UNC journalism professor to help Duke's student newspaper's digital transition

The UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media continues its tradition as a world-class resource for digital media innovation today as Duke University taps associate professor Ryan Thornburg for a key role in its student newspaper’s transition to a digital first news product.

Thornburg will be a Visiting Lecturer in Digital Media at the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy at the Sanford School of Public Policy. He will continue teaching at UNC during the 9-month appointment and use the experience at The Chronicle student newspaper to further his research and publishing agenda.

“This entire region is becoming increasingly known for its digital media innovation,” Thornburg said. “This opportunity is not only going to build stronger stories for another segment of the news audience here, but it’s also going to be yet another media R&D that shows how our universities are leading the industry.”

The Chronicle, Duke’s independent student news organization, has launched a year-long initiative to focus on developing its staff and daily news operation into a multimedia, interactive and on-demand service. The project at the non-profit news organization is being driven by new revenue and audience opportunities that are familiar to newspaper publishers everywhere.

“During the critical first year of our transformation, we think having a professional journalist on site, particularly someone with expertise in the transition from a product that is primarily print to multiple products and services delivered in multiple digital formats, will help make our transition a success,” said Chronicle General Manager Chrissy Beck, a 1989 UNC journalism alumna.

Thornburg has spent the last two years at UNC’s journalism school focused on a project – with $275,000 of funding from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation — to help North Carolina’s rural newspapers create new revenue and reporting opportunities from public data. He also serves on the board of UNC’s student newspaper, The Daily Tar Heel.

“Working with students who see real opportunity in the future of journalism and media generally is one of the greatest privileges of being a professor at UNC and now a visiting lecturer at Duke,” Thornburg said.

“This whole area — from the Knight professorships, Reese News Lab, Powering a Nation and DTH here at UNC to the Knight Professor at Duke and the non-profit and for-profit media startups all over the place — make North Carolina a great place to innovate,” he said. “It’s not just the kind of innovation that makes money, but that finds new ways to shine light in dark places, hold powerful people accountable and explain our increasingly complex and interconnected world.”

This isn’t the first time that Duke and UNC have collaborated on digital media innovation. Thornburg and then-Duke professor Sarah Cohen taught a class in 2011 in which a class of half UNC students and half Duke students worked together on reporting and producing an investigative journalism project.

“I’m as strong of a Carolina partisan as you’ll ever find,” Thornburg said. “But collaborating with good, smart people with diverse and creative minds is the only way we’re going to figure out how to reach more people with memorable and relevant true stories.”

UNC journalism Dean Susan King said this kind of hands-on innovation and collaboration is part of the school’s DNA. "Our faculty and our students are creating new knowledge through research and then bringing that knowledge to the marketplace,” she said. “It's part of Carolina's unique culture — a culture that Ryan is showing is strong enough even to survive basketball season.”