When my students and I toasted the end of the semester in May 2014 at Columbia University, I was proud to be heard saying that we had produced a good group of potential mobile editors for the industry. That was, indeed, the case. A few months later, those students are all over the map, in many cases doing just that for organizations such as Circa, The Economist, Vogue and Bloomberg News.
Today is the first day of the semester as 14 new graduate students join the Multiplatform class for a journey that should take them through a variety of subjects, from a pre requisite design boot camp of four weeks starting today, through the challenges and practice of storytelling across platforms of the media quartet—soon to be the media quintet as we learn more about smart watches.
The students will complete many reading assignments on a variety of topics. They will do weekly exercises to apply what they learn. They will engage in class discussions and listen to an impressive list of guest speakers that include the likes of Callie Schweizer (TIME); Raju Narisetti (News Corp); Christian Schwartz, type designer, Commercial Type; Marco Grob, freelance photographer for almost every major publication in NY; Joe Zeff, creative director of Scroll Motion, Gabriel Dance, of The Marshall Project; Liz Spayd, editor of Columbia Journalism Review, and Bob Newman, legendary art director.
Reed Reibstein, art director/project manager for Garcia Media, will again be my teaching assistant and will conduct lectures to share his expertise in typography and responsive design.
We will, of course, publish interesting follow ups from class in this blog as the semester develops.
For course syllabus
https://garciamedia.com/syllabus2015/syllabus2015.html