Masters

After working for a few years, I decided to go back to school and get a Master of Science in Journalism at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. The program I chose includes a specialization in Media Innovation and Content Strategy. This study sits at the intersection of media, business and technology and focuses on product and strategy.

Throughout my studies, I took many classes where I worked in groups, often across cross-functional disciplines, to develop media and AI products from ideation to prototype to launch. Read about some of my experiences and products below.

Custom.ai.ze

Northwestern University’s Farley Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation offers a course called NUvention Media. This project-based course builds interdisciplinary teams of computer science, business and journalism students to build AI-driven media products and envision the future of media.

I worked as a product manager on a cross functional team that developed an AI product , called Custom.ai.ze, that generates hyper-personalized product descriptions. Custom.ai.ze is designed as a B2B product for online retailers that are looking to personalize the descriptions of their products to their individua users to capture and retain audiencesand convert them to sales. Although my team focused on online retailers, this product could also be used to hyperpersonalize the product description of services, and experiences.

Product

Focused on both digital and tech products, my master’s program trained me to become a product manager using agile methodology. In my Digital & Tech Product Management course, I led a team develop a product and prototype for an online financial literacy platform for women in their 20s.

After conducting market research, we found that the online courses industry is rapidly growing and expected to pass $300 billion by 2025. Additionally, women are entering the work force at record numbers but still falling behind in financial literacy. We conducted user interviews of our target segment and created a product roadmap, backlog and user stories using agile. We then wrote market requirement and product requirement documents and pitched the project for launch.

Knight

The Knight Lab at Northwestern University is a community of designers, developers and journalists working to create new research and tools to help journalists and push journalism into new spaces. In this class, I researched the future of social media, particularly decentralized niche platforms and their experimentation with monetization outside of an advertising model.

Additionally, I researched the problems that journalists and journalism organizations face on current existing social media platforms. For example, many platforms such as Twitter and Instagram are not prioritizing or deprioritizing external links in order to keep users on their platforms. Journalists are getting more harassment than news tips and its becoming harder to share news stories in online communities. Addressing these problems I researched solutions including social news apps like Artifact and pitches new solutions for monetization and community.

In this class, I was also exposed to AI experimentation with short-form video where the user could create an animated persona and feed it scripts which could potentially be used in newsrooms with limited resources.