Students and faculty: Does your j-school offer security education?

Are you a student or faculty member at a U.S.-based school of journalism? What you know about your program can make all the difference in protecting journalists and their sources.

Through conducting hundreds of security trainings with news organizations of all sizes, we’ve learned that journalists often have little or no formal education about information security. It turns out, many journalism programs offer little or no security guidance, despite an environment where contemporary newsrooms contend with targeted hacking and surveillance. Journalism programs in 2019 demand training preparation for 2019, and information security is now a central part of it.

Future journalists should have sufficient security training before they arrive at a newsroom. We intend to help j-schools get ahead of the problem.

We are kicking off a multi-year initiative to work alongside j-schools to learn about their security education offerings. In turn, we are using findings and working with j-schools to understand how to create a security curriculum that prepares journalism students for the real world.

We are in the beginning stages of this project. For now, we're collecting contact information from people like you, who are interested in contributing to our research in the future.