Introducing NBTB Online

Left to right: Students Cooper Boardman, Jason Zheng and Caroline Orr work on their team websites during production night at NBTB 2015.

We’ve been working hard over the past few weeks to develop an online alternative for accepted and new students following the cancellation of our on-campus residential and commuter programs at Stanford this summer due to coronavirus concerns.

Here’s more on NBTB Online, including our new application, program details and a typical day.

Already accepted-and-paid students can switch to NBTB Online with no new application. For new students, the application deadline is May 15. Due to the impact of coronavirus on schools and the unusually high demand on teachers, we’re waiving the requirement for recommendations, though we will ask for contact information for a journalism adviser or teacher who knows the student well.

As they would on campus, NBTB Online students will still get four hours of classes daily in news reporting and writing, digital media, broadcast/video and photojournalism from award-winning journalism educators. Special intensives will focus on climate science journalism and political reporting.

Afternoons will include team meetings and one-on-one coaching by our talented team leaders, aimed at helping students to improve their journalism and production skills and to learn more about college study in journalism.

There will be plenty of opportunity for leadership as students begin designing and producing NBTB’s print, web and new broadcast products. Students this year also will be doing client work for a major news publication as well as a climate science organization.

Our amazing guest speakers — working journalists , industry innovators and newsmakers — are a highlight of NBTB and they’ll remain so. Going online and spanning time zones will mean we can reach out more widely to those who may not have been able to travel to Stanford. Online press conferences will also give more students a chance to connect close-up.

While we’ll miss being on campus, we know that learning online together and telling the story of what life is like now will be a teachable moment. It may even create the kind of “group problem solvers” that education experts seek to encourage.

“Working with unseen partners, especially online, will become a bedrock skill for career success,” said Jenny Bradshaw of the Program for International Assessment, in a 2015 Scientific American article called “Testing the Team Player.” “Increasingly, this is the way the workplace and the world will function.”

We think that’s true, and we look forward to the summer to come. Join us — online!