Studio 20: New Media and Digital Innovation

Faculty

• Jay Rosen
  Associate Professor Studio 20, Director
  
  

  Jay Rosen has been on the faculty since 1986, and from 1999 to 2005 he served as chair of the Department. He lives in New York City.

  Rosen is the author of PressThink, a weblog about journalism and its ordeals (www.pressthink.org), which he introduced in September 2003. In June 2005, PressThink won the Reporters Without Borders 2005 Freedom Blog award for outstanding defense of free expression. In April 2007 PressThink recorded its two millionth visit.

  He also blogs at the Huffington Post. In July 2006 he announced the debut NewAssignment.Net, his experimental site for pro-am, open source reporting projects. The first one was called Assignment Zero, a collaboration with Wired.com. A second project is OfftheBus.Net with the Huffington Post.

  Rosen is also a member of the Wikipedia Advisory Board.

  In 1999, Yale University Press published his book, What Are Journalists For?, which is about the rise of the civic journalism movement. (sample chapter) Rosen wrote and spoke frequently about civic journalism (also called public journalism) over a ten-year period, 1989-99. From 1993 to 1997 he was the director of the Project on Public Life and the Press, funded by the Knight Foundation.

  As a press critic and reviewer, he has published in The Nation, Columbia Journalism Review, the Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Newsday and others. Online he has written for Salon.com, TomPaine.com and Poynter.org. In 1990 he and Neil Postman (friend, colleague, mentor) hosted a radio show on WBAI in New York called “The Zeitgeist Hour.”

  In 1994 he was a fellow at the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University, and in 1990-91 he held a fellowship at the Gannett Center for Media Studies at Columbia University.

  A native of Buffalo, NY, Rosen had a very brief career in journalism at the Buffalo Courier-Express before beginning graduate study. He has a Ph.D. from NYU in media studies (1986).

• Jason Samuels
  Associate Professor Studio 20, NewsDoc
  
  

  Jason Samuels is an Emmy Award-winning broadcast news and documentary producer.

  Currently Jason produces prime-time documentaries for CNN. Jason's most recent work, the 90-minute documentary Obama Revealed: The Man, The President aired on CNN in September. In 2011 Jason produced the CNN documentaries Unwelcome: The Muslims Next Door and Black in America: The New Promised Land - Silicon Valley; both projects featured CNN anchor Soledad O'Brien.

  Prior to joining CNN, Jason served as the executive producer in charge of documentary programming and news specials for Black Entertainment Television (2010). Before BETJason served as a senior producer for ESPN's Emmy award-winning newsmagazine E:60 (2009).

  Previously Jason worked as a senior producer for ABC News (2006-2008). In that role, Jason supervised all of the digital content of ABC World News and led production of the World News Webcast with Charles Gibson, the first, live daily networknewscast produced exclusively for a digital audience. Jason also briefly served as the executive producer of the ABC World News Saturday and ABC World News Sunday broadcasts.  

  Prior to joining ABC News, Jason spent 11 years at NBC News (1995-2006) where he produced several award-winning long-form projects for Dateline NBC. In 2004 Jason produced the Dateline NBC documentary: A Pattern of Suspicion. This groundbreaking data-driven examination of racial profiling was awarded several of the most prestigious prizes in broadcast journalism including an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award, an RTNDA-Edward R. Murrow Award and an Investigative Reporter and Editor Award.

  Jason has won numerous other awards for his work including one Emmy Award, five Emmy nominations - including three for coverage of the Hurricane Katrina disaster, a Freedom Forum Excellence in Urban Journalism Award, a Cine Golden Eagle Award, a Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism, a New York Association of Black Journalist Awards for Overall Excellence, and an American Women in Radio and Television Grace Award. In 2008 Jason was selected to participate in the 12-month Punch Sulzberger News Media Executive Leadership Program at Columbia University, a joint business/journalism program for emerging industry leaders.

  Born and raised in New York City, Jason began his career in journalism as a news writer and producer at WCVB-TV in Boston (1993). He is a graduate of the Ethical-Culture Fieldston School in New York, and received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Tufts University and a Master of Journalism degree from the University of California at Berkeley.

• Doc Searls
  Visiting Scholar
  
  

  A leading interpreter and writer on disruptions caused by the Internet, Doc Searls is currently the director of ProjectVRM at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society (where he served as a fellow from 2006-2010) and is currently a fellow with the Center for Information Technology and Society (CITS) at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is a book author, most recently of The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge; Senior Editor at Linux Journal; and one of the world's most quoted bloggers. In The World Is Flat, Thomas L. Friedman called him "one of the most respected technology writers in America." Doc is president of The Searls Group, a consulting practice, and is a photographer committed to enlarging the sum of images in the public domain. His appointment at NYU Journalism is sponsored by the Studio 20 graduate program.

• Clay Shirky
  Associate Professor
  
  

  Clay Shirky is teacher, writer and consultant on the social and cultural effects of the internet and mobile phones, particularly where they allow for amateur access to the public sphere and easy coordination for group action. He holds a joint appointment at NYU as Arts Professor at NYU’s graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program in the Tisch School of the Arts, and as a Distinguished Writer in Residence at the NYU Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute in the Faculty of Arts and Science. His courses address how communications networks shape culture and vice-versa. He is also a Fellow at Harvard's Berkman Institute for the Study of the Internet and Society, and in the fall of 2010, he was the Edward R. Murrow Visiting Lecturer at the Shorenstein Center for the Press and Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

  Shirky is the author of two recent books on social media. Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, published in 2010,  describes new forms of coordinated voluntary participation, ranging from political activism to the creation of lolcats, and Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, published in 2008, describes how the social media landscape came to be. These two books have been translated into 10 languages. Several of his essays have been anthologized, including, most recently, his 2009 essay, Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable, on the fate of newspapers in the digital age.

  He has written extensively about the Internet since 1996. His columns and writings have appeared in Business 2.0, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review and Wired, and has given talks all over the world, including TED talks in Oxford, Cannes, and at the US State Department,  and at Emerging Tech, the Economist's “Human Potential” conference, Tech4Africa, and South by Southwest. Shirky was named one of Foreign Policy's “Top 100 Global Thinkers” in 2010.

  Prior to joining the NYU faculty, Mr. Shirky was a partner at the investment firm The Accelerator Group, and the Chief Technology Officer of Site Specific, a web design firm based in Manhattan. In the early 1990s, Shirky was vice-president of the New York chapter of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and wrote technology guides for Ziff Davis. He appeared as an expert witness on Internet culture in Shea v. Reno, a case cited in the U. S. Supreme Court's decision to strike down the Communications Decency Act in 1996.

  Shirky is a 1986 cum laude graduate of Yale University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in fine arts. In 1990 he founded in New York City a theater company, Hard Place Theater, in which he created and directed several "non-fiction" theater pieces using only found materials such as government documents, transcripts and cultural records. During this period, he began using the internet as a research tool, and has never looked back.

• Jonathan Soma
  Adjunct Faculty
  
  

  Jonathan Soma is a Ruby on Rails developer who focuses on making unapproachable data accessible. He has made maps, processed data, and crowdsourced stories with ProPublica, WNYC, The New York Times, and others.
  
  In 2009 he helped create Big Apple Ed, a web application that crunched NYC school data, which was awarded third place in New York City's first annual Big Apps contest.
  
  Soma's personal projects - analyzing the Japanese census, MTA travel times and more - have been featured everywhere from Gawker to The New York Times Style section.
  
  In 2010 Soma founded the Brooklyn Brainery (www.brooklynbrainery.com), a community-driven school and workspace. He instructs on neuroscience, the Loch Ness Monster, and everything in between. He is also a speaker at Masters of Social Gastronomy (hellomsg.tumblr.com), a monthly lecture series on culinary history, food science and culture.
  
  A graduate of the University of Virginia, Soma has been living in New York since 2007.