Courses

It’s been a long time coming, but the cat is now completely out of the bag with regards to Lynda.com, a fee-based educational website launched in 1995. The Carpinteria headquartered company was the first ever title sponsor at this year’s Santa Barbara International Film Festival and in May, got a full five minutes of on-air attention from product sampler Howard Stern.

The company’s remarkably savvy evolution from humble website and classroom beginnings in Ojai is wonderfully charted today in the Santa Barbara Independent by D.J. Palladino. Co-founder Lynda Weinman, who oversees the operation with husband Bruce Healin (pictured), went to high school in Sherman Oaks with Simpsons creator Matt Groening. Early on, she tried her hand in LA at a more conventional commercial model:

After college came retail back in Los Angeles, first a museum gift shop and then her own two clothing stores called Vertigo on Sunset and Melrose, founded on a $20,000 loan from her grandfather. “I went out of business,” she said grimly, but added, “I learned what a terrible model retail is.” There’s much less waste, she’d later discover, in cyberspace.

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Randall Smith, a Reynolds Center endowed chair at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, recalls how a conversation with David Cohn, founder and director of SF-LA focused Spot.us, led to the spark for a new business journalism course. He wound up hashing it all out one weekend with Missouri prof Tom Stam:

Our goal was to teach our students about business and to write a lot about it. They would be exposed to the inner most workings of a company: budgets, senior executives and industry dynamics. The project would require a lot of work. Stam recruited two other business professors to help teach, and I found five businesses that either had a new idea or problem that could use help from a highly motivated student team.

Along with Spot.us, Smith and Stam secured the participation of AP, Silcon Valley start-up Kachingle, the Chicago Sun-Times, and LA’s Media & Policy Center. As Smith goes on to detail, many valuable lessons were learned during this inaugural 2010 graduate course, with some of the MBA and Ph.D. students choosing to shift afterwards to more of a journalism focus.

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The prestigious fellowship administered by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard is the print reporting world’s oldest mid-career pit stop. It’s also a little like winning the lottery, with a chosen few U.S. and international fellows getting to attend a year’s worth of classes, seminars, and special events.

Among those making the grade for the 74th year, 2012 edition is LA based globe-trotting freelancer Samuel Loewenberg. The last featured link on his website, for New York-London medical journal The Lancet, is all about the Libyan refugee crisis. Per today’s Nieman news release, his goals during the upcoming fellowship year will be equally noble:

Loewenberg will study neglected factors in global health interventions, foreign aid reform, and the role of journalism in increasing accountability.

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On Wednesday, ten lucky aspiring filmmakers from around the country will begin a month-long regimen of digital media courses at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts. The subsidized program, which will subsequently repeat at Columbia College in Chicago with a separate group of ten participants, found its winners via YouTube under the banner YouTube Creator Institute.

All twenty summer students now have video introductions posted at the YouTube hub, many presented with great originality in the format of a breaking newscast, a Presidential candidacy announcement, or–in the case of David Bower from Dallas–a catchy acoustic guitar ditty:

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First off, just how much fun does a university project named “The Image of the Journalist in Pop Culture” sound?

The massive database at USC’s Norman Lear Center, launched in 2000, now encompasses more than 76,000 records. The goal is to “investigate and analyze the conflicting images of the journalist in film, television, radio, fiction, commercials, cartoons, comic books, music, art, demonstrating their impact on the American public’s perception of newsgatherers.” And the man who oversees the program, Joe Saltzman (pictured), has just been voted 2010′s Journalism and Mass Communication Teacher of the Year by the Scripps Howard Foundation.

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It’s always nice to hear about the success of someone like Larry Maisner, an engineer and technical writer who chose to nurture his more creative aspirations on the side, via the esteemed UCLA extension writer’s program.

The Encino-based British native has just published his third novel, The Glorious Whore of Milan. Set in Renaissance era Italy, it tells the tale of a plucky heroine who takes on the suffering caused by the indifference of the Catholic Church.

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“Gotta report about singing…. Gotta report about dancing…”

While no one is ever going to belt out those lyrics on a Broadway stage, that’s the basic idea behind the seventh annual Arts Journalism Institute in Theater and Musical Theater, an upcoming June 14th-24th fellowship for journalists, freelancers, and producers.

The program, now open for 2011 applications, is put on by USC Annenberg in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts. Sasha Anawalt (pictured), founding director of the school’s graduate degree program “Specialized Journalism (The Arts),” will once again oversee the intensive 11-day event. Her associate directors this year are Douglas McLennan, editor and founder of Artsjournal.com, and Jeff Weinstein, editor and a former critic with The Village Voice, Philadelphia Inquirer and Bloomberg News. A total of 22 to 25 applicants will be accepted.

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How about giving yourself a special February 14th gift today, courtesy of mediabistro.com’s expansive offering of online courses? Today, and today only, through 2 p.m. PT / 5 p.m. ET, entering the promo code ‘LOVE25′ will get you 25% off the price of most courses.

Offerings beginning in March include Writing Comedy for TV, taught by Emmy nominated SNL and Pop-Up Video veteran Alan Cross, and Writing the TV Pilot, with instructor Wendy Riss.

Riss is a television writer, screenwriter, and playwright based in Los Angeles. She was a story editor on HBO’s Hung (pictured) and a staff writer on F/X’s The Riches. Wendy has also written the plays Wildfire and A Darker Purpose at Naked Angels, which became the movie The Winner starring Rebecca DeMornay, Vincent D’Onofrio, and Billy Bob Thornton.

Both courses are normally $499, or $475 for Avant Guild members. With today’s special discount, the price falls respectively to $374.25 and $356.25.

Ahead of a free one-week boot camp this spring at USC’s Annenberg School, former newspaper website editor Robert Niles has chimed in with another take-down of what he dubs print journalism’s “culture of failure.”

For Niles (pictured), the phrase he coined in May, 2009 has taken on even more resonance in the wake of his latest efforts with website Theme Park Insider, recognized by Forbes and other publications. Writes the one-time LA Times contributor at the Online Journalism Review:

I’ve been publishing my own websites since 1996. I’ve been working full-time for myself for nearly three years. And I’ve never had more fun in the journalism business than I’m having now. My income went up in 2010, not down. I am so thankful to have found a way out of the culture of failure that imprisons so many others in the news business. I just want to help other journalists find their way out, as well.

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Social media is busting out all over. Mark Zuckerberg is TIME Magazine‘s Person of the Year; Twitter just got $200 million; and UC Irvine Extension is offering three new online social media marketing courses in January.

Caitlin Adams at OC Metro has the details. By far the most intriguing is the one to be taught by Dr. Pamela Rutledge, Director of Boston’s Media Psychology Research Center, and Bonnie Buckner (pictured), CEO of LA’s MicroFocus Media.

“Transmedia Marketing Through Storytelling” explores the concept of 360-degree marketing through multiple media… The course will examine the new phenomenon of transmedia storytelling, the psychology behind creating audience engagement and the challenges the marketing strategy poses to more traditional business models.

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