The Emmy win by UBC journalism students and faculty for an investigative documentary on e-waste is a prime example the emerging partnerships between schools, foundations and the media. The documentary, Ghana: Digital Dumping Ground, was produced by students of the International Reporting class, under the supervision of Professor Peter Klein, for PBS Frontline/World. It was made possible by  a $1 million donation from Mindset Social Innovation Foundation to fund an international reporting

On Wednesday 21 July, I’ll be talking at the IAMCR conference in Braga about our integrated journalism programme at the Graduate School of Journalism, University of British Columbia. Here are my slides: Lessons from integrated approach to journalism education View more presentations from Alfred Hermida

On Friday, I gave a presentation to science and health researchers at UBC about blogging. The purpose was to discuss how blogs could help them share their research and engage with others interested in the same areas. Among the examples I cited as different approaches to blogging were Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science, BBC environment correspondent Richard Black’s Earthwatch, the Knight Science Journalism Tracker, and the Neuroethics at the Core group

Please join me in congratulating my journalism students on the first edition of this academic year of our online publication, TheThunderbird.ca. My colleagues and myself at the UBC Graduate School of Journalism have been working with our grad students on stories from their beats in Vancouver. It was their first major assignment of the semester. This week was crunch time, with Thursday being an intense day of final edits and

Dr Siva Vaidhyanathan was briefly in Vancouver for a talk about his forthcoming book, The Googlization of Everything. To him, Googlization is the process of the world being processed, rendered and represented by Google. He argues this is problematic, given Google’s mission to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible. His concern is that Google’s focus on satisfying the consumer is “fabulous for shopping, but we make a

I’m very pleased to announce that Eric Ulken, a former editor from the Los Angeles Times, is joining the UBC Graduate School of Journalism. Eric is coming as the Canwest Visiting Professor for 2009-2010. He spent four years at the LA Times as managing news editor for latimes.com and as editor of interactive technology. He is known in online journalism circles for developing new ways of collecting, organizing and presenting

The Asian American Journalists Association held its first inaugural meeting in Vancouver on Friday 18 September, hosted by the UBC Graduate School of Journalism. I was honoured to be on the panel to discuss issues of diversity and the future of the journalism industry. In my remarks, I focused on how journalism is changing and how the way we teach journalism is evolving. Here is the audio of my brief

Image by Giorgio____ via Flickr Given the tidal wave of bad news about the journalism industry, a story with the headline, “Surprise! J-school grads are finding jobs“, is bound to attract attention. Best of all, the headline is not link bait. Instead the Daily Finance story reports on how journalism school graduates in the US are thriving. It found that two-thirds of recent grads from Columbia University’s Graduate School of

Here is my latest column for PBS Mediashift on how journalism students are taking to social media to build up a reputation: One of my students landed her first A1 story on Monday. Amanda Ash’s story on auditions for the sequel to the teen vampire blockbuster “Twilight” was splashed across the front page of the Vancouver Sun. But she first alerted me, and her 130 other followers on Twitter, to

We run a visiting professor scheme at the UBC Graduate School of Journalism and the deadline for applications is fast approaching. The aim of the scheme is to bring in professional journalists who are interested in coming to Vancouver to work with the students and teach a course in their area of specialty.  From the school website: The incumbent is expected to reside in Vancouver for the 3 1/2-month period