environment as greener pastures. Sarah is now Web/Publications Manager of the Arab American Institute, where she is working very hard, as usual and enjoying her work immensely, also as usual.

But she keeps a hand in, serving as TBS's Washington DC Contributing Editor. We also hope she will play at being an occasional correspondent for AdhamOnline, keeping us posted on USA-based alumni and related developments in DC.

Taking over as Manager of Publications, which includes serving as Managing Editor of TBS as well as directing the publication of AdhamOnline is Dr. Humphrey Davies, who brings so many skills to his work that I advise the reader to click immediately on his profile.

Working with Dr. Davies is our new Web Designer Mayada Wahsh who also serves as Managing Editor of AdhamOnline. Mayada was the beneficiary of intensive training even before her graduation from AUC, first with our TBS Creative Director, Prof. Shems Friedlander, as a star student in his graphic design courses, and then here at the Adham Center working with Sarah Sullivan. We are all delighted by the commitment of this new team and we hope the reader will be making increasing use of the product they now generate.

In the end this particular column has turned out to be an introduction, and not as our heading would have it, an editorial. But in future issues "From the Center: An Editorial" will deal with issues that effect television journalism education in general and the Adham Center for Television Journalism in particular, notably within the context of the Adham Center's role in the eyes of our late patron Sheikh Kamal Adham - "to serve as a bridge between the Western and Eastern worlds of broadcast journalism and to be a center for dialogue between these two worlds." That goal, set for us by our Sheikh, inspires TBS and will provide focus for editorials "From the Center."

S. Abdallah Schleifer.