Dr. Rebecca Haggerty

Biography

Rebecca Haggerty is a broadcast digital journalist and the associate director of the undergraduate journalism program at USC Annenberg. She oversees curriculum development and trains students to succeed in a changing industry while emphasizing the importance of journalism in civic society. Haggerty has dedicated over a decade to working in broadcast news and documentaries, earning various journalism awards, including national and local Emmys. She holds a doctorate in education with a focus on hands-on learning and creativity. As the director of video and multimedia at USC Annenberg’s Media Center, she has modernized the student newsroom by co-creating an experimental unit that publishes news reports directly to mobile platforms, thus enhancing its reach and relevance to student audiences. Haggerty initiated a program for students to support local news outlets in rural communities through an intensive two-week reporting course. She has also designed a course on drugs and media with a colleague from the School of Pharmacy, which received an Interdisciplinary Teaching Grant. Her research includes journalism education, the use of chatbots in copy editing, and collaborations between journalism schools and the industry. Prior to her full-time position at USC, she worked as a co-executive producer for “SoCal Connected” at KCET and was a senior web editor for “Worldfocus” produced by the NYC public television station WNET. Haggerty produced and edited documentaries for NBC News's “Dateline NBC” and was a Knight International Press Fellow in Eastern and Central Europe in 2001.

Research Interests

Courses