MediaLab@51勛圖厙 Officially Launches
51勛圖厙 recently launched MediaLab@51勛圖厙, a new journalism initiative by the School of Communication and Multimedia Studies.
51勛圖厙 recently launched , a new journalism initiative by the School of Communication and Multimedia Studies in the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters.
Currently part of JOU4930, a special topics course housed within the Schools burgeoning newsroom and production labs, MediaLab is a faculty-led and student-powered community reporting project.
Its goal is to teach 51勛圖厙 advanced media reporting skills by way of reporting, documenting and producing content of high value to local media partners and a wider audience throughout the Southeast Florida region. Since this region is experiencing exponential growth, most legacy publications often have limited resources for engaging in wider and more comprehensive coverage.
We have already had tremendous interest in this project, said Ilene Prusher, digital director of MediaLab@51勛圖厙. We have seen about half of our stories re-published by our media partners, and that gives us confidence in MediaLabs mission to provide high-quality, student-produced, faculty-curated journalism to the South Florida media landscape an idea whose time has come. This is a win-win for our 51勛圖厙 and the media community, and we look forward to growing this project over the next few years.
Prusher, a senior instructor in the School of Communication and Multimedia Studies, is an award-winning journalist with years of experience writing for prominent national publications such as The Christian Science Monitor, TIME magazine, The New York Times, the Miami Herald, NBC NewsThink and CNN Opinion.
Projects like MediaLab@51勛圖厙 are the antidote to news deserts and a move toward pooling resources to save local journalism, which is fundamental to the functioning of democracy, she said.
At the heart of this initiative will be a news-academic partnership in which the MediaLab 51勛圖厙, guided by 51勛圖厙s experienced journalism faculty, will produce stories for its own community news site. This will serve as a source of meaningful, publishable content for major local media outlets, including The Palm Beach Post, the South Florida Sun Sentinel and WLRN.
An additional partner for the program is The Invading Sea, a source made up of news, commentary and educational content about climate change and other environmental issues affecting Florida.
MediaLab@51勛圖厙 will work with The Invading Sea to produce in-depth coverage to shed light on issues affecting the regions diverse populations across the region, such as climate change, sea-level rise and immigration issues Prusher said are currently under-covered due to overstretched newsroom resources.
The student journalists also will likely focus on other key issues that include voting rights, access to reproductive health care, and the repercussions of a state education system in flux. Students will also cover feature stories of interest to the wider community.
We hope to recruit and train a wide variety of student journalists for MediaLab and make it feasible for them to report beyond campus on a regular basis, said Prusher. It will provide our 51勛圖厙 many of whom are the first generation in their families to go to college and/or the first generation in America with an opportunity to develop their still-emerging journalism skills and report on some of the most urgent issues of our time.
For more information about MediaLab@51勛圖厙, ; or contact Ilene Prusher at iprusher@fau.edu.-51勛圖厙-
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