The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) and CUNY’s Lehman College announced a unique technology-driven journalism training collaboration today that aims to introduce students to data-science reporting careers and, ultimately, help improve diversity in America’s newsrooms and at the nation’s largest newspaper.
The WSJ & Lehman Journo-Tech program will provide professional internship and training opportunities to interested Lehman “fellows” and curriculum support for Lehman’s faculty beginning in the 2020 fall semester.
Additionally, the program will:
- Develop and equip a diverse pool of talented individuals with sound technological skills for today’s growing newsroom roles that support the intersection of technology and journalism
- Expose Lehman’s racial and ethnically diverse student body – more than 90 percent of the College’s undergraduates are persons of color, primarily Hispanic, representing 130 diverse global regions – to emergent technologies that generate story ideas and new ways to disseminate complex information
- Provide Lehman students with WSJ mentors to augment their classroom instruction and newsroom experiences
“This innovative program extends the campus partnerships that help us work with diverse student bodies to identify the next generation of talented business journalists,” said WSJ Editor-in-Chief Matt Murray. “Our outreach training bolsters our mission of bringing awareness and understanding to issues related to the global economy, finance, and business. It’s a real commitment of time and resources. We expect to learn as much from them as we hope they do from us.”
“We are thrilled to join the effort in bringing fresh faces to journalism’s roster of digital storytellers,” said Lehman College President Daniel Lemons. “The acceleration of the pace of today’s newsgathering, propelled by technology tools, is a dominant feature of journalism, just as the movement to diversify newsgathering spaces has stalled.”
Newsroom employees are less diverse than U.S. workers overall. A 2018 newspaper diversity study, conducted by the American Society of Newspaper Editors, found less than 10 percent of all industry staff and or executives to be Asian, Hispanic or black.
The WSJ launched a similar journalism training partnership in the Spring 2019 with Morgan State University, a public historically black research university (HBCU) in Baltimore, Maryland.
As part of the initiative, five Lehman fellows will spend 10 weeks embedded in the WSJ’s newsroom as part-time paid members of the Digital Experiences and Research & Development (R&D) teams focusing on new Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered tools and news experiences.
Students will work on projects similar to current R&D efforts including a tool that monitors algorithmic changes in tech platforms or a data mining tool for finding and alerting journalists to financial market moves to support news generation.
In addition to the semester project work, two of the fellows will continue as paid summer interns.
While open to all, ideally students who are enrolled in a Lehman Computer Science program – with knowledge of cloud computing, databases and basic coding languages – and have an interest in journalism and media are encouraged to apply. Experience working in Python, SQL or other data engineering projects and natural language processing projects is a plus.
For more information about the program and how to apply:
About this training program: Brent Jones, assistant managing editor for training and outreach, The Wall Street Journal via email at brent.jones@wsj.com.
How to apply: Lawrence Fauntleroy, director of CUNY 2X/Tech Talent Pipeline, 718.960.2470 or via email at lawrence.fauntleroy@lehman.cuny.edu