JMSC welcomes two distinguished visiting educators

Two distinguished educators will be teaching classes and presenting talks, on journalism entrepreneurship and the mainland Chinese media, at the JMSC in November and December .

Dan Gillmor

Professor Dan Gillmor is an author and writer, and joins the JMSC from Arizona State University in the US, where he specialises in digital media literacy and citizen journalism.  He will be teaching students the importance of digital journalism entrepreneurship.

He aims to give JMSC students an understanding of the history and current state of the media start-up culture, and said journalists today need to be aware of the skills required to develop a digital journalism product.

“It’s a very different world from working for a traditional media company, and I want students to have an appreciation of how an idea gets turned into a media product at a basic level,” Gillmor said. “I want to make the students comfortable doing something on their own, or to be able to bring these entrepreneurial skills into a bigger media organisation.”

Lifen Zhang

Lifen Zhang arrives on a two-month sabbatical from the Financial Times newspaper, where he is an associate editor and editor-in-chief of FTChinese.com, the FT’s only online foreign language publication.

Zhang previously worked for BBC TV and BBC World Service, and has served as a visiting professor at Taiwan National Chengchi University, Hong Kong Baptist University and Fudan University in China. He has also been appointed an Outstanding Visiting Fellow at the University of Hong Kong’s Robert Black College, where is staying for the duration of his appointment.

At the JMSC, Zhang will be teaching courses and hosting seminars on Chinese media, as well as assisting with research, and will address such issues as the future of journalism and the digital transition of the media industry.

“I am really excited to be invited by the JMSC, one of the leading centres of journalism education in Asia,” said Zhang. “The global media landscape is changing fast and the Internet has been challenging and has re-written the rule book for the media industry, as well as for journalism.”

“It’s an era, both daunting and exciting, for journalists and media practitioners,” he said.  “Our profession has to adapt, and be the creator of new habits in the digital era, or we are in the danger of becoming irrelevant.”