SMPA 3195.15/3194.14 "From Both Sides of the White House Podium"
What's it like to report from the White House Press Room? What's it like to face the reporters in the White House Press Room and speak for the President of the United States? CNN's Senior White House Correspondent Ed Henry, Clinton White House Press Secretary Joe Lockhart and Assistant Professor Michael Shanahan, a former White House reporter, will conduct a weekly seminar to comprehensively examine both presidential message-making and how the messages get reported.

The course will examine how messages aimed at advancing the President's policy agenda and political standing get formulated by the White House Communications team. Henry, Lockhart and Shanahan will also explain how the White House press corps decide what stories to cover and how to interpret and report them. The often conflicting goals of White House reporters and White House communicators intersect in the White House Press Room. This course will also analyze their relationship. Are they allies or adversaries? Has the relationship changed from President to President? The course will examine these issues through a real-world lens from both sides of the White House podium.

SMPA 3195.14 Entrepreneurship in the New Media Industry
Taught by the SMPA Shapiro Fellow for Spring 2011 – Rick Ducey

Decades old media business models are being upended by changing audience and advertiser patterns across traditional and digital media; Internet technologies supporting innovative, scalable and engaged user services; and challenging economics on who pays for content. Based on a grounded understanding of the digital media ecosystem, we will analyze what is happening; why; where the media industry is headed and career opportunities for those entering this industry. We will explore the role of entrepreneurship in a period of fast change and the degree to which this is accepted in the market and institutionalized by the financial, policy and media communities. We will consider how traditional media companies try to evolve and evaluate their relative success in doing so by identifying critical change factors. Rick Ducey is the Chief Strategy Officer for BIA/Kelsey. Ducey is expert in new media technologies; competitive strategies; shifting consumer demographics; and media usage trends which are driving changes in the media ecosystem and what traditional media companies must do to be successful in the new environment.

SMPA 3195.16  and SMPA 3194 .15  Media and National Security
Taught by Tara McKelvey

This course will investigate America’s shadow warfare and covert operations, examining the relationship between media and national security, as well as civil liberties, state secrets, and accountability. Students will conduct an examination of the counterterrorism campaign of drone strikes in Pakistan, cruise missiles in Yemen, and Special Forces in Afghanistan and will engage in a timely discussion at the intersection of secret warfare, national security, and the public’s right to know. The students will work together to complete an investigative project that will shed light on targeted operations, which have become the signature military strategy of our time. In addition, students will take advantage of the classroom setting of Washington, D.C. and go on field trips to the Pentagon, State Department, and International Spy Museum. Guest
speakers will include television journalists, former intelligence officers, and counterterrorism experts.

Tara McKelvey is the author of Monstering: Inside America's Policy on Secret Interrogations and Torture in the Terror War.  She was the SMPA Shapiro Fellow in the fall of 2010.  Her work has appeared in Columbia Journalism Review, The Washington Post, Boston Review, among other publications, and she has contributed chapters to The Impact of 9/11 and the New Legal Landscape, and New Threats to Freedom. She is currently a research fellow with Medill National Security Journalism Initiative at Northwestern University and a fellow with the Alicia Patterson Foundation, writing about the military's black operations. Her work has been supported by NYU Law School's Center on Law and Security and Stanford's Hoover Institution.

See all the spring SMPA courses online (at the bottom of the page)!