Google Establishes Digital Media Travel Fellowships at J-School

Google Establishes Digital Media Travel Fellowships at J-School

The UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism announced today that Google will sponsor newly established travel fellowships for graduate students specializing in digital media. The funding will send students from the School’s acclaimed New Media program to top-tier conferences around the country, including the Online News Association, the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting (NICAR) and SXSW Interactive conferences.

Beginning this summer, a total of nine $1,000 Google Digital Media Travel Fellowships will be awarded based on need and promise.

The fellowships follow a spate of good news in the School’s prestigious New Media program, which has been at the head of the pack in training this evolving medium since the late 1990s.

In February, second-year student Jeremy C.F. Lin made the front page of The New York Times with his multimedia story on the Flint water crisis. In March, three second-year Berkeley journalism students received separate recognition from Google, through the prestigious Google News Lab fellowships. The three were among eight winners in a nationwide competition that drew some 1,800 applications. Berkeley’s three fellows were the largest number selected from any single journalism program in the country.

In April, first-year student Jason Hanasik was selected as the first ever virtual reality intern at The Los Angeles Times. On the prize front, six recent J-School alumni were nominated for Online Journalism Awards this year. A 2015 graduate took home the award for best work in the student project category.

“Google is delighted to be involved in helping the next crop of journalists who will go on to create the quality journalism that is a key ingredient of a vibrant and functioning society,” said spokeswoman Maggie Shiels. “These conferences are some of the best in their field and will undoubtedly provide a great opportunity for mixing, mingling and making contacts.”

The program is led by two of the most dynamic minds in the field: Emmy Award”Òwinning multimedia producer and Assistant Professor Richard “Koci” Hernandez, and Lecturer Jeremy Rue, a 2007 alum of the J-School. They recently co-published a book on multimedia storytelling, The Principles of Multimedia Journalism: Packaging Digital News.

“Good ol’ face-to-face networking is still the most valuable tool for young journalists to successfully make their way into the industry,” said Hernandez. “These fellowships are invaluable for our students, making sure they are in the mix at the best conferences in the business. Conferences help get us to our goal of diversifying and engaging the pool of potential employers for students.”

Rue said, “We are incredibly grateful for Google extending this opportunity to our students. The inspirations and opportunities they will gain from these conferences are invaluable. Every conference that our students have attended in the past results in tangible results: in the form of ideas for projects, learning new tools, or networking with future employers.”

About the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism

Since its founding 45 years ago during Berkeley’s watershed Free Speech Movement, the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism has graduated more than 2,000 students who have gone on to win virtually every major industry award and to steer the country’s top news organizations. One of the few remaining two-year journalism master’s programs in the country, the J-School’s Master of Journalism is also the only graduate-level journalism program in the vast, publicly funded University of California system. It also hosts the system’s only undergraduate minor in journalism.

The School of Journalism has as its core mission the education and training of news media practitioners who pursue professional excellence as a public service. The instruction is artisanal, with an emphasis on the production of high-impact, publishable work both for outlets operated by the School and for cooperating outside news organizations. The School’s values center around journalism as a practice consisting not just of competencies, but of the fair-minded pursuit and publication of significant information as a duty indispensable to civic life and social betterment.