SPJ Breakout Sessions – 2014

By delboni on August 26, 2014 • ( 0 )

Panel: Starting, Building and Maintaining a Successful Academic Newsroom

This session is ideal for student journalists, educators and newsroom managers who may be looking to partner with educational institutions on collaborative projects. A number of university journalism programs are producing content in cooperation with major media, such as Florida International University’s South Florida News Service, USC’s Neon Tommy, CUNY’s NYCity News Service. Questions arise about configuring curriculum to meet the needs of media as well as their own journalism programs; financing of such partnerships, including paying students stipends for their work; sustaining journalism/media programs; and developing curriculum that prepares journalism students for the rapidly changing media and tech environments. These are some of the challenges that university programs face as they adapt to 21st century journalism. We will discuss how we built and sustained the South Florida News Service and our future goals.

Trainers: Chris Delboni, news director, South Florida News Service and instructor, Florida International University; Allan Richards, associate dean and associate professor, Florida International University; Barbara Corbellini Duarte, reporter, SouthFlorida.com and the Sun-Sentinel

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Chris Delboni, news director, South Florida News Service and instructor, Florida International University
Award-winning Brazilian journalist Chris Delboni has been a foreign correspondent in the United States since 1993. She started her career as a magazine writer before becoming the Washington correspondent for Bandeirantes Radio Network. She was later hired by CBN Radio, a division of Globo Network giant. Delboni worked most of her tenure in Washington, D.C., initially as a general assignment reporter and later as a financial and business correspondent for Globo News TV, Globo Network’s 24-hour news channel. Delboni graduated in print journalism from American University’s School of Communication in 1992 and received a master’s in online journalism from the same institution in 2003. She produced, reported and edited stories daily for a variety of Brazilian mainstream media outlets — from newswire services and magazines to online news sites, radio and television before moving to South Florida, where she began teaching journalism and new media reporting in 2007 at the University of Miami School of Communication and worked with the Knight Center for International Media. In September 2009, she became the first news director for the South Florida News Service at Florida International University. Delboni is now an instructor at FIU and continues to build SFNS. She also has a column online at O Estado de S. Paulo, a major newspaper’s website in Brazil, http://estadao.com.br/diretodemiami, where she writes about Miami and the Brazilians who chose to call it home.

Barbara Corbellini Duarte, reporter, SouthFlorida.com and the Sun-Sentinel
Barbara Corbellini Duarte was born and raised in Brazil, where she finished a technical course in video production before she moved to Florida in 2008 and started studying journalism. At Florida International University, she joined the South Florida News Service, where she published stories and videos in the Miami Herald, the Sun Sentinel and The Palm Beach Post, including a front-page story in the Miami Herald about an investigation she worked with a partner about the prominence of the drug “Molly” at Ultra Music Festival in Miami. She became president of the Society of Professional Journalists chapter at the University in 2013. As president, she traveled to Washington, D.C., to cover the presidential inauguration with five other students. She interned with the Miami Herald while doing a four-month field experience with South Florida’s public radio station, WLRN. Then, she participated in the 2013 short course program with the Scripps Howard Foundation Wire in Washington, D.C. She also interned with Naples Daily News in the summer 2013 and NBC News in New York in the fall 2013. She started working with the South Florida Sun-Sentinel in January 2014, one semester before graduating. She covers culture, arts, lifestyle and entertainment, writing stories, producing videos and taking photos.

Allan Richards, associate dean and associate professor, Florida International University
Allan Richards, M.A., associate dean and associate professor, oversees the SJMC’s language skills program and previously served as chair of the SJMC’s journalism department. Richards developed the SJMC’s current computerized language skills testing and teaching system with a grant from the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation and the SJMC’s Writing Center with a grant from the Scripps Howard Foundation. He inaugurated the SJMC’s multimedia program in 2002 and has taught the multimedia course for a decade, producing a number of student-based Web sites. This innovation led him to spearhead the Digital Rap Sessions, which produced the SJMC’s newest major, Digital Media Studies, beginning in fall 2012. Richards, collaborating with The New York Times, inaugurated the first New York Times Hispanic Student Journalism Institute at the SJMC in January 2007. He was also one of the founders of the SJMC’s South Florida News Service with the editors of the Miami Herald, The South Florida Sun-Sentinel and The Palm Beach Post in 2009. Richards was a 2009 Kaiser Fellow on Global Health Reporting for his documentary “Lessons from South Africa,” which reported on the South African media’s powerful and creative response to the HIV/AIDS pandemic. The documentary was screened at the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival, has aired on WPBT2 and continues to be used in classrooms and as part of an interdisciplinary pilot campaign university-wide. Richards has served as a judge for the Scripps Howard National Journalism Awards since 2007.