Our diverse city makes for a rich learning lab, and we’ve have hired new faculty with expertise in digital and multi-media storytelling, social networks, economic literacy and entrepreneurial thinking, all anchored with the understanding that our work must reflect the diverse voices of a rapidly changing nation. We are infusing the curriculum with these skills, even as we reinvigorate the foundational classes -- in ethics and history and law, critical thinking and good writing and reliable information gathering. Meanwhile, we are becoming ever more international in our faculty and in our programs, bolstered by our position on the Pacific Rim. Not to mention the fact that USC has the highest percentage of students from abroad of any university in the United States.

With our location in the middle of a richly diverse neighborhood in a city that feels as if it is virtually bounding into what comes next, Annenberg is able to be on the cutting edge.

We are pushing the boundaries technologically, and also in multidisciplinary work. We collaborate with our engineering school and our business school, for example.
In the Annenberg Innovation Lab, we are inventing the next generation of media tools.
We are partnered with a School of Communication that is a powerful scholarly force well matched to our own more practical focus, enabling us to build research projects that can make a valuable contribution to journalism and information in the public interest.
We are doing journalism through our numerous award-winning news outlets, from Annenberg TV News and Annenberg Radio News to our documentary program, Impact and Annenberg Digital News, Neon Tommy, and in classes across the curriculum that contribute to these outlets, and that build their own special-interest websites, focusing on particular themes, or in service to particular L.A. neighborhoods.

Partnerships between our news outlets and classes and commercial and public professional news organizations have led to student work published or aired in the Los Angeles Times, La Opinion, KCET, KPCC and Telemundo, to name a few.

Our newly revised graduate curriculum gives students more freedom to dig deeper into their interests, and allows them to enroll in courses offered in our one-year Specialized Journalism program, with offerings in business and economics, religion, science and sports. Our undergraduate journalism and public relation curricula similarly are undergoing a transformation designed to send our graduates into workplaces with 21st century skills and sensibilities. Students in our public relations graduate programs, one of the nation’s strongest, can work for our student-run TriSight agency, which has worked for the British Consulate, the Los Angeles Coliseum and dozens of non-profits across greater Los Angeles. They also can get involved in important research into the evolving practice of public relations and ongoing investigations into branding and social media.

As part of our commitment to service-based learning, you can also mentor young journalists in our neighborhood high schools, create mobile apps for news for local media outlets and join our student organizations that help recruit students like you.

We are making a real difference, at a time when change is sorely needed. Our award-winning faculty -- veterans of the nation’s leading corporations and public relations agencies and news organizations -- are exceptionally talented and forward-looking, and will help guide your process of discovery as we reinvigorate and reinvent journalism and public relations.

Great journalism careers start here. That is the USC Annenberg story.