Joshua Fouts
Joshua S. Fouts (born March 24, 1967) is the director of the University of Southern California Center on Public Diplomacy, a cross-disciplinary research and training center run jointly by the USC Annenberg School for Communication and by the USC School of International Relations, a school within the College of Letters, Arts & Sciences.
In 2007 he was awarded a $550,000 grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to explore the role of the foundation in virtual worlds. He serves as co-director and Principal Investigator of the project, which is a multi-year effort to explore the role of philanthropy and public good in virtual worlds. He is Principal Investigator And Co-director of the Institute for Photographic Empowerment, a center for the study and practice of participant-produced documentary (or storytelling) projects in photography, video and multi-media formats. He is founder and director of the Public Diplomacy in Virtual Worlds" project along with USC Annenberg School communication Professor Douglas Thomas.
Prior to joining the Center on Public Diplomacy in 2003, he was co-founder and director of the USC Annenberg Online Journalism & Communication Program, a center for the study of the global impact of the Internet-based journalism on policy, journalism, ethics and society. He was also editor of the program's flagship effort, OJR, the Online Journalism Review, which he grew from a small university Web site to an internationally recognized leader in the field of online journalism, read by almost 50,000 readers monthly, rivaling the per article readership of many respectable U.S. newspapers.
Before joining USC, Joshua spent half a decade at the Voice of America where he was Deputy Chief-of-Staff. He worked on numerous public diplomacy projects throughout the world, including developing the earliest iterations of the VOA Web site, which was the first broadcast news organization in the world to offer continuously updated program product on the public Internet (and what would become voanews.com); public affairs efforts at U.S. Embassy in Brasilia, Brazil; negotiations with the former Soviet Republics to lease transmitters formerly used to jam VOA signals; and development of the first-ever TV/radio/Internet simulcast to Asia.
He has been a Web activist and new technology adopter, creating and running grassroots Web campaigns, including "StopOverlay.com" a successful effort to stop California phone companies from "overlaying" and removing community "area codes."
Among the awards Fouts has received are the Presidential Management Fellowship in 1991, and other distinguished service awards for his work in the U.S. government. In 2001 he was recognized by the Silicon Alley Reporter as one of the "Digital Coast's 'Top 100 Survivors'" of the digital community of the Western United States.
Fouts is a member of the Public Diplomacy Council at the George Washington University, the Pacific Council on International Policy, the Los Angeles World Affairs Council, and the Heidelberg Club International. He serves on the board of the International Visitors Council of Los Angeles, The UCLA Communications Board, and the Friends of Washoe Foundation. He is on the editorial board of Games and Culture: A Journal of Interactive Media (Sage), and Place Branding (Palgrave Macmillan).