James Hamilton, director of Duke University’s De Witt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy, will join Stanford in the fall as director of the Graduate Program in Journalism. Hamilton, who will also serve as a professor of communication, will replace Ann Grimes in the post.
Participants formed 11 teams to create projects analyzing political and economic data and exploring issues such as whether money can buy an election, how political apathy is related to campaign contributions and the degree to which Silicon Valley contributes to political campaigns.
“Social media has more eyewitnesses than ever, recording the voices of people on the ground,” said Storify CEO and co-founder Burt Herman to an audience in McClatchy Hall yesterday afternoon. “There is so much amazing source material out there that we can’t just passively look at what people are saying, but we have to drive through social media and see what people think.”
Despite minor concerns as The Bay Citizen and the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) explore the possibility of a merger, editorial staff at The Bay Citizen said they are optimistic about how the merger might affect the Peninsula’s media ecosystem. Stanford and Berkeley-based journalism experts agreed, arguing that the larger size of The Bay Citizen-CIR organization will lead to better news coverage.
In 2005, the journalism program’s curriculum still trained students for the nineties newsroom. But now, the Internet is a centerpiece of Stanford’s Graduate Program in Journalism.