By Michael Juliani
Student and faculty leaders from the major campus publications met at USC Annenberg Tuesday afternoon for the third installment of the school’s Journalism Forum, "We the Media: Annenberg Emerges as Publisher." The participants met around a roundtable and took turns presenting their websites to the forum, discussing new features they used in online reports.
Over the course of the hour, representatives from Neon Tommy, Annenberg Television News, Annenberg Radio News, the Daily Trojan, Impact and the U.S.-China Institute planned various future collaborations based on the publications’ specific strategies of multimedia innovation.
With the opening of USC Annenberg’s new Wallis Annenberg Hall in 2014, the school’s news outlets will converge in a state-of-the-art media center. Tuesday’s forum focused on ways for the publications to collaborate and increase efficiency and value in student reporting.
ATVN’s representatives, Director Serena Cha, Associate Director Stacy Scholder and Executive Producer Jessica Benson showcased the broadcast outlet’s video-intensive website as well as their extensive catalog of info about ATVN alumni who work in the “real world” now.
Professor Dan Birman took pride in having the most succinct presentation while representing the most long-form outlet, the documentary TV program Impact. He spoke for a couple minutes about Impact alumni and some of their 74 episodes, showed some clips, and then sat back down at his spot at the roundtable.
The focus landed especially on ways for the other news outlets to integrate the U.S.-China Institute’s unique reporting perspectives into their pieces concerning Chinese issues. The Institute’s two outlets—U.S.-China Today and Asia Pacific Arts—often have an edge on less specifically focused publications because the two online magazines are run by students who have direct knowledge of Asian and American culture.
Marc Cooper, the Director of Annenberg Digital News, which includes Neon Tommy, said that Neon Tommy has many Chinese student reporters whose Chinese contacts locally and overseas have been used as sources for some of the website’s most important stories, including coverage of the off-campus shootings of two Chinese students in 2012. Brianna Sacks, a second-year graduate student and Editor-in-Chief of Neon Tommy, planned to coordinate with representatives from the two U.S.-China Institute outlets this week to get started on collaboration.
Clayton Dube, Executive Director of the U.S.-China Institute, a program of USC Annenberg, said that the broader audience that the other student publications attract could provide a wider reach for the Institute’s publications. He was enthusiastic that direct involvement between reporters from all the sites who focus on issues involving Asia and the United States could likely bring exciting results.
U.S.-China Today is a student-run news site that focuses on long-term trend issues related to U.S.-China relations. Their info graphics and articles have been used and linked to by Business Week and The Wall Street Journal.
Asia Pacific Arts focuses on pan-Asian pop culture, and has the advantage of being able to do lengthy interviews with major Asian pop culture figures that don’t necessarily get attention from most American publications.
All the publication representatives said that they’ve experienced an increase in student interest this year, with overwhelming numbers of freshman undergraduates and first-year graduate students wanting to work for them.
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