Actors Shawn and Marlon Wayans will be visiting North Carolina colleges this weekend on behalf of Barack Obama.

Their mission - to get students registered to vote.

Obama's campaign announced today that the Wayans brothers will be part of a larger effort to get people registered by North Carolina's April 11 deadline.

The actors are scheduled to visit N.C. State, N.C. Central, UNC-Chapel Hill, Duke, N.C. A&T, UNC-Greensboro, Winston-Salem State and Wake Forest.

Gov. Mike Easley today issued a proclamation offering at $10,000 reward for information in the death of UNC-Chapel Hill student body president Eve Carson. Carson was found shot to death Wednesday, March 5, in a neighborhood near the campus.

Two men have been arrested in connection with the shooting. But according to Easley's proclamation, others may have been accessories after the fact, and the reward is designed to help investigators find those people.

The reward is conditional upon the information being given as a direct response to the proclamation. Law enforcement officials are not eligible.

Anyone with information about the case is asked to call the Chapel Hill Police Department at (919) 968-2760 or the State Bureau of Investigation.

The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill has been named a “Center of Excellence” by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

UNC-Chapel Hill will lead a program with Jackson State University in Jackson, Miss., to study emergency preparedness.

The Center of Excellence for Natural Disasters, Coast Infrastructure and Emergency Management will focus on protecting people and property from natural disasters such as hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes and wildfires.

UNC-Chapel Hill is located in the congressional district of U.S. Rep. David Price, a Democrat and chairman of the appropriations subcommittee that funds the Department of Homeland Security.

UNC-Chapel Hill's School of Journalism and Mass Communication announced today that it has hired a former executive at The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times to help the school focus on the digital media revolution.

Penelope Muse Abernathy, a Laurinburg, N.C. native and former reporter, editor and media executive, has been named the Knight Chair and in Journalism and Digital Media Economics, reports Jane Stancill. Abernathy starts the job July 1.

Abernathy is vice president and executive director of industry programs at the Paley Center for Media in New York.

The Internet revolution has weakened traditional media businesses in recent years, a trend that scholar Phil Meyer, UNC-CH's current Knight Chair, detailed in his 2004 book "The Vanishing Newspaper." Meyer will retire later this year.

Abernathy launched new money-making enterprises at some of the nation's most prominent news organizations, including The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.

Before her career on the business side of the industry, she worked as a reporter or editor at various newspapers, including The Charlotte Observer, The Greensboro News & Record, The Dallas Times-Herald, The Wichita Eagle-Beacon, The Fayetteville Times and The Laurinburg Exchange.