Curriculum
In New Media: Courses Faculty Careers Events
New Media Faculty and Lecturers
Faculty
Qiang Xiao (Adjunct Professor)
Xiao Qiang, a Beijing native, is a professional observer and commentator on Chinese Internet, media and politics. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of the China Digital Times, an independent China news portal and directs the Berkeley China Internet project. Xiao also studied physics in China and US and has been a long time human rights activist. He is a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship in 2001, and is profiled in the book "Soul Purpose: 40 People Who Are Changing the World for the Better."
Paul Grabowicz (Senior Lecturer and Associate Dean)Paul Grabowicz is Director of the New Media Program at the Graduate School of Journalism and teaches classes in multimedia reporting and new media publishing.
Lecturers
Scholle Sawyer (Lecturer)
Scholle Sawyer is Executive Editor of Macworld
Pam Pfiffner (Editor in Chief)Pam Pfiffner has been editor in chief of several publications, including MacUser and Publish magazines.
Marilyn Pittman (Lecturer) 33 years in broadcasting as a talk show host, news anchor, announcer, engineer, producer, writer, commentator. 20 years as a broadcast educator and consultant, coaching talent for NPR, PRI and public radio stations, training community radio station hosts. Teaching performance modules in radio and new media classes and for the Knight Digital Media Center for more than a decade. Stand-up comic, documentary narrator, also. Bill Gannon (Lecturer)Bill Gannon is Director of Online Operations at Lucasfilm Ltd. and previously was Editorial Director and Managing Editor at Yahoo!.
Samantha Grant (Documentary Filmmaker)Samantha Grant is a Bay Area documentary film and radio producer. Through her production company GUSHproductions, LLC Samantha has worked with ABC, MTV, CNN, NPR, PRI, FRONTLINE/World, PBS, Al Jazeera International, and Current TV, as well as several national corporate clients like Merrill Lynch, AT&T, and Electronic Arts. Samantha’s work has received several awards including a student Emmy and a South Asian Journalists Association award for a short documentary she produced about the black market trade in Human Kidneys in India. In 2006, Samantha began work on a documentary film which is still in production about the Jayson Blair/New York Times scandal. In 2007, Sam was named a Carnegie/Knight fellow and through the News21 fellowship Sam directed a short documentary about life after Polygamy called “Now Leaving Colorado City”. When she’s not shooting, recording, producing or directing independent documentaries, you can find Sam lecturing at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and the Knight Digital Media Center.
Jeremy Rue (Multimedia Training Instructor) Jeremy Rue is a multimedia training instructor for the Knight Digital Media Center located at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. He teaches Flash and other programs for a series of week-long multimedia training workshops for professional working journalists through a program funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Richard Hernandez (Lecturer)Richard Koci-Hernandez worked as a photographer at the San Jose Mercury News for 15 years. His work has appeared in Time, Newsweek, USA Today, The New York Times and international magazines, including Stern. In 2003, Richard was the recipient of the James K. Batten Knight Ridder Excellence Award. His work for the Mercury News has earned him two Pulitzer Prize nominations. His photography and multimedia work has won numerous awards on the national and regional level, including two Emmy nominations. Richard was named deputy director of photography and multimedia after spearheading the creation of MercuryNewsPhoto.com. He has taught multimedia workshops for Stanford University, National Press Photographers Association, The Southern Short Course, National Association for Hispanic Journalists and National Association for Black Journalists. He has lectured at USC Annenberg School for Communication and Stanford University. Koci-Hernandez is a San Francisco State University journalism graduate, where he has been a guest instructor.
Alan Mutter (Lecturer)Alan D. Mutter began his career as a newspaper columnist and editor at the Chicago Daily News and later rose to City Editor of the Chicago Sun-Times. In 1984, he became the No. 2 editor of the San Francisco Chronicle. He left the newspaper business in 1988 to join InterMedia Partners, a start-up company that became one of the largest cable-TV companies in the country. Mutter was the COO of InterMedia when he moved to Silicon Valley in 1996 to lead the first of the three start-up companies he led as CEO. The companies he headed were a pioneering Internet service provider and two enterprise-software companies delivering cutting-edge solutions for media companies. Mutter now is a consultant specializing in corporate initiatives and new media ventures that combine his twin passions, journalism and technology. He joined the adjunct faculty of the Journalism School in January, 2009.
Kara Platoni (Lecturer)Kara Platoni was a staff writer for the East Bay Express for eight years, and is now Senior Editor at Terrain, a Berkeley-based environmental quarterly. She is also a freelance science writer whose work has appeared in Smithsonian, Popular Science, Air & Space, and other magazines. This fall she's co-teaching J200 with Cynthia Gorney and their class is producing the hyperlocal news site OaklandNorth.net. More information and favorite stories at KaraPlatoni.com.
Josh Williams (Ford Foundation Fellow)Josh Williams, formerly new media projects editor at the Las Vegas Sun, is a Multimedia Teaching Fellow at the J-School, where he is involved in the school's News21 project and Knight Digital Media Center. He managed the launch of the Sun's new website in 2008, which won awards from the Online News Association for general excellence and from Editor & Publisher for best overall newspaper affiliated site. Prior to that, Josh was a multimedia exhibit developer at the Smithsonian Institution for three years. He has a master's degree in interactive journalism from American University and a bachelor's degree in multimedia journalism from the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill.
Previous Instructors
Kelly Lunsford (Visiting Lecturer)
Kelly Lunsford is Assistant Editor at Macworld.
Jason Snell (Editorial Director)Jason Snell is Editor of Macworld.
Jane Stevens (Visiting Lecturer)Jane Stevens is a freelance multimedia journalist who began a newspaper career at the Boston Globe and San Francisco Examiner. She's been an assistant foreign/national editor, Sunday magazine writer, and technology reporter and columnist. She founded a syndicated science and technology feature service with 20 newspaper clients worldwide, including the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and Asahi Shimbun's AERA Magazine. For four years, she lived and worked in Kenya and Indonesia. She’s written for magazines, including National Geographic, and worked for New York Times Television as a videojournalist. She has done multimedia reporting for the New York Times, Discovery Channel, and MSNBC.com. E-mail Jane Stevens.
Robin Wise (Visiting Lecturer)Robin Wise is an independent audio engineer working from her post-production studio, Sound Imagery, in Sebastopol, CA.
Robin has engineered and served as technical director for over 150 radio documentaries. Awards received for these programs include The Peabody Award, The Robert Wood Johnson Award, AAAS Award, Silver Baton of the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Award, Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, Women in Communications Award, and the Clarion Award. Robin has provided digital audio technology training and consulting at the United Nations, AARP Headquarters, Marketplace, Savvy Traveler, radio stations, SoundPrint Media Center, and to countless radio documentarians. Her field recording locations include India, Pakistan, South Africa, Central America and Europe. Robin performs post production for Simon & Schuster Audio Books, and creates CD masters and DVDs for diverse projects.
Russell Chun is a senior producer for Art and Media at Benjamin Cummings, an educational science textbook publisher in San Francisco, where he develops and directs instructional media. He has authored three books on Macromedia Flash, a program for interactive animation for the web: “Flash 5 Advanced Visual
QuickPro Guide”, “Flash MX Advanced Visual QuickPro Guide,” and "Flash MX 2004 Advanced Visual QuickPro Guide" published by Peachpit Press in association with Macromedia Press. Russell has a Bachelor’s degree in biology from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and a Master’s degree in medical illustration from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
Gregg Zachary is a former Wall Street Journal correspondent based in London.
Katie Hafner (Visiting Instructor)Katie Hafner is a reporter for The New York Times. She has written four books: "Cyperbunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier" (with John Markoff); "The House at the Bridge: A Story of Modern Germany"; "Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet" (with Matthew Lyon); and "The Well: A Story of Love, Death and Real Life in the Seminal Online Community". She is currently at work on a fifth book. She has also worked at Business Week and Newsweek. She has been writing about technology since 1983.
Jonathan Weber is editorial director for Standard Media International ("The Standard"), publisher of the weekly newsmagazine The Industry Standard, and daily Web site TheStandard.com. As founding editor-in-chief of The Industry Standard, Weber propelled the three-year-old newsweekly and its Web site into an award-winning news organization, garnering two National Magazine Award nominations, a Maggie award and numerous other national honors and accolades. Weber formerly served as technology editor for the Los Angeles Times, and was responsible for launching the Times? highly successful technology section, "The Cutting Edge." Prior to that, he was a reporter for the Times in San Francisco and New York.
Pete Deemer, is an executive at CNET and former vice president of ZDNet. He is a co-founder of SpotMedia Communications, whose flagship publication, GameSpot, grew to become one of the largest entertainment information sites online and later merged with ZDNet.
James Fallows (Lecturer)Fallows has written magazine articles, mainly for the Atlantic Monthly, about a wide variety of topics, including about technology. He is author of the book, "Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy."
Michael Lewis (Lecturer)Michael Lewis, a Koret Teaching Fellow, is a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine and author of The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story, which will be published in fall of 1999.
David Weir (Hewlett Fellow - Lecturer)David Weir is a Lokey Visiting Professor of Journalism at Stanford. He's a veteran journalist who was formerly Editor in Chief of 7x7 magazine in S.F.; Executive VP and Acting Radio News Director at KQED; an investigative reporter for Rolling Stone; a senior editor of California magazine; Managing Editor of Mother Jones; an editorial writer for the San Francisco Examiner; and co-founder and Executive Director of the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR).
He's authored or co-authored three books, including the textbook Raising Hell:
How the Center for Investigative Reporting Gets the Story (with Dan Noyes,
1983); and over 150 articles for various publications (including the New York
Times, the Economist, New York, the LA Weekly, Rolling Stone, New West, The
Nation, Mother Jones, HotWired, Salon and many others).
He is currently at work on his fourth book, a biography of Rolling Stone founder, editor and publisher Jann Wenner.
Robert Magnuson has 25 years experience in the media business, as a journalist, news executive, publisher, CEO and consultant. He has been an economics editor at Business Week, Hong Kong Bureau Chief of the Asian Wall Street Journal, Business Editor of the Los Angeles Times and a Senior Vice President of The Times. He most recently was President and CEO of InfoWorld Media Group, a leading information technology publishing company. Currently, he is CEO of The Magnuson Group, a media and business strategies firm that provides senior counsel to corporations, governments, universities and non-profit organizations.
Bob began his journalism career as an economics editor at Business Week. He returned to his home town of Los Angeles as a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times and three years later moved to Hong Kong as Bureau Chief for the Asian Wall Street Journal. He served briefly as Business Editor of the Oakland Tribune before rejoining the Los Angeles Times in 1984.
He was a member of The Times staff that won two Pulitzer Prizes, in 1993 for coverage of the Los Angeles Riots and in 1995 for coverage of the Northridge Earthquake.
Ellen Seidler is an 18-year broadcast journalism veteran. She worked for ABC News in New York as an assignment editor, then joined KRON-TV in San Francisco as a photojournalist and editor. Currently, she is a tenured professor in Media Communications at Contra Costa College in San Pablo, CA. She is also a lecturer in Digital Media at U.C. Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. Ellen also recently created a non-profit website, www.breastcancernetwork.org, which provides categorized links to a variety of breast cancer resources across the web. Ellen received her Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from Harvard University, and her Master’s degree in Journalism from UC Berkeley.
Neil Chase is managing editor at CBS MarketWatch.com in San Francisco. MarketWatch's 120 journalists in 9 bureaus worldwide produce breaking financial news around the clock on the Web, on television and radio, and in print. He is a member of the board of directors of the Online News Association. Chase spent five years as a professor at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, where he launched the graduate and undergraduate new-media journalism programs and was the school's director of technology. Before joining the Northwestern faculty he worked as an editor at The San Francisco Examiner and The Arizona Republic and helped to launch a Russian-American newspaper that was a joint effort of Hearst and Izvestia. He has consulted for dozens of news and technology companies and written for magazines ranging from Time and Digital Chicago to Nightclub and Bar Journal.
Yehuda Kalay (Carnegie Fellow - Prof. Architecture)Yehuda Kalay, a professor in the UC Berkeley Architecture Department, is author of "Architecture's New Media" and director of the UC Berkeley Center for New Media.
John Battelle is one of the co-founders of Wired magazine and former CEO of The Industry Standard.
Adam Block (Visiting Professor)Adam Block formerly was director of product development at PC World Online Services.
Andrew DeVigal (Multimedia Skills)Andrew DeVigal is an information designer, illustrator, speaker and educator and a principal of DeVigal Design, a design firm. He is assistant professor at San Francisco State University, teaching visual and online journalism, and a visiting professonal with The Poynter Institute, teaching and directing seminars in the area of new media and Visual journalism. He was involved with the Stanford-Poynter Project, a research study on how users read online news using an Eye Tracking System. Formerly he was an interface designer for Knight-Ridder New Media in San Jose, designing many of the early verticals offered by Real Cities, and a producer for chicagotribune.com, shaping the look and format of the original Internet version. Before making the transition to online,he was an informational graphic artist working with reporters creating the visual stories, including at the Contra Costa Times for a number of years. He also runs a site called InteractiveNarratives.org that chronicles examples of storytelling on the Web.
Dan Gillmor (Lecturer)Dan Gillmor, a former newspaper columnist, is this fall's I.F. Stone Teaching Fellow and author of "We the Media." He is director of the Center for Citizen Media, a project affiliated with the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University Law School.
Don Lattin (Carnegie Fellow - Lecturer)Don Lattin is one of the nation's leading journalists covering alternative and mainstream religious movements and figures in America. He is the author of "Following Our Bliss - How the Spiritual Ideals of the Sixties Shape Our Lives Today" (HarperSanFrancisco 2003) and co-author (with Richard Cimino) of "Shopping for Faith - American Religion in the New Millennium" (Jossey Bass 1998).
His work has appeared in dozens of U.S. magazines and newspapers, including the San Francisco Chronicle, where Don covered the religion beat for nearly two decades. He has also worked as a consultant and commentator for Dateline NBC; PrimeTime Live and Good Morning America on ABC Television; American Morning on CNN and Religion and Ethics News Weekly on PBS.
Don has taught religion writing at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, where he holds a degree in sociology. He was also a fellow in the Program in Religious Studies for Journalists at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.
Laura Hilliger (Lecturer)Laura Hilliger is part of Rudner Design Works and teaches classes in Flash, design and other subjects for the Bay Area Video Coalition and Sonic Training.
Abigail Rudner (Lecturer)Abigail Rudner is a designer and faculty member at Cal State in the Art and Multimedia Department. She is a graduate of Parsons School of Design with a BFA in Communication Design and Photography.
Valerie Krist (lecturer)Carnegie Fellow Valerie Krist is a web and Flash interactive designer for a series of marine life websites for TOPP (Tagging Of Pacific Predators) out of the Stanford Hopkins Marine Station in Monterey. She has collaborated on and created projects for Yahoo!, the University of California, Oceans Foundation, California Dept. of Fish and Game, the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley (the U.S. Military Abroad), and Stanford University as well as privately owned businesses and corporations. With a background in illustration, Valerie has licensed her artwork to greeting card and publishing companies including Portal Publications, Renaissance Greeting Cards and Design Design. Her portfolio also includes home and business murals. More about Krist.
Dan Robinson (Lecturer)Carnegie Fellow Dan Robinson is a co-founder of CivicActions and the Technology Practice Lead. Mr. Robinson began his technology career in High School in 1977 in a programming course. He has extensive experience in data center operations, system administration and management, system security, electronic publishing, programming, system's analysis and design, system's architecture, relational database design and programming, design and programming of client-server and distributed systems, fault-tolerant and highly-available systems. Before forming CivicActions Mr. Robinson worked with a wide variety of commercial companies including Time-Life, Hewlett Packard, Bank of America, Varian, EDS, MCI and Charles Schwab. Mr. Robinson's deep technical experience and his ability to understand and communicate how they effect and are effected by critical business issues puts him in an excellent position to bridge the gaps between technology and it's effective utilization in real world situations. In addition to Mr. Robinson's professional background he also has a long history of community organizing and the promotion of social justice and positive social change. In the early 80s he worked to oppose the U.S. wars in Central America and spent time in Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua. He also worked in San Francisco's Mission District assisting political refugees, and raising money and support for community and technology projects in Central America. Since that time Mr. Robinson has been heavily engaged in civic life at the community as well as national level. Mr. Robinson's work at CivicActions allows him to apply his technical experience to tackle pressing social, environmental and political issues that he feels deeply about.
David Charron (Visiting Lecturer)Charron has a bachelor of science degree in mechanical engineering from
Stanford and his MBA from Haas. He joined the faculty in 2003 after having
served as CEO of 6Gear Inc. and Osner Inc. Charron has also consulted for
various startups, serves as Executive Director of the Berkeley
Entrepreneurship Laboratory and is a Mentor to the Global Social Venture
Competition at Haas. Charron teaches several courses at Haas
including, Entrepreneurship & Innovation Entrepreneurship Workshop for
Start-Ups Life as an Entrepreneur, Business Model Innovation for New
Ventures.
Terisa started working with KRON in 2001. A veteran of the news business, Terisa's experience spans much of the nation. She previously worked as a correspondent for CBS's Newspath traveling the nation to all breaking news events. Terisa has covered numerous high-profile court cases including the trial of the men accused of beating and killing Matthew Shepard's because he was gay, and the trial and execution of Timothy McVeigh. Terisa has also traveled the country covering national disasters including the country's worst floods, hurricanes, and fires.
Turning to politics, Terisa worked as a White House correspondent for Tribune Broadcasting during President Clinton's first term. She was later on the scene for much of the breaking news surrounding the 2000 Presidential race between President Bush and then Candidate Al Gore.
In more than two decades as a journalist, Terisa has worked for television stations in Los Angeles, Houston, Texas, Sacramento, Reno and Eureka. Now settled in the Bay Area, Terisa covers a wide range of topics for KRON-TV, with an emphasis on crime, the courts and top investigative stories of the day.
Terisa was born and raised in the Bay Area and is very proud and extremely happy to be back home covering the important stories for Bay Area residents.
She lives in the North Bay with her dog, Kalvin.
Geeta Dayal (Multimedia Fellow)Geeta Dayal worked most recently as a researcher at the M.I.T. Center for Future Civic Media, which won a $5 million Knight News Challenge grant to design new technologies to foster community engagement. She holds two bachelors' degrees from M.I.T. and a master's degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She taught several courses in journalism and related subjects as an adjunct lecturer at Fordham University and at the State University of New York. Her articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Village Voice, Bookforum, The International Herald-Tribune, and many other national and international publications. She has also worked on many award-winning broadcast projects, including documentaries for PBS and public radio. She is the recipient of several honors, including a 2005 Arthur F. Burns Fellowship, awarded by the International Center for Journalists. Her book Another Green World will be published by Continuum in 2009.
Eric Simons (Lecturer)Eric Simons is the author of Darwin Slept Here: Discovery, Adventure, and Swimming Iguanas in Charles Darwin's South America in February. Simons brings a strong background in writing for daily, weekly, and monthly outlets, and a few years professional copy editing and line-editing experience (at the former ANG Newspapers). Simons grew up in the East Bay, and has done considerable reporting on East Bay history.
Mia Lobel (Lecturer)Mia Lobel in an independent audio producer and journalist based in Oakland, CA. After graduating from the jschool in 2001 she went on to work for media outlets across the country including KQED, The Tavis Smiley Show, Youth Radio, Antenna Audio, and B-Side Radio. She is co-founder and senior producer of Distillations – a chemistry podcast for the Chemical Heritage Foundation, a Philadelphia-based non-profit specializing in the history of chemistry. Mia is also the founder of Freelance Café, a support, networking and resource center for Bay Area independents. (You may have seen her posts on the jschool jobblog.) The group encourages both online and in-person collaboration with freelancers of diverse fields. In her spare time, Mia is a mommy blogger and book club enthusiast.