Education
GMF offers a full curricula, including daily lesson plans and exercises for journalists, for university courses and for high school courses. GMF journalists bring not only decades of field experience to the classroom, but also training in advanced instructional techniques.
Course material includes:
- Fundamentals of journalism: what is news? reporting, writing, editing, free press, ethical, legal and other issues
- Feature writing
- Television: reporting, writing, editing, packaging and producing
- Radio: reporting, writing, editing, packaging and producing
- New media: how to integrate social media and reliable reporting, citizen reporting, thinking new media
- Journalism and culture: the role of the press and media practices around the world
- The truth from Plato to Murdoch: notions of objectivity and spin
- Deconstructing the news: weekly seminar on current coverage
- Specialty topics (journalism and race, war reporting, politics and the press ...)
Available on a semester- or year-long basis, stand-alone or integrated into existing curricula.
The Khmer and Afghan services of the Voice of America prepare for a session in their six-day radio journalism workshop in Washington, DC., February-March 2006.
Project Plato A Seminal Project
As a discipline, journalism goes far beyond the production of newspapers and television broadcasts. It requires fundamental training in how to organize our perceptions of the world, how to collect, evaluate and prioritize information. These skills are essential to all of us, not only reporters and editors, if we hope to make responsible choices in our personal and professional lives. They are taking on added importance as the new technologies churn out ever-increasing volumes of data that we must absorb.
Project Plato, which gave birth to GMF, was launched in 1999 to provide youth with such skills through expert instruction in journalistic techniques and philosophical issues facing the media today. The theory is backed up with work on a web magazine on international, national and community/lifestyle affairs that teaches them how to function in a professional environment. Seasoned journalists serve as volunteer "mentors," guiding the students through the editorial process.
The program ran for more than three years at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, a public high school for talented minority youth in Washington, DC. Classes averaged 12-15 students, and they produced five editions of a webzine titled "Regeneration" with the help of volunteer journalists from AFP, Reuters, USA Today, Time Magazine and other news organizations.
Plato was presented as a model program to Washington's school board and inspired a spin-off project in Australia. The basic curriculum was adapted for a training course for young professionals in Iran.
Home page of "Re-generation" a webzine created in 2004 as a mentoring program in journalism as a lifeskill at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts in Washington DC.