Digital Media Skills Certificate

Course Overview

You’ll experience best practices for telling stories to an online audience —through social media, on the web, and to a mobile audience. You’ll learn to engage with video, digital photography, audio recordings, and data visualizations. You’ll have the tools and storytelling skills to produce, edit, and post content 24/7. Upon completion of this program, participants will have the knowledge and tools necessary to apply their new skill set immediately to their profession.

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Course Outcomes

  • Learn to choose the best media for telling stories on multiple digital platforms.
  • Learn to develop the narrative in your digital story and how to produce creative visual stories.
  • Learn best practices for interviewing and how to prepare a subject for the interview.
  • Best practices for shooting, editing and producing videos.
  • Learn to produce engaging content for all digital platforms.
  • Become skilled in creating quality audio for videos or audio files that engage audiences.
  • Learn the basics of producing a podcast, including recording, editing, and adding narration, music and sound effects.
  • Learn to create interactive data visualizations, charts, graphs, and maps to tell stories.
  • Understand the keys to audience engagement and how to apply this to your own content.
  • Learn to use publishing platforms to showcase your work.
  • Explore emerging technologies influencing digital media content production.
  • Produce a final digital media capstone project using  new media technologies and tools.
  • Build a new set of skills that will make you a fluent, active and engaging digital media content producer.

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Work Sample

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Who Should Attend?

This is ideal for all content creators, advertising specialists, journalists, editors, new media managers, media professionals, content marketers, communications and PR, educators and web producers.

Need help justifying this training to your employer? Please check out our customizable document.

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I've learned a huge amount about a wide range of production skills in this program & the instructors have been so wonderful and generous with their professional expertise.

Alison C.
Media Content Producer

Great experience! I've particularly appreciated having help from Graduate Student Assistants here and there to complete the project and receiving feedbacks on my work.

Viviana D.
Freelance Journalist

Very satisfactory! I felt like my skills & understanding of digital media have significantly improved. I will continue to polish my projects & also make connections with classmates I plan to work with in the future. Thus, I really appreciate the collaborative aspect of the course.

Celine G.
Digital Editor

Instructors & Facilitators

Instructors subject to change.

Angelia Baxter

Angelia Baxter is a Certified Usability Analyst with 20+ years enterprise, startup, and agency experience as an effective user advocate and collaborator. She is the President/CEO of The Kreativ Studio, Inc – a design consultancy firm and Founder of In the Place – a professional networking platform for creators in Film & Tech. She has taught UX courses for General Assembly, Imparture, San Francisco State and her firm The Kreativ Studio, Inc.

Indu Chandrasekhar

Indu Chandrasekhar is the director of audience engagement and oversees all of WIRED’s efforts to grow its audience and increase reader engagement, focusing on search engines, social platforms, newsletters, content recommendations, and analytics. She previously worked at MarketWatch, The Wall Street Journal, and the Telegraph in London.

Francesca Fenzi

Francesca Fenzi is an audio producer, reporter and educator based in the Bay Area. Her work has been broadcast on NPR’s “All Things Considered” program, the Alaska Public Media network, and featured in several podcasts. She’s also written for The Guardian, Inc. and TIME magazines, and news outlets like Oakland North, Richmond Confidential and Anchorage Daily News. Francesca enjoys stories where science and social issues overlap, and is a graduate of UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. When not hunting for wild b-roll, she can be found climbing, biking or sea kayaking along the Pacific coast.

Amanda Hickman

Amanda Hickman is the Director of Product at Factful. She led BuzzFeed’s Open Lab for Journalism, Technology, and the Arts from its founding in 2015 until the lab wrapped up in 2017. She has taught reporting, data analysis and visualization, and audience engagement at graduate journalism programs at UC Berkeley, Columbia University, and the City University of New York, and was DocumentCloud’s founding program director.

Natalie Jones

Natalie Jones is a reporter and podcast producer based in Oakland, California. She helps produce Your Undivided Attention, a podcast that takes a hard look at the impact of technology on our lives, and has worked on several other podcasts and audio projects. Her reporting has been published in The Guardian, The Washington Post, NPR.org, Grist, Civil Eats, Craftsmanship Quarterly, and The Point Reyes Light, and has aired on KQED, and KALW in San Francisco, and Aspen Public Radio in Colorado. Some favorite topics to cover are health, agriculture, food, and the environment. She also teaches for the UC Berkeley Advanced Media Institute at the Graduate School of Journalism.

Chris Schodt

Chris Schodt is an Emmy-nominated multimedia producer, and a freelance journalist. His work includes video, animation, and data visualization, and he has had his work published by Engadget, the Verge, the BBC, and National Geographic.

Emma Schwartz

Emma Schwartz is a multimedia producer and filmmaker based in Oakland, California. She holds a masters from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, and has over ten years of experience producing and shooting for magazines, television and independent documentaries. In recent years, she’s worked with PBS, The Washington Post, GQ Magazine, Bon Appétit Magazine, NBC Bay Area and SF Gate, among others. As a freelance international journalist, she has also lived and worked in Argentina, Dominican Republic, Israel and Palestine. She is currently an Associate Producer for the PBS series, “Not In Our Town,” a project that uses documentary film, new media, and organizing to stop hate, address bullying, and build safe, inclusive communities.

Richard Taylor

Richard Taylor was previously the BBC North American technology correspondent in the Bay Area, is the founder of SuperRich Media and creator of the BBC’s global technology brand, ‘Click,’ a pioneering TV show which trail blazes the use of innovative production techniques. Richard’s experience with creating video on the mobile phone includes shooting entire TV news reports on his iPhone and in-person interviews with film director, James Cameron and web inventor, Tim Berners Lee.

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Tuition

$[ts_format_number][/ts_format_number] USD

We encourage team work! Bring a colleague or friend and receive additional tuition discounts. Contact us at advancedmedia@journalism.berkeley.edu for more information.

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Where?

UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism

121 North Gate Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720

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Prerequisites

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Requirements

  • This is a beginner course. No previous experience is required. Please contact us if you have questions as to the level of this course.
  • It is the participant’s responsibility to provide their own Equipment & Software, including:
    • WiFi-ready laptop with at least 8GB memory. Note that Lenovo laptops are known to be incompatible with some software used in this course.
    • You will need a video camera, microphone, & tripod for 2 to 3 days in week 5 (instructors will discuss exact dates during week 1) for video shoot (see Equipment & Software Guide for rental options).
    • External hard drive (Formatted for Mac or PC).
    • Headphones.
    • Adobe Creative Cloud – Premiere, Photoshop, and Audition (7-day free trial + at least 2 additional paid months to use for the remainder of the course).
  • Computer literacy skills.
  • Comfortable with learning new equipment and software.
  • Proficiency with English.

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Additional Information

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FORMATIn-Person
START DATENot Currently Offered
DURATION
TIME
PRICE

Upcoming Workshops:

TBA