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...

Julie Drizin, Assistant Director | E-mail: julie AT j-lab DOT org
Julie Drizin has been a news and talk producer in public radio since 1984, when she began hosting interview programs at WXPN-FM in Philadelphia. After a six-year, award-winning stint as the station's News and Public Affairs Director, she moved to Washington, D.C., to lead Pacifica Radio's Washington Bureau. There, she produced a nightly newscast, reported from the UN World Conference on Women in Beijing, anchored national programs and launched Democracy Now!, a ground-breaking daily program of citizen activist news. The Institute for Alternative Journalism named her a "Media Hero" of 1996 at its historic Media and Democracy Congress. In 1999, she helped create and went on to produce Justice Talking, an NPR program of live debates on constitutional issues, sponsored by the Annenberg Public Policy Center. She was Managing Producer of The Intersection, a daily interactive regional news-talk program on WETA-FM. Most recently, she was a judge in the Public Radio Talent Quest, an online participatory contest to find a new generation of hosts for public radio. She is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania.

Kira Wisniewski, Project Coordinator | E-mail: kira AT j-lab DOT org
Kira Wisniewski joined J-Lab in September 2007. She completed her undergraduate work in 2006 at the University of Miami double majoring in print journalism and political science.

Craig Stone, Web Editor | E-mail: craig AT j-lab DOT org
Craig Stone joined J-Lab in June 2005. A native of Laurel, Maryland, he earned a bachelor’s degree in print journalism from the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism in 2005.

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.