Courses I Teach
To succeed in the new media marketplace, entrepreneurial journalists must understand basic business fundamentals. This course provides students with a foundation in core principles of finance, strategy, marketing and more. The course is oriented toward journalists, with emphasis on applying key concepts to journalism businesses.
In this course, students explore the growing universe of journalism startups and the modern renaissance in digital journalism. We work through real-world case studies that prepare students to develop their own entrepreneurial journalism projects.
Build something of your own! Develop your own journalism startup. We'll move quickly from idea development into a fun and creative process for sharpening ideas into sketches. We'll test and refine those ideas and build prototypes. You'll conceive of and take steps toward launching your venture. You'll learn about what helps journalism startups succeed — and in some cases, fail. Past students have developed topic-focused sites, newsletters, and podcasts.
Social Video is about creating impactful multimedia for social media. We focus on identifying, conceiving and developing story ideas. We also work on strengthening the way we shoot and edit visual stories for social distribution. The platforms and tools employed by professional news organizations and independent journalists change frequently, so this course aims to help catch you up on some of the most important new developments in the world of social video. Along the way we explore new directions for platforms ranging from Instagram and Snapchat to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
Meet the next-generation news organization. In this module we'll explore the fast-changing world of innovation within newsrooms in NYC and across the globe. We'll visit a top-tier hub of news innovation and also host visits from industry experts. Each session centers on real-world case studies of news orgs remaking themselves to thrive in this new era of social/mobile news.
In this living laboratory module, we'll focus on the impact of new platforms and tools on the creation of innovative journalism products and services. Sessions will include hands-on demonstrations, experiments, games, challenges and debates. We'll explore how newsrooms can capitalize on VR, AR, AI, & more. We'll consider the use of Snapchat, and WhatsApp for reporting and news distribution.
Students develop business opportunities they've identified. They develop prototypes, products and services. Instructors and advisors help guide students as they develop ventures by providing input on identifying a niche market, assembling a team, overcoming obstacles, building a community and other topics crucial to the development of new journalism ventures.
Students explore the inner-workings of New York City-based hubs of media innovation. These include small startups as well as divisions of large media orgs developing new products and services. The course objective is to expose students to real-world entrepreneurship and organizational innovation and to enable them to observe and analyze local firms influencing next-gen media.