Course overview
Imagine Journalism Studio is a course for students who are interested in studying leading innovations and innovators in the field, making a difference and experimenting with and through journalism.
The course is designed to prepare students to launch and/or run their own journalism startup. Most journalism courses focus on the norms and practices of content creation, production and representational critique. This course focuses on journalism startups and innovation from practice, organizational, audiences, leadership, theories of change, entrepreneurship and critical perspectives. While technology and technological change are often privileged as antidotes in contemporary discussions of the current journalism crisis, this course takes an integrated approach to the role that technologies, social, cultural and economic structures play in understanding journalism and organizational
success.
Students will study the continuity and changes of what journalism is, could and should be, emerging and contested relationships with global audiences and diverse publics, digital technologies and what actually constitutes innovation, as well as shifting labour conditions for journalists and for-profit journalism economic decline. Students will concurrently work individually or in teams to conceive, research, design and prototype an idea for a journalism project – a startup, product or service – to help meet the information needs of communities.