New Media Faculty & Lecturers

Faculty

Paul Grabowicz (Senior Lecturer, Associate Dean and Bloomberg Chair in Journalism)

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.

Richard Koci Hernandez (Assistant Professor)

Richard Koci-Hernandez is an Emmy Award winning visual journalist who 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.

Lecturers

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.

Samantha Grant (Documentary Filmmaker)

Samantha Grant is a documentary filmmaker, journalist, and educator. Through her production company GUSHproductions Samantha has worked with FRONTLINE, ABC, MTV, CNN, NPR, PRI, FRONTLINE/World, PBS, Al Jazeera International, and Current TV, as well as several national corporate clients like Pandora, Merrill Lynch, AT&T and Electronic Arts. A third generation journalist, Sam considers it a joy and a privilege to bring to life stories that are compelling, character-driven narratives rooted solidly in journalism. Her approach to storytelling is informed by both her undergraduate degree in American Studies/Literature from Yale University and her Master’s of Journalism degree from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Sam was a 2007 Carnegie/Knight Fellow, and is an alumna of the WGBH CPB/PBS Producers Academy. Sam was also selected as a BAVC MediaMaker Fellow in 2011. Currently, Sam is directing the ITVS Open Call funded feature documentary A FRAGILE TRUST: Plagiarism, Power, and Jayson Blair at the New York Times , about the 2003 Jayson Blair Journalism scandal. In addition, Sam received funding to build DECISIONS ON DEADLINE an Alternate Reality Educational News Game that teaches journalism ethics as a companion project to A FRAGILE TRUST. Also, Sam is Producing/Shooting the independent feature documentary GIRLS IN THE FOREST about a revolutionary all-girls agricultural boarding school in the last old-growth forest in Paraguay. When she's not shooting, producing or directing documentaries, you can find Sam lecturing at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, lecturing at Stanford's Knight Fellowship program, or hanging out with her husband and their two beautiful daughters.

Jeremy Rue (Lecturer, Ford Fellow)

Jeremy Rue is a Lecturer of digital storytelling at the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Before formally joining the ranks of the grad school, he was formerly a multimedia instructor for the Knight Digital Media Center at UC Berkeley where he taught workshops to hundreds of professional journalists on new media storytelling techniques. He has spoken at conferences for the Associated Press Managing Editors, National Association of Hispanic Journalists, National Association of Black Journalists, American Association of Sunday Feature Editors and the Association of Alternative Newsmedia. He has led several newsroom trainings on the transition to digital journalism, including National Public Radio, American Public Media and the University of California Office of the President. He was a technical editor for several textbooks on Adobe Flash, and Adobe Dreamweaver. Rue worked as a multimedia journalist for the Oakland Tribune; as a multimedia producer and photographer for a Carnegie-Knight funded reporting fellowship; as a photojournalist for The Fresno Bee, The Modesto Bee and the Duluth News-Tribune in Minnesota; and as a reporter for the Selma (Calif.) Enterprise, where he covered city government, courts and crime. Rue is the recipient of the 2007 Dorothea Lange Fellowship for his photo documentary work on migrant farm workers in the California Central Valley. He is an experienced web developer with knowledge in HTML/CSS, JavaScript, Unix/Linux, PHP/MySQL and a variety of other scripting languages. He has a Master of Journalism degree from UC Berkeley.

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.

Previous Lecturers

Scot Hacker (Webmaster, Knight Digital Media Center)

Scot Hacker is the Webmaster at the school of Journalism and the author of O'Reilly's "MP3: The Definitive Guide," as well as Peachpit's "The BeOS Bible." He is the author of dozens of technology articles for PC Magazine, Byte, MacWorld, and ZiffNet. Hacker also runs an independent web hosting and consulting business.

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 (Multimedia Skills)

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.

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 (Visiting Lecturer)

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 (Lecturer)

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."

Scholle Sawyer (Lecturer)

Scholle Sawyer is Executive Editor of Macworld

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 (Visiting Fellow - Lecturer)

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 (Multimedia Skills)

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 (Visiting Lecturer)

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.

Marilyn Pittman (Lecturer, Talent Coach)

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.

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.

Bill Gannon (Lecturer)

Bill Gannon is the Director of Digital Media at Lucasfilm Ltd. where he has company-wide strategic and operational leadership roles and responsibilities. Before joining Lucasfilm he served as Senior Editorial Director and Managing Editor of Yahoo! Inc. where he had corporate-wide editorial strategy and content leadership responsibilities in product development, content programming, front page news, brand voice, and a range of policy issues. Gannon was previously Editorial Director & Managing Editor of Financial Engines Inc., of Palo Alto, Ca. For more than a decade Gannon was a national correspondent and staff writer for The Star-Ledger of NJ, and Newhouse Newspapers Inc., where he covered a range of international, national and regional issues for the newspaper and the news service. He currently serves as co-chairman of the Knight Digital Media Center and also serves on the Board of Advisors to New Voices, a community news incubator project sponsored by J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism at American University. He has been a lecturer in the New Media program at the Graduate School of Journalism since 2005.

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.

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.

Josh Williams (Ford Foundation Fellow)

Josh Williams is lecturer at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, where he teaches skills courses in new media and helps run the school's three student-produced, hyper-local Web sites. Before Berkeley, he was the new media projects editor for the Las Vegas Sun. Williams 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 and a Web developer at several Washington, D.C. companies. 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.