LearningLab

About LearningLAB

LearningLAB is the Renaissance Journalism Center’s training program, which aims to provide free to low-cost instruction in digital media and innovative journalistic practices to ethnic and community media journalists, as well as nonprofit professionals and students. Armed with what are rapidly becoming vital skills and knowledge, news organizations and nonprofit organizations can continue to thrive and be vibrant voices for the communities they serve.

In 2009 and 2010, the Renaissance Journalism Center offered daylong conferences with a rich array of workshops and several hands-on multimedia-training boot camps. Attendees learned new skills in digital journalism and storytelling; social media and community engagement; website development and design; and entrepreneurship and fundraising. The conferences and trainings featured leading practitioners and trainers, and were conducted in state-of-the-art computer labs at San Francisco State University’s College of Extended Learning in downtown San Francisco.

Both conferences drew about 100 people, who represented a wide range of organizations, from local news organizations to nonprofit groups and foundations. In 2011 we even had a small contingent of international journalists from Brazil, Cuba, Armenia and Canada who were involved in a journalism fellowship program at Stanford University.

Read more about our 2010 LearningLAB.

What’s New in 2011

In fall 2011, we’re piloting an innovative training approach by offering three bilingual training “boot camps” geared specifically to Latino news organizations in the San Francisco/Bay Area. The free, by-invitation-only training sessions will be taught in Spanish and English and will cover basic website development, multimedia storytelling using audio slideshows, and social media for reporting. If this pilot project is successful, we would like to offer customized, bilingual training sessions to more community-based news organizations, and possibly nonprofits, in the future.