Assistant Professor Jeremy Gilbert
Jeremy Gilbert, assistant professor
Gilbert received both a bachelor’s and a master’s in journalism from Medill in 2000 and comes to Medill from the Poynter Institute where he managed online staff, wrote about and taught news design and Web publishing and led the recent re-imagination of poynter.org. Before that he worked in a variety of online and offline capacities for media companies in St. Petersburg, Fort Myers and Chicago.
Medill asks:
What is it about Medill that made you want to come here?
Journalism needs to reinvent itself to survive. It needs to keep the core principles but find new ways to practice the craft. Northwestern and Medill seem uniquely positioned to experiment with new tools and explore new ways to tell important stories.
In your research or creative endeavors, what is the most interesting (or exciting, or demanding, or rewarding, or noteworthy) thing that you worked on lately?
I just finished the year-long redesign of Poynter Online. The Web site for The Poynter Institute has incredibly loyal followers and serves many different purposes. Finding ways to keep existing users happy but make the site easier to use for new visitors was extremely challenging. We live in interesting times, to say the least, and both journalism and marketing communications in the real world face exhilarating and sometimes scary challenges.
How would you characterize some of those challenges?
Journalists need to be relevant. Changes in technology allow anyone to publish their ideas to large audiences. Media companies are no longer gate keepers. The work of journalists is more important than ever, but finding an audience for those stories is also harder than ever.
What are the challenges that you think a school such as Medill faces?
Medill needs to stay current with the latest journalism trends and technologies. It also needs to help journalists keep the craft relevant to an increasingly skeptical public.
After a student completes a class that you're teaching, what do you want him/her to walk out of the classroom thinking and feeling?
Young journalists would be foolish to think they will spend their entire career doing one kind of reporting or using one set of tools. Students leaving my class need to be flexible enough to pick up new skills when needed.
Link to Jeremy's Bio