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Broadcast Veteran Speaks to MSLCE Students About Media Industry Disruption

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By Benjamin Levine

The MSLCE program consistently brings in industry professionals as guest speakers to augment and expand upon the principles taught in class. Professor Daniel Gruber (above) hosted seasoned TV guru Hank Price during his Business Models in the Creative Enterprises class to help the cohort understand how to take a failed business model and turn it into something fresh.

Price framed his discussion around his current project at WVTM 13 in Birmingham, Alabama where he was taken on as president and general manager to fix the struggling station’s declining ratings.  (more…)

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Categories: Industry Immersion

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MSLCE Student Hopes to Save Print Journalism

Posted by kel643

By Miya Williams

“I want to find what will make newspapers viable again,” said MSLCE student Jessica Neary.

While some publications like the New York Times are exploring new ways to stay relevant and profitable, Neary contends that no one has quite figured it out.

“As far as online goes, I think everyone is struggling,” she said.

Neary wants to close the gap between journalism and design. She believes examining the way people read online and how information is presented can help newspapers survive.

The University of Montana grad wrote for her college newspaper but soon discovered that she hated writing. Thankfully, she found her passion with design. Neary was the paper’s page designer for two years followed by two years as a design editor. “I loved the whole atmosphere of the newsroom with design,” she said. (more…)

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Categories: Student Profiles

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Crafting Your Perfect Mission Statement

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by Colin DeKuiper

A mission statement isn’t usually the first statement that you are told to write as you begin your career, but it should be. Although you are unlikely to use it publicly, it is the one sentence that will inform all the other professional materials you produce. It provides the “why” and “how” of what you do. (more…)

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Categories: Industry Immersion

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MSLCE Student Hopes to Be a Professional Pop Singer

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By Jacob Nelson

Linling Navarro has set her sights high: she wants to be a pop star.

“The end goal is to become a professional singer, performing in huge venues, touring, selling albums,” the MSLCE student said.

It’s an ambitious goal, and one she’s been already working towards for years. As a Northwestern undergrad studying vocal performance and opera, Navarro looked for opportunities to perform crossover songs that drew on both her classical and pop/R&B preferences. She performed with the Northwestern Community Ensemble Choir, a group she says she “fell deeply in love with.”

Then, when she graduated, she decided MSLCE would be a great way for her to become even more prepared to enter the music industry. (more…)

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MSLCE Students Head to Lookingglass Theatre for ‘Treasure Island’

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By Scotty Stieber

The Lookingglass Theatre’s ‘Treasure Island’ production takes our childhood daydreams to the stage in an exciting space that feeds off the senses.

MSLCE students ventured downtown to Michigan Avenue last Wednesday to experience Mary Zimmerman’s vision of the classic treasure hunt story. Unlike larger performances, ‘Treasure Island’ keeps its audience close to the action with only a few rows of seats placed around the perimeter of the stage. (more…)

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Categories: Industry Immersion

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Northwestern Law Professor Explains How Musicians Make Money in Digital Age

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By Ben Levine

Northwestern University professor of law Peter DiCola joined the MSLCE cohort for a conversation surrounding a question often asked in the creative fields: how the heck do musicians make money? Professor DiCola is one of the first people to do extensive research on the subject and took the opportunity to address questions that the students had posed in response to his research paper, “Money from Music.” While the data on this field is still developing, it is clear that the revenue streams for musicians are undergoing dramatic change and that the future of monetizing music is not selling recordings. (more…)

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Jellyvision Founder Makes the Uninteresting Fun

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By Jacob Nelson

Harry Gottlieb makes learning fun, and that means making it funny. It’s something he’s good at because, in one way or another, he’s been practicing for decades.

Gottlieb is the founder of Jellyvision, the Chicago-based multimedia company behind the trivia computer game You Don’t Know Jack and, more recently ALEX, an interactive program that uses humor and straightforward language to teach corporate employees about health care plans and retirement savings, to name a few of its offerings.

“I’ve always been super interested in making and learning and engaging,” Gottlieb said, “I’m particularly interested in things that are non-interesting and complex.”

Gottlieb will be discussing his career at Northwestern on Thursday, Feb. 4 at 5:15 p.m. (more…)

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CBS Vice President and Executive Talks TV, Gives Career Advice

Posted by kel643

Jane Gottlieb’s career was largely self-invented and built brick by brick in small steps.

Days out of Northwestern, Jane landed a job in the then-nascent field of ‘corporate AV (as it was then called) and never looked back.   Producing meetings and events for blue chip companies required a boatload of skills: theme development, proposal and scriptwriting, budgeting, casting, art directing, to name just a few — skills honed in real time, on the job. (more…)

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Categories: Guest Speakers

MSLCE Student Hopes to Turn Television Passion Into Industry Career

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By Amy A. Ross

Morgan Zankich takes her television watching very seriously. She invests a significant amount of her time and attention watching shows, assessing their quality and trying to figure out what makes them work.

“My hobbies pretty much revolve around watching television. I have most of the streaming apps like Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, HBO Now and Showtime AnyTime,” said the 22 year-old Cornell graduate.

Zankich’s life-long interest in television turned into something more over the past few years, as she developed a fascination with the television industry and a desire to become a part of it. (more…)

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MSLCE Students Learn What It Takes To Be A Project Manager

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By John Matthew Simon

Today, we’re taking a look at one of our core classes and what students learned. Here’s MSLCE student John Matthew Simon describing our Project Management course, taught by Dan Heck:

Managing projects in creative environments can be difficult due to the emotive nature of creatives and their ideation processes. As future leaders who will need to welcome change by embracing innovation, students analyzed creative organizations like Cirque du Soleil (more…)

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