News Topic:
Alumni Highlights
Few people truly understand the way algorithms on the internet work. How they recommend content and draw people in; or how to use them to maximize audience engagement and grow a following. But for Zainab Khan, they’re her expertise. A self-described “student of the internet,” Khan spent years in front of a glowing screen for…
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One year ago, the searing six-part docuseries “The Trials of Gabriel Fernandez” began streaming on Netflix. The film, based on reporting by Garrett Therolf of Berkeley Journalism’s Investigative Reporting Program (IRP), examines the brutal 2013 death of 8-year-old Gabriel Fernandez by his mother and her boyfriend and how misguided policies fail to protect children in peril. Brian Knappenberger is the…
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The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced shortlists in nine categories for the 93rd Academy Awards. In this most prized of lists is “Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution,” competing for Best Documentary Feature. “Crip Camp,” which premiered on Netflix, is about a groundbreaking summer camp in the Catskills in the 1970s—”a…
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A six-month investigation of California police officers with criminal records, led by Berkeley Journalism’s Investigative Reporting Program (IRP) and the Bay Area News Group (BANG), was honored this month by the Northern California chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. “California’s Criminal Cops,” which exposed hundreds of current and former police officers with rap sheets across the…
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Eight Berkeley Journalism alumni featured prominently at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Four were producers on new cinema vérité documentaries on education equity, one a story producer and editor on a documentary short about a Native Hawaiian queer slam poet, and two pushed boundaries presenting live performances and one recently joined the Sundance Institute as…
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Every four years, voices in the political industrial complex proclaim the upcoming presidential election the most important of our lives — perhaps even the most important since some long-ago marker like the Civil War. Each election, we’re told, is a fight for the very soul of America! This year is certainly no different, but what…
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Michelle Goldberg got her first up-close encounter with what she calls “rightwing postmodernism” covering the 2004 presidential campaign in Ohio. Out on the streets, with all his canvassers, it was easy to think John Kerry might have had the upper hand. But Goldberg found “the bones of what the George W. Bush turnout operation was…
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The 41st Annual News and Documentary Emmy Awards were announced this week. In all, more than 20 Berkeley Journalism alumni were recognized by the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, the highest number in our community since 2016. Closest to home, alumna and former instructor Daffodil Altan (‘04) and Berkeley Journalism Prof. and alum…
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At the outset of her undergraduate time at UC Berkeley, Terry McMillan did not have a major. When it came time to declare, she told a school counselor that she wanted to do sociology. “Why?” he asked. “I said, ‘I care about the human race,’” she remembers replying, “‘and how we treat each other and,…
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September 9, 2020 Dear Berkeley Journalism Community, Today, the Sundance Institute announced that it is naming Carrie Lozano to the position of director of its documentary film program. Please join me in congratulating Carrie on her appointment to one of the most important and prestigious positions in documentary film in the world. As many of…
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