On Friday, March 11, students and faculty from the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism and City College’s BIC Program, and communications professionals attended a unique "co-conference” sponsored by both schools entitled "Journalism in the Age of Branded Content...and Vice Versa." This sold-out event featured top experts and executives from PRWeek, Contently, IBM, Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times.
Later, five cross-disciplinary teams composed of students from both schools broke out into work sessions to develop “speed" campaigns anchored in a branded content solution for one of these brands: Shiseido, Red Rooster in Harlem, Memorial Sloan Kettering, Intel, and Girls Who Code.
The five teams met again on Wednesday, March 23, to present their campaigns to a panel of professionals who included Ashley Bode (Marcus Samuelsson Group), Charles Van Es (Vita Coco), Diallo Hall (Loquatio), David M. Olsen (Tyco), Deborah Singer (Girls Who Code), and Fara Warner (Wall Street Journal Custom Studios).
The night concluded with highest praise going to the campaign for Girls Who Code which used robots and influencers on YouTube to inspire girls in high school to become coders. This team featured BIC students Castro Desroches, Diana Friedman and Megan Beth Fullagar.
The idea for this unique cross-disciplinary collaboration began as a conversation between BIC Program Director Nancy Tag and J-School Dean Sarah Bartlett. For BICsters, it blossomed into a one-credit BIC course on Native Advertising that was anchored by the March conference and student collaboration — all done in concert with J-School faculty and members of the Tow-Knight Center Jeff Jarvis, Hal Straus, and Jeremy Caplan.
About The City College of New York
Since 1847, The City College of New York has provided low-cost, high-quality education for New Yorkers in a wide variety of disciplines. More than 15,000 students pursue undergraduate and graduate degrees in the College of Liberal Arts and Science; Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture; School of Education; Grove School of Engineering; Sophie Davis Biomedical Education/CUNY School of Medicine; and the Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership. U.S. News, Princeton Review and Forbes all rank City College among the best colleges and universities in the United States.