Northeastern graduate students launch website and magazine covering social justice issues
This semester, students in Dan Zedek’s graduate Media Innovation studio wrote, designed, photographed, coded, and published a web site and print magazine looking at social justice issues. This new publication, The Margins, was built on traditional journalism’s bedrock values of thorough reporting and thoughtful writing.
But today’s digital era demands more of journalism.
Now, the most effective stories step beyond the written word to add photography, video, audio, and data visualization. The Margins aims “to tell stories that live on the outskirts of the modern news cycle.” Its six stories chronicle underrepresented and unheard individuals within our community.
The website and print magazine were built on the skills students learned throughout the Master’s program. Zedek, the former design director for The Boston Globe, first contacted his students over the summer, grouping them in small teams and suggesting directions for additional reporting on stories for which they’d produced podcasts and short videos in a previous course taught by Dina Kraft.
Using the Adobe Creative Suite as a prototyping tool, the students learned valuable design, layout, and infographics skills and produced the print magazine and a social media campaign for Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. They then combined their knowledge of data visualization with web design to develop the site using HTML, CSS, Javascript, and D3 scaffolded on a responsive framework called Skeleton.
