Yule Heibel
Terrific article by Neil Henry, professor and dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley, about the J-School's initiatives around local news reporting. Focusing on Linjun Fan's success with Albany Today (albanytoday.org), Henry explains how the students cover local news and use cutting edge multimedia tools.
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For nearly every story over the next two years, Linjun was first on the scene, using the most highly advanced digital tools to file her work to her site from all over town.
Most of the time she was the only reporter at any of the events she covered, a stark reality shared by most of her classmates in their own coverage of places as varied as El Cerrito, Emeryville, and West Oakland.
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Today, as they learn multimedia and community-based journalism, so do all of our students practice it, providing fresh content throughout the year to our other thriving digital news sites, Oakland North (oaklandnorth.net) and Mission Loc@l (missionlocal.org), which won a national award for Internet excellence recently for its coverage of San Francisco's Mission District.
And we continue to grow. In August we will launch a new digital news site devoted to the people of Richmond.
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We want to partner with other local sites run by people similarly committed to covering Bay Area communities. We envision legions of small businesses and other potential advertisers in the Bay Area finding tremendous new audiences through these ties. We are filled with excitement and purpose, fueled by the idealism and dedication of young students who increasingly are showing the way.
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local_news uc_berkeley journalism
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