About J-Learning

J-Learning is your how-to guide for hyper-local community media.

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J-Lab Staff

Jan Schaffer, Executive Director | E-mail: jans AT j-lab DOT org
Jan Schaffer, former Business Editor and a Pulitzer Prize winner for The Philadelphia Inquirer, is executive director of J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism and one of the nation’s leading thinkers in the journalism reform movement. She left daily journalism in 1994 to lead pioneering journalism initiatives in the areas of civic journalism, interactive and participatory journalism and citizen media ventures. She launched J-Lab in 2002 at the University of Maryland’s College of Journalism to help newsrooms use innovative computer technologies to engage people in important public issues. As a federal court reporter, she helped write a series that won freedom for a man wrongly convicted of five murders. The stories led to the civil rights convictions of six Philadelphia homicide detectives and won several national journalism awards, including the 1978 Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal for Public Service.More...

Craig Stone, Web Editor | E-mail: craig AT j-lab DOT org
Craig Stone has been the Web Editor at J-Lab since June 2005. He is a native of Laurel, Maryland, and earned a bachelor's degree in print journalism from the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism in 2005. While with J-Lab, he was a contributing editor for Mark Briggs' book, "Journalism 2.0: How to Survive and Thrive," as well as J-Lab's research publication, "Citizen Media: Fad or the Future of News?" As a Maryland student, Craig was a copy editor for the student newspaper, The Diamondback, and he has written and edited for College Magazine.

Rachel Sandor, Project Manager | E-mail: rachel AT j-lab DOT org
Rachel Sandor is the Project Manager at J-Lab. She grew up in Boulder, Colorado and earned her bachelor’s degree in media studies from the University of San Francisco. While attending USF, she was a film critic for the student newspaper, The San Francisco Foghorn. She is also a former editorial staff member of Rotten Tomatoes, a movie review Web site. Rachel enjoys traveling and lived in Budapest, Hungary for over a year. Her other interests include watching movies and exploring Washington with her fiancé, friends and dog.

Hop Studios

Susannah Gardner is a Web designer and developer at Hop Studios (hopstudios.com), an Internet consulting firm with offices in both Pasadena, Calif., and Vancouver, British Columbia. She authored Buzz Marketing with Blogs for Dummies (buzzmarketingblogs.com), which was published in March 2005, and co-wrote two other Internet-publishing guides: Dreamweaver MX 2004 for Dummies and Teach Yourself Visually: Dreamweaver MX 2004. As a graduate of the University of Southern California, Gardner has played many roles in the Annenberg School for Communication – particularly in its online program – and has served as lecturer, director and editor for a variety of projects. She also helped to set up the Web site for the Los Angeles Times as both an electronic editor and multimedia director.

Travis F. Smith is a partner at Hop Studios. Also a graduate of USC, has been a long-time online journalism lecturer in the Annenberg School and had been the Online Journalism Review’s Paris bureau chief. Smith previously helped to run Variety.com and the Los Angeles Times Web site, which he helped to create in 1994. He has spoken on a number of panels regarding blogging, subscription-based revenue models and online journalism. Smith’s avid enthusiasm for the Internet also finds him maintaining at least three blogs, including Unvarnished (hopstudios.com/nep/unvarnished).

Colophon

Gardner and Smith were responsible for all the writing on the site at its launch, in addition to crafting the design and the functionality of the J-Learning site. Hop Studios specializes in content intensive, community-based Web sites, and can be reached via its Web site at hopstudios.com.

The site runs on Expression Engine 1.3, a blog and content management system developed by PMachine that's as flexible as it is affordable. It's also running a custom article rating module developed for Expression Engine by Mitchell Kimbrough of solspace.com. The site content was organized using MediaWiki for internal collaboration and shared editing, and Basecamp for project management. The site is hosted by the good folks at Nexcess.net.