© 2024 WLRN
MIAMI | SOUTH FLORIDA
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Google Fellows, WLRN To Profile Miami Tech Startups

Knight Foundation

When Google takes an interest in journalism education, we are happy to help.

This summer, Google is launching the Google Journalism Fellowship, recognizing that behind many blue links on Google “is a journalist and that quality journalism is a key ingredient of a vibrant and functioning society.” The eight fellows started off with a week-long visit to Miami, hosted by Knight Foundation.

Fellow Jan Lauren Boyles, a PhD candidate in journalism education at American University, applied for the fellowship because, she explained, “it's essential to understand the industry's disruptions from those working on its front lines.”

“In Miami, industry practitioners are proactively meeting the challenges forged by disruptive innovation, even building brand new, digital-first newsrooms,” Boyles said. “Those who are encountering the greatest success, it seems, are risk takers who are mirroring the agile and experimental culture of startups."

As part of the fellowship, Boyles will spend 10 weeks at the Pew Research Center. Other fellows will be embedded at ProPublicaInvestigative Reporters & Editors and other organizations that are focused on improving news and information content and delivery.

In Miami, the fellows were put to work by WLRN, helping WLRN’s Tom Hudson collect audio and stories about the Miami startup scene, dubbed “Silicon Beach,” for the radio series “The Sunshine Economy.”

The fellows’ profiles of local start-ups will appear this week, starting Wednesday June 12, on the WLRN website.  The fellows also visited the new Miami Heraldnewsroom, the soon-to-be “Fusion newsroom” (Fusion is a joint venture between Univision and ABC News), as well as the tech startups, The LAB Miami and Gui.de.

By Marie Gilot, media innovation associate at Knight Foundation

More On This Topic