Students Get a Look at ‘Reinventing the News Business,’ Thanks to New Fellowship for Thomas Bass

“Entrepreneurial Journalism” Comes to UAlbany

ALBANY, N.Y. (January 4, 2016) – Thomas Bass, a UAlbany professor of English and journalism, has been selected as a fellow to the Scripps Howard Journalism Entrepreneurship Institute. As a result of his recent honor, UAlbany will offer a new class, “Entrepreneurial Journalism,” in spring 2016.

Scripps Howard award winner Thomas Bass.

Bass is currently attending an immersion program at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University that equips professors with the skills to infuse journalism entrepreneurship into their own academic programs. A professor of journalism at UAlbany since 2005, he is among an elite group of journalism educators selected from an international pool of qualified applicants to participate in the Institute.

“I imagine the topic of discussion in Arizona will deal with reinventing journalism in the digital, online, 24/7 world,” said Bass before leaving for Arizona. “Newspapers are folding, and traditional models for researching and reporting news are up for grabs. Entrepreneurial journalism looks for ways to reinvent the news business — get ahead of the curve — and thrive as a journalist in the 21st Century. I can’t imagine anything more important to be teaching our journalism majors.”

An award-winning journalist and author of a half dozen books, Bass leads journalism development projects in Tunisia for the U.S. State Department and serves as a founding board member of Albany’s Museum of Political Corruption. His writing appears regularly in The New Yorker, Foreign Policy, American Scholar, and other publications. The Institute is made possible through a grant from the Scripps Howard Foundation, the philanthropic arm of The E.W. Scripps Company.

The E.W. Scripps Company is a leading media enterprise with 19 television stations and newspapers in 13 markets that is developing and expanding its digital strategies, including social gaming, for multiple platforms. Since 1941, Scripps has operated the National Spelling Bee.

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