“Print media in the traditional sense is going away as evidenced in the print newspaper industry,” said the School’s Visual Journalism Program Director, Loup Langton. “Consumers are turning to the internet for their news and journalists must learn to tell stories through the web.”

The School of Communication is offering a program that can be completed in 18 months and emphasizes two separate facets of multimedia storytelling. The first is for content providers and teaches high-end visual storytelling skills, photography, audio and video storytelling and information graphics. The second stresses multimedia design, production, database-driven dynamic web site generation and advanced multimedia programming languages

This program is suitable for traditionally trained journalists and recent graduates alike. “Journalism ethics and the idea of telling a story and working fairly with subjects are still at the heart of the program,” added Langton.

The School already has professional media partnerships with World Press Photo, the Online Newspaper Association and Pictures of the Year International that provide strong professional ties for students with leading media organizations

Supporting the new Master of Arts program are award-winning School of Communication faculty who specialize in visual journalism, multimedia, social media and web design, programming and production and have professional backgrounds in converged media. Included in that group is one of the nation’s leading multimedia journalism educators, Rich Beckman, holder of the Knight Chair in Visual Journalism. As former Director of the Visual Communication program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Beckman’s former graduate students are leaders in multimedia organizations around the country, including The New York Times, MSNBC and USA Today. As an online producer, Beckman has led teams that have won many of the most prestigious multimedia prizes in the world including the Pirelli INTERNETional Award for Educational Media and multimedia storytelling awards from the Online News Association, the National Press Photographers Association, The Broadcast Education Association, Horizon Interactive Awards, The Society for News Design and the Pictures of the Year International competitions.

According to Beckman, “This innovative graduate program will provide students and journalism professionals the opportunity to work in a multiplatform environment based on emerging and cutting edge storytelling technologies that dominate today’s media environment. Our graduate students will work on projects in conjunction with the Knight Center for International Media as we strive to use new media technologies globally to cover the world’s most under-reported stories.”

For more information, visit our website at http://com.miami.edu/graduate/ for more information.