Prior to earning a Ph.D. in Mass Media and Communication at Temple University, she worked in print journalism covering environmental issues in the Philadelphia-New Jersey area, as well as in corporate and agency marketing communications. Her research agenda involves journalism production, collective memory, social risk, gender-ethnicity issues, and computer-assisted textual analysis. She co-edited Representing Resistance: Media, Civil Disobedience, and the Global Justice Movement, and her research has appeared in Communication and Terrorism: Public and Media Responses to 9/11, The West Wing: The American Presidency as Television Drama, Enviropop: Studies in Environmental Rhetoric and Popular Culture, Environmental Communication Yearbook, Journal of Public Relations Research, Public Relations Review, Media History Digest, and Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly.