Why a CPA Pursued a Master’s in Social Journalism

Published in

Engagement Journalism

12 min readDec 18, 2016

I just graduated with a Master of Arts in Social Journalism from the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. The intensive one-year program was all that I’d hoped for and more.

Many of my friends thought it was a bold move to pack up and move from Atlanta to New York City for a year after sending my youngest child off to college. With my husband’s crazy travel schedule, we figured we could make it work for one year of life.

I was intrigued by CUNY’s description of their newest program, social journalism:

“Our Master of Arts in Journalism is aimed at helping future leaders in news recast journalism as a service that helps communities meet their goals and solve problems, using a wide range of new tools and skills involving relationship-building, data, social media, and business.”

As a CPA specialized in healthcare, the program appeared to offer a unique set of skills and tools that would enhance my ability to address a problem that I was deeply concerned about- the epidemic of chronic illness. Chronic illness currently costs our nation $1.3 trillion annually and affects half of all Americans. I saw social journalism as a way to complement my healthcare expertise and strengthen my ability to make an impact.

It’s definitely been an exciting adventure filled with unexpected lessons and life-changing insights, so I thought I’d share some of the highlights for those who are curious.

The Program

The coursework was rigorous, but I loved the challenge. At times I thought it could be spread over a longer time period, but the one-year commitment was an attractive tradeoff.

Spring Semester

Community Engagement (taught by Carrie Brown and Jeff Jarvis)

This was a valuable class where we learned engagement and listening skills to better understand and empathize with a community and its needs.

We read and discussed “Geeks Bearing Gifts: Imagining New Futures for News” by Jeff Jarvis, who stated that our goal as social journalists should be to help a community better organize its knowledge through our journalism so that it can better organize itself. He says:

“But we in the field came to define ourselves less by our value and mission and more by our media and tools — ink on pulp or slick paper, sound or images over airwaves. Now we have new tools to exploit. Those tools require new skills and create new value. But at the core, we serve citizens and communities.”

We each chose a community we cared about — one that we would work with for the entire year. We learned how to apply state-of-the-art listening tools such as design thinking, ethnography, and platforms such as Hearken to gain a better understanding of who’s in the community and what they need.

Here’s a summary of what we did in the class: “Some Highlights from my Social Journalism Community Engagement Class”

Information Gathering and Reporting (taught by Kathryn Lurie and Jessica Firger)

In this class, we learned to find and present the information that our communities need by identifying the community’s stakeholders and gathering information through interviews, observations, and research techniques.

We learned how to determine the newsworthiness and relevance of a story, and we pitched and reported on stories that were important to our community. We acquired valuable research skills and had access to the latest digital tools.

One of the most important things we learned was how to write using AP style.

Metrics and Outcomes (taught by Terry Parris, Jr.)

The metrics we focused on were not the typical “page views” and “likes,” rather we learned that our success as social journalists will be measured by the impact we have in our communities. In other words…did we help our community achieve its goals?

We used a new crowdsourcing and outreach platform, GroundSource to invite the community to share their concerns through a texting campaign related to ProPublica’s “Rent Racket” project.

We learned about both media-centric and community-centric tools and platforms, as well as how to present data using Excel and create pivot tables.

Social Tools and Platforms (taught by Thomas Page McBee and Megan Hess)

For this class we focused on key social media platforms and had the opportunity to manage the Facebook page for a non-profit. Our goal was to develop a sustainable strategy for the organization.

We each published a weekly article on Medium to highlight something we learned about that week — here are mine:

Summer Semester

Data Skills (taught by Miguel Paz)

This class was packed with tools for gathering, analyzing, cleaning and presenting data in a storytelling format. We learned how to identify datasets that are newsworthy to produce compelling stories that people would care about.

We learned to pitch and storyboard our ideas for a story, then created a piece that profiled our community as well as a data- driven story.

Some of the data tools we used included OpenRefine, Excel, Tabular and Carto, and we learned how to scrape data.

Writing for Social Media (taught by Meredith Bennett-Smith)

This class built on our first reporting class and offered more advanced storytelling skills.

We wrote an explainer, a community contributor piece, and created a multimedia project about our community that we edited with Adobe Premiere.

Design and Development (taught by Sandeep Junnarkar and T.C. McCarthy)

This class taught us basic HTML, CSS, JavaScript and JQuery programming. We created our own “calculator” that would serve our community. I created a health quiz and a wireframe. Most importantly, we gained an understanding of how to communicate with designers, developers and programmers.

Legal and Ethical Considerations (taught by Michael Boone)

This class taught us how to engage with our communities in ways that are legal and ethical, and how to avoid complications and conflicts that can affect the quality of our journalism.

Our class discussions were lively and engaging. We discussed topics such as social media ethics, hate speech, libel, time, place and manner, prior restraint and media liability.

In the end, we developed a ‘Code of Ethics’ for our specific community, an exercise that I found extremely valuable.

Fall Semester

Entrepreneurial Journalism (taught by Jeremy Caplan)

The class consisted of three sections:

Sprint to Success — The goal was to develop a prototype for our own journalism startup, something that worked perfectly with my capstone project that was focused on building a website to address the needs identified by listening to my community. The steps we used in the sprint helped me to better understand my community and led to the creation of a website, ChronicHealthBridge.com. The specific steps are outlined in the following article: “From Problem to Prototype in Five Weeks”
Newsrooms 2020 — We spent five weeks exploring the fast-changing world of innovation within newsrooms and working on real-world case studies.
News Innovation Lab — This section was focused on analyzing the impact of new tools and platforms for creating innovative journalism products and services. The hands-on classes included learning about drones, virtual reality, augmented reality, bots, sensors and other creative ways to use technology to create sustainable journalism ventures. Here’s what I wrote with a classmate about virtual reality: “The Future of Virtual Reality is Coming.”

Practicum Final Project (advised by Carrie Brown and Jan Schaffer)

Our program director, Carrie Brown and mentor, Jan Schaffer provided guidance as we developed a capstone project for our community based on all that we had learned by listening to and collaborating with our community.

In addition to creating my website, I built a Facebook page, tracked the progress of a woman’s diagnosis and treatment using functional medicine, planned a newsletter, collected success stories from patients, and wrote articles about my community.

Here is a link to my final seven-minute capstone presentation: (video coming soon).

The Project

During the year, I relied on the listening skills and tools taught to gain a clear understanding of what my community needed to better organize itself and find solutions to its problems. I collaborated with the community to create a journalism platform that would help to meet their needs and solve their problems.

The Community

The community I chose to work with is one that I’ve been a part of for most of my life: women with a chronic illness that is unresolved through traditional medicine. Many of these women are finding success with functional medicine, a twenty-first century medical approach that trains doctors to find the underlying causes of a chronic illness, rather than merely providing a diagnosis based on symptoms.

Functional medicine considers how our genes are affected by our lifestyle, diet and environment — factors that can create imbalances in the body, that when corrected, often result in significant improvement. As the number of patients and providers are demanding this type of care, it’s likely to become more mainstream.

My mission is to provide this community with the resources they need to discover new avenues for diagnoses and treatment options.

Identifying the Problem

Interviews

During the course of this project, I interviewed 25 members of my community, including 19 women who have dealt with a chronic health condition. Many of the women interviewed have reversed their symptoms through integrative and functional medicine and are open to sharing their stories.

One community member I interviewed responded by saying:

“I think you’re doing a great service… There have to be other people out there who are suffering the way I was, with seemingly no options. Functional medicine was a miracle for me. Getting the word out that there are other approaches to healing is very important.”

Three key things I learned about my community:

Chronically ill women are hampered by cost and confusion. They desire resources that will help them to evaluate their options before they spend money on medical tests and procedures that are often not yet covered by insurance.
Functional medicine practitioners usually spend more time with patients to reach more accurate diagnoses and they are looking for ways to cover the unreimbursed costs of treatment and training.
The functional medicine industry is struggling to provide adequate patient resources for identifying qualified practitioners and report on progress in achieving its mission.

Collaboration with a Healthcare practitioner

I have developed a key relationship with an advanced FM practitioner with extensive experience. She has provided tremendous insight into the challenges of FM, access to the Institute for Functional Medicine, and has referred patients with turnaround stories.

I recently received this note from her about the project:

“I think this is a very worthy project, one that is huge but will fill a big gap. I think the problem we are facing now is really lack of well-trained MDs who can implement FM balanced with traditional medicine. I am inundated with patients and have no idea how to meet the need. It’s exhausting but exciting. Creating demand through projects like yours will help more MDs see they need to be learning this…hopefully. I fear for awhile, there will be more demand than supply.”

Collaboration with Patient

I’ve been working directly with a patient to document and report on her experience with FM and have full access to her medical records and doctor.

This kind of access to a patient and her doctor are highly unusual and are an important indication that this project is needed and is having early impact in my community.

Deliverables

Website

After listening to my community, I’ve created a Wordpress site, Chronic Health Bridge (www.chronichealthbridge.com) to help them meet their goals and solve their problems.

The site is almost complete and I plan to build out the following features:

Explanation of functional medicine
Comparison with traditional medicine
Turnaround stories (five stories in the works based on completed interviews)
Documentation of a chronically ill patient’s experience through functional medicine
Collaboration with functional medicine practitioners (Q&A and blog posts)
Resources for finding FM practitioners nationwide
Legislative Updates
Glossary of Terms
FAQs
Newsletter sign-up hosted on site
Blog posts (including original posts and content from FM doctors)
Invitation to readers to share their stories for possible publication
Health coaching collaboration — doctors are interested in learning the value of integrating them into their practice which could save time and enhance patient outcome
Expand conversation between traditional and FM doctors

I am also considering whether to turn my project into a nonprofit initiative.

Social Media

Facebook appears to be the primary social media platform where my community members engage with one another, according to the patients I’ve interviewed. I’ve established a Facebook page for Chronic Health Bridge to promote engagement with members of my community. I plan to explore other social media platforms once I have a strong presence on Facebook.

Logo Design

I commissioned a graphic designer to create this logo for Chronic Health Bridge:

I’m developing a newsletter through MailChimp to feature updates and current blog posts with both original content and articles written by functional medicine practitioners.

Medium Publication

My website launch will be announced on the Chronic Health Bridge Medium Publication page which was developed to post articles to generate interest in project.

What I’ve Learned

Perhaps the most important lesson I’ve learned over the past year is that social journalism is first and foremost about listening. I came into this program believing that I understood my community, but I’ve learned the listening requires letting go of our point of view and agendas.

By starting from a place of curiosity, I was able to aquire a deeper appreciation and comprehension of the needs of individuals in my community — one that will help me to provide more meaningful journalism that is based on real needs rather than my limited perceptions and assumptions.

Listening has allowed me to recognize my own biases. I’ve thought a lot about my ethical responsibilities as a journalist and I’m working hard to listen to what everyone has to say. I’m also beginning to comprehend the tremendous potential of social journalism to positively impact a community by breaking down divisive barriers.

I’ve learned the importance of building trust within a community and discovered that listening is essential to building safe relationships. Explaining my role as a social journalist helped to establish trust, and I found that individuals were more open and willing to share their deepest concerns. When someone trusts you and they refer you to others who trust them, it becomes much easier to foster a meaningful relationship from the start.

Having a mindset of serving a community made a big difference in how community members responded to my project. When I explained my goals as a social journalist, my community was eager to collaborate — it became our project for their benefit.

I’ve realized that the skills I’ve learned can be applied to any community, and working with one that I care about has made my work during this past year personally meaningful. As someone who had no previous journalism background, I can’t imagine a more effective way to impact a community than by helping them solve their problems and meet their goals. Social journalism just makes sense.

My experience at CUNY has been amazing and I’m sad to see it come to an end. The feedback from my community has been tremendous and I plan to continue to work on my project to build out the tools they have told me they desperately need. While I’ve focused on serving a specific community, I’m confident that what I’ve learned can be applied to any community, and that’s exciting.

Special Thanks

I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to participate in this cutting-edge program led by our brilliant and passionate professor and program director, Dr. Carrie Brown. Thank you for all you’re doing to make this program a success. You are amazing.

Special thanks to the visionary founder of our program, Jeff Jarvis, who inspired me to think outside of the box. What an honor it has been to learn from you.

I appreciated having a gifted, multi-talented mentor, Jan Schaffer, who provided invaluable input and support while developing my capstone project. Thank you, Jan.

The teachers at CUNY are as good as it gets — thank you all for sharing your extensive knowledge and expertise and for challenging us to give our personal best. I will miss those engaging, thought-provoking conversations that always inspired me to dig a little deeper.

The CUNY Graduate School of Journalism is a special place. I’ve learned so much over the past year and know that this degree will be a gift that keeps on giving.