Meet the Graduate Program Director

Jerry Lanson: Graduate Program Director, Journalism Dept.

"I've always considered myself a miniaturist. Little stories, covered well, can have universal implications. And they often have a strong character and a strong sense of place," says Jerry Lanson when asked about Journalism. Lanson carries that philosophy into the classroom in teaching such courses as advanced print & multimedia reporting and feature writing to the graduate students. He also carries this into his work as Graduate Program Director for the Journalism Department.

Excitement for Graduate Studies

Lanson, who currently blogs for the Huffington Post, is excited to be the Director of Graduate Studies in a year when Emerson's Department of Journalism is putting the final touches on what promises to be a distinctive new curriculum, one that for the first time fully integrates multimedia across the curriculum, that recognizes community coverage and civic engagement as integral to the best practices of journalism, and that will lead the way in looking at new outlets for news coverage beside and beyond the traditional print, television, radio, and web newsrooms.

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A Passion for Ethics

In addition to writing and reporting, his other passion is ethics. "Everyday journalists make decisions that require them to 'do ethics,' to look at their professional values and carefully weigh the best approach to covering a story," he says. "In today's emerging Wild West of blogs and tweets and interactivity, it's that much more important to think and reflect even as we work quickly and efficiently.  The value of a graduate program is that even as students learn the skills to compete in the professional world, they also learn the foundations that make them leaders in the field and allow them to place their work in the historical context that has long made American journalism so extraordinary in its freedoms.