Through a continuing series of news and digital literacy programs, students come to understand differences among sources, how to ferret out and verify reported facts, how to conduct their own reporting in their communities and how to be responsible “journalists” in their own content creation and social networking and Internet publication activities.

The programs are based on a news and digital literacy seminar and a toolkit of interactive classroom exercises created by Geanne Rosenberg of Baruch College, in collaboration with Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Ed Madison of the Media Arts Institute, and Esther Wojcicki of Palo Alto High and the Creative Commons, along with Google and Stanford University. Included are teacher workshops and a series of classes and exercises for students.

Funded by the Robert R. McCormick Foundation with support from the Harnisch Foundation.

Ethnic News Media Internship and Mentoring Program

Kellogg Event This educational pilot project fosters community leadership qualities and communication skills in immigrant high school students and mentors role models for the ELL population – a population whose graduation rates are dropping. Training in effective social media use, in news literacy, and internships in ethnic publications provide an opportunity for immigrant high school students to develop, contextualize, and leverage these skills while gaining real work experience writing for their communities.

The project has selected 12 immigrant high school students with proven writing and/or journalism interests and involve 12 ethnic publications. Read more at the project website.

Funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation with support from The Harnisch Foundation.

Media Law Projects

Journalism Schools as News Providers: Limiting Legal Risk

This broad collaboration with journalism educators, journalism school deans and directors, news directors and media lawyers resulted in suggestions for journalism programs nationwide to support their journalism while helping them to sensibly limit their legal risk. Suggestions are available here. The project included two Poynter Institute national task force meetings and two Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication pre-conference, multi-panel events, one in August 2010 in Denver and another in August 2012 in Chicago.

Funded by the Carnegie Corporation with additional support from the Harnisch Foundation.

Newsgathering Liability Online Course

David Ardia and Geanne Rosenberg co-wrote this interactive online course in collaboration with Poynter’s News University, which produced the site. Launched in spring 2011 with funding from the Harnisch Foundation and Google’s Matt Cutts, this course provides instruction in avoiding legal liability while engaging in newsgathering activities. Available FREE on Poynter’s NewsU.

See past Media Law events.

News & Digital Literacy Projects

CUNY-wide News and Digital Literacy Committee

Collaborating with faculty from CUNY senior and community colleges to pilot new approaches to involving News and Digital Literacy in the curriculum on the various campuses.

Freshman Seminar News and Digital Literacy Pilot Program

Developed by Geanne Rosenberg, in collaboration with the Youth and Media team at Harvard’s Berkman Center, this program piloted in November 2011. Faculty, in addition to Geanne Rosenberg, included Bridgett Davis and Christopher Hallowell. Funded with support by the David and Katherine Moore Family Foundation and the Harnisch Journalism Projects grants.

High School News Literacy Summit

Harnisch Funds have been used to expand and supplement the Inaugural News Literacy Summit at Baruch in fall 2010, funded primarily by the McCormick Foundation. (http://blsciblogs.baruch.cuny.edu/hsnewsliteracy/)

High School News Literacy Workshop

In conjunction with the High School News Literacy Summit, educators from around the country met for a one-night workshop to discuss how they’ve included news and digital literacy in their curricula.

Virtual News and Digital Literacy Summit

McCormick provided funding for a fall 2012 Virtual Summit, created in collaboration with Harvard’s Berkman Center, MIT, Juana Ponce de Leon and others.

High School Journalism Collaborative

Annual NYC High School Journalism Conference

Newsies winners show off their awards.

In collaboration with CUNY Journalism (Jere Hester and Indrani Sen) and two high school journalism advisers, this project includes an annual high school journalism conference at Baruch during which hundreds of public high school students from throughout New York City, along with their advisers, participate in educational workshops and events in an all-day conference. In 2010, this program launched the Newsies, the first ever city-wide journalism contest for New York City high school students. The collaborative, in addition to the annual conference, includes year-round workshops for high school newspaper advisers and student editors.

Directing this project is Katina Paron, who is supported through the Harnisch Journalism Projects Fund, with Geanne Rosenberg serving in an executive director role but involved in programming and education and related content. It was initially funded by the McCormick Foundation and is now solely supported by the Harnisch grant. Visit the conference site.

More Student Collaborative Projects:

Global Film Series at CUNY Journalism, March 2012
From YouTube to the Silver Screen, an educational program for NYC high school and CUNY students, journalists and filmmakers. Sponsored by the Harnisch Journalism Projects and Baruch College. Dean Stephen Shepard delivered welcoming remarks. See accompanying website.

Experimentation with New Business Models

East 20s Eats experimental hyper-local site

This local food site was developed in consultation with Lisa Williams, of Placeblogger and formerly M.I.T., and Poynter’s Bill Mitchell. Baruch professor Vera Haller was poject director through construction of the site and development of the editorial plan, and Baruch lecturer Craig Stone led on technology and directed community and revenue building experimentation for the project. Katina Paron, also of Baruch, served as the managing editor.

The project provides a platform for multi-media publishing for Baruch students and interns but is different from other journalism department-based projects in that, in addition to editorial and multimedia content, the site integrates a database of information about local business, automatically pulls in news feeds from food and other related sites, contains an interactive map that allows for searches and mining of data-base and editorial information collected by the site, allows for revenue building including coupons and advertising, and allows for social networking and community building. Just figuring out how to design and build the site was a major research project that expanded the knowledge and experience of journalism faculty and students, and was documented on a project blog. Now that the experiment has run its course, the site remains available for further use and experimentation, depending upon the needs and interests of the Department of Journalism and the Writing Professions. It can be seen at www.east20seats.com.