Developing digital media content

The Meld team have been busy on a number of projects including the next stage of the Meld Pathfinder project. After a successful validation of the course modules, developed with our industry panel, we have been gathering course material for the Postgraduate Certificate in Digital Media.

Talking to people in industry has always been a key part of the development of the digital media course. Our thinking has always been that many of these these interviews will form part of the core material for the course, so that students can share in the debate and use the content as a springboard for their own thoughts and ideas.

The latest bunch of people we’ve been talking to included a bunch of people from the US.

We sat down with Jan Schaffer, executive director of J-lab and talked about the future of journalism funding and community journalism. We spoke to Propublica, the investigative reporting site that encourages you to “steal their stories” about where they fit in to future models of journalism. We spoke to their Editor of Distributed Reporting Amanda Michel, about managing user communities, her experience directing Off the bus for the Huffington Post and her latest role managing Propublica’s Reporting Network. We also spent time with Michael Messinger, Director, Internet at Voice of America where we talked about managing media across a range of languages and the challenges the web brings to a multi-platform organisation. Craig Duff, the director of multimedia at Time.com talked about managing multimedia and his experiences of moving from TV to the web. Beth Frerking, Assistant Managing Editor at Washington based politics website Politico told us about their content sharing network and how politico has managed to grow in to such a major player in such a short space of time – and still keep a print publication going!

Academics also got a look in as Jay Rosen talked about the role of journalism and how it was changing in the digital age and Amy Eisman shared her experiences of the move from print to the web and her view of where the industry is going.

We are still busy gathering interviews and material for the course and to get access to all of this great material all you need to do is sign-on.