“The last few years we’ve produced stories focusing on the economy, but this year the students decided to take on a subject close to their hearts — the future of journalism,” West said.
Eighteen students, most of them in their second semester of the master’s program, researched new journalism ventures and story leads before pitching their ideas to an editorial board and student editor-in-chief Elizabeth Davies. In addition to working on their stories, students developed the website, public relations, and marketing.
During the course of seven weeks, students conducted interviews, edited video footage, and worked on scripts. Even Davies had to put on various hats — jetting down to Brooklyn to do interviews, logging video, and attending meetings. “There’s no such thing as a typical day in journalism, even when it’s at graduate school,” Davies said.
In the end, the writing, editing, and filming paid off, and the project was revealed during a public screening hosted by the school in May. With stories covering topics as diverse as computer assisted-journalism, Al Jazeera’s improved fortunes, sportswriting robots, and one-man band journalism, West said the subjects would be intriguing to other young journalists.
“I love the fact that we have an interview with esteemed ‘60 Minutes’ correspondent Bob Simon in the same project as a piece about a computer algorithm that ‘writes’ journalism,” Davies said.
The team also managed to score an on-camera interview with CNN’s Piers Morgan thanks to the persistence of student Josh Haskell, who produced the clip. Even though Haskell’s request to interview Morgan was turned down three times, he stayed on the show’s staff and worked with the show’s executive producer Jonathan Wald, also an adjunct professor at Columbia, to land the interview.
The project allows students to grow as journalists and to share their knowledge at the same time. “[Fast Forward News] really shows the tremendous diversity in terms of the changes in journalism and the different ways people are trying to experiment,” Davies said. “Personally, what I took away from the project was how much your individual skills now matter and the initiative you bring by using them.”