Melissa Zimdars is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Media at Merrimack College. She earned her Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Iowa and her M.A. in Media Studies and B.A. in Journalism and Political Science from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Zimdars is the author of Watching Our Weights: The Contradictions of Televising Fatness in the “Obesity Epidemic” (Rutgers University Press, 2019), and primarily researches global television programming, communication policies, and media industries. However, after a Google Doc she created went viral, Zimdars began working with a team of librarians and computer programmers to create tools for navigating fake news and other news websites through the OpenSources project. Zimdars’s work has appeared in Feminist Media Studies, Popular Communication, Television and New Media, and Flow. She has also been interviewed about fake news by dozens of news outlets around the world, including the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, The Guardian, NPR, and BBC, and has presented on fake news at various libraries, museums, schools, private companies, and academic/trade conferences.
Kembrew McLeod is a Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Iowa and an independent documentary producer. A prolific author and filmmaker, he has written several books and produced documentaries that focus on popular music, independent media, copyright law, and pranksterism. His fifth book, Pranksters: Making Mischief in the Modern World, was published by New York University Press in 2014. McLeod also coproduced the documentary Copyright Criminals, which premiered at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival and aired in 2010 on PBS’s Emmy Award–winning documentary series Independent Lens. His first documentary, Money for Nothing, was programmed at the 2002 South by Southwest Film Festival and the 2002 New England Film and Video Festival, where it received the Rosa Luxemburg Award for Social Consciousness. McLeod’s second documentary, Freedom of Expression®: Resistance and Repression in the Age of Intellectual Property, was distributed by the Media Education Foundation—where he also worked as an educational documentary producer. Freedom of Expression® serves as a companion to his book of the same title, which won the American Library Association’s Oboler book award for “best scholarship in the area of intellectual freedom” in 2006. McLeod is also coauthor of the book Creative License: The Law and Culture of Digital Sampling and coeditor of the anthology Cutting across Media: Appropriation Art, Interventionist Collage, and Copyright Law, both published by Duke University Press in 2011. McLeod’s music and cultural criticism have appeared in Rolling Stone, Spin, Mojo, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the Village Voice.