It's really good to know that some of the things I found really valuable, I can pass on. They will go on well beyond me, just as others did before them.

How long have you been teaching MASC 679, and what brought you here?

This class is only the second time it's been offered. It's a summer course offered once a year and I launched it a year ago. They made it a full-time mandatory course this past year, so this will be the first version of it that I've taught in the spring. I've been in media for a long time in the Richmond area and I've taught a lot of classes at VCU. I had a position for a long time as the VCU Student Media Center Director. I've taught classes through the mass-comm [Robertson] School and through English in writing, journalism, reporting, and editing. So, when Veronica contacted me and asked if I wanted to teach a class specifically about writing for the graduate program, I said I would be interested. 

Before I was the Student Media Director, I was an editor and writer/journalist/reporter in Richmond working at the Times Dispatch and at the Associated Press. But my most influential time was Bennett's Style Weekly, which was—to some degree—the weekly alternative paper. We focused a lot on feature stories, breaking news where we could, and coverage of arts, culture, and social issues. But mostly we learned how to tell a story in a way that's interesting, even if it isn't the huge breaking story of the day or the week. Because of the deadlines, we had to make people interested in it so they wanted to read it. Our mantra was “They don't have to read us.” 

So I learned a lot of skills about how to tell a story in a way that'll be effective, how to tell news in a way that breaks through journalese, and how to define stories that are not handed to you. We had to break our own coverage and find our own stories. If it was a press release, we wouldn't do it at all because there was no point. We would find our own stories and do that. We filled the entire paper and sometimes it was 200 pages every week with entirely new material. It was a lot. It was a small staff of about 20 people at the time, and we did that week after week. It was like putting on a new show every Monday starting from scratch. I learned a lot of skills from that and I apply them here. Those were really formative years for me.

 

What motivates you to be in the field of mass communications?

I started at VCU studying journalism. I sort of backed into it because I actually meant to take a graphic design course, but the only one that they would let me in or that I could enroll in was the one that wasn't in the arts program. The arts program was locked out to non-majors and I wasn't a major. So I took a graphics course in mass-comm and I found out about a week into it that I wasn't supposed to be in it at all and they just hadn’t noticed.

So I ended up taking the class and the teacher said, “if you want to keep taking classes like this you have to be a mass-comm major”. So I said okay, so I changed majors. And that was it. After that, I became a full-time journalist and worked in the media field for a long time. That was that one class that led to some really big changes in the way I thought about my career, what was possible, and that completely changed my life.

 

What’s been the most rewarding aspect of teaching in the program so far?

I think the thing that was really revelatory to me, which is not a surprise to anybody who's done it, but because I've done it for so long, I didn't know how I did it anymore. So when I had to teach it, I had to break down the steps that I normally take. That in itself was a really interesting experience because it forced me to think not only about what I do, but why I do it. That actually changed how I did some things. Every time I teach a class, I start with knowing what I want to teach and then I have to figure out how to explain it. That process is really interesting. I'm very interested in how steps you take to perform an act can change the act itself, and how, when you break it down into steps and and parts, it can make you realize what gaps there might be in your process.

And then of course the obvious thing is that a lot of the students I have worked with over the years have gone on to positions doing really interesting work and have done great things. It's really good to know that some of the things I found really valuable, I can pass on. They will go on well beyond me, just as others did before them. And that's really important to me because I think the ethics and the viewpoints that this kind of writing teaches you are really useful and are really important. 

 

How would you describe your teaching style and what the  students should expect out of your class?

The class is essentially about making sure students have all the skills they need to write across all the media that I expect them to run into. I've taken a pretty expansive view of it. It says across media, so I took that pretty literally. A lot of people come in from mass-comm, but some don't. There are some folks who are professional musicians; they come from all over the place. So I try to give them a foundation for how journalists and editors think about things.

I give them a baseline of what news judgment is, what makes a story a story, how to frame a story so it makes sense, how to take the material they find in reporting and make a story out of it, even if they don't have what they think they were going to have when they started, which was a skill I learned a lot at Style Weekly.

So I try to give everybody a baseline on how to write a simple explanatory piece of journalism. Even if they've never done it before, they should be able to come out of that phase of the class with the foundation to be able to do that. And then I take it across all the different media I can think of. There's a profile, there are Q&A's, newsletters, and social media assignments.

There's an AI component where we use it for research and then use it for comparison, sharing the sort of information they can find, and how prompts can affect the information they get back. So the class is essentially everything you’d ever know or want to know about how to write. There's even a section about how to write an email. That type of stuff goes a long way in any career, not just mass-comm related fields.

 

What is one piece of advice you would give to incoming students of the Graduate Program?

The best thing that I've learned from studying, working in media professionally, and teaching is that it teaches you to be flexible and pivot when the world pivots. That's the one thing media training really teaches you. And that more than ever is going to be key.

Think about what you're learning today and be ready to apply it, but think about the principles that lie behind it. That's the specific techniques you're using because those are the things that are going to guide you. No matter what happens, the principles of checking your facts, presenting information with integrity, and treating individuals—whether they are sources or readers or colleagues—with respect are always going to be good. And the idea that there is more than one way to look at a piece of information and that many of those options are at least viable and worthy of being explored with respect. They're always going to be useful. Take the techniques that you're learning and learn them, but listen very carefully to the principles that underlie them because those are the things you're really going to use later.