To the team at elDiario.es, Servimedia, Prodigioso Volcán, Podimo, The Facto, the University of Bordeaux, the newspaper Sud Ouest, and the Instituto de Prensa y Sociedad (IPYS), who were the first media outlets and institutions to join and support the Master’s program in its first year, the team now grows larger for this second edition with the participation of the European Commission, Canarias Ahora, Confilegal, the production company Capa España, the technology company Esri España, the state agency Red.es, and ONTSI (National Observatory for Technology and Society).
In addition, we will offer financial aid for tuition sponsored by Canarias Ahora, Prodigioso Volcán, Podimo and Capa España. Once again, Red.es and ONTSI provide financial support to the Master’s program and award a €1,000 prize for the best Master’s Thesis (TFM). All of this aims to make knowledge and journalistic specialization accessible to more students.
The goal of the Maldita/URJC Master’s program is to train professionals from journalism, communication, law, economics, history, and other fields so that they know how to investigate, verify, and visualize major journalistic stories using new tools and new narratives. It brings together the best investigative and data journalism in this country with cutting-edge innovation and technology to report and explain our reality.
Students will also complete a period of paid internships in the various media outlets and institutions that support the Master’s program, lasting three months and extendable to six. Places in this postgraduate program are limited because we are committed to direct and personal communication between students and faculty. Classes are active and in-person and take place at the URJC campus located in Plaza Manuel Becerra in Madrid.
A bridge between the academic and professional worlds that won the Ondas Award in its first edition
In its first edition, the Master’s program received the Ondas Award for Non-Fiction podcast for the work carried out by its director, Antonio Rubio, together with professor and director of The Facto (now Capa España) Tomás Ocaña, and the platform Podimo, which collaborated in the first edition and contributed training scholarships in the second. Teamwork is one of the main features of the Master’s program, and the award is an example of this: The Facto, Podimo, and the faculty. Among the new storytelling formats included in the program is the podcast module.
The Master’s program, which is an institutional degree, aims to be a bridge between the academic and professional worlds, and for this reason its curriculum includes PhDs and specialists, both national and international, in the most advanced fields: investigation, new narratives (including podcasts and documentary series), data, fact-checking (“journalism so you don’t get fooled,” as defended at Maldita.es), and transparency.
Among the faculty teaching in the Master’s program are: Clara Jiménez, CEO of Maldita.es; Julio Montes, director of Maldita.es; Lydia Cacho, Mexican journalist and writer; Laura Zommer, director of Chequeado; Raúl Sánchez, head of the Data Unit at elDiario.es; Ramón Salaverría, professor at the University of Navarra; Mercedes del Hoyo, Vice-Rector of URJC; Tomás Ocaña, director of Capa España; María Santos, professor at the University of Bordeaux; Belén Carreño, Reuters correspondent; Jacopo Ottaviani, director of Chief Data Office; Daniel Lizarraga, Mexican investigative journalist; Gerardo Reyes, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and Director of Investigations at Univision; Marianela Balbi, president of IPYS Venezuela… and many more that you can consult here.
The Master’s management team is composed of Dr. Antonio Rubio as director, Dr. Manuel Gertrudix as academic director, Agustina Pozzi as coordinator, and Stephane Gruesso, from the Maldita.es Foundation, as deputy coordinator.
To continue researching and innovating in the field of journalism and communication, the Master’s program will launch in this second edition the Laboratory for Journalistic Research, Verification and Innovation (LIVIP). Renowned foundations at both national and international level will join this initiative in the near future.