Alyson Martin
Adjunct Faculty; Editor, Columbia News Service
Alyson Martin is the co-founder of the news organization Cannabis Wire, which covers the business and policy of the global cannabis industry. She is the co-author of the book A New Leaf: The End of Cannabis Prohibition (The New Press, 2014). Martin has written for The Atlantic and The New York Times, among other publications, and has taught a course on covering cannabis for Poynter and the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Center for Health Journalism. Martin frequently appears on radio and television, including NPR, CBS and the History Channel, among other outlets.
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Classes taught
In this core class, which begins in August and continues through the end of October, you'll explore the methods journalists use to gather and evaluate information. You'll learn how to think and behave as a journalist, how to conceive of journalistic story assignments, and how to report them quickly and accurately on deadline. You’ll learn how to gather original information first-hand and to combine it with contextual information that can be found online and elsewhere. You will be taught how to ensure that a story is true, both in the sense of getting the facts right and also by stating the implications fairly.
You’ll also get some basic training in digital technologies such as mobile photo, video and audio that are essential parts of a modern journalist’s toolkit, and you’ll begin using them in service of journalism, while thinking about ways to use social media to engage an audience for your work.
Multiple instructors teach sections of this class.
