Meet your 2024 instructors.
Sherrod Blakely, Instructor
On Campus: Sherrod Blakely is a Lecturer at Boston University’s College of Communication with a concentration on sports journalism, multi-media reporting and podcasting. Blakely is also an NBA writer for Bleacher Report along with being an NBA columnist for Ebony.com and Bet.com. Blakely is also the creator and co-host of The A-List Podcast with Kwani Lunis and Gary Washburn, nominated for Best Basketball podcast in 2023.
A graduate of Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Communications, Blakely spent 10 years as the first Boston Celtics Insider for NBC Sports Boston and was awarded Boston.com’s “A-List Celtics Reporter of the Year” in 2011. Blakely previously covered the Detroit Pistons for the award-winning Mlive.com website, and earlier covered ACC football and men’s basketball for the Raleigh (N.C.) News & Observer. Away from class, Blakely is the Chair of the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) Sports Task Force and Chair of the Associated Press Sports Editors (APSE) Diversity Committee.
Jan Brogan, Instructor
On Campus: Jan Brogan is the author of the book, Combat Zone: Murder, Race and Boston’s Struggle for Justice, an examination of a 1976 murder of a Harvard football player and its impact on the city and the criminal justice system. She’s worked as a reporter at The Boston Globe, The Worcester Telegram & Gazette, and The Providence Journal, where she won the Gerald Loeb award, the most prestigious national award for business journalism. Her freelance magazine work has been published in Boston Magazine, The Improper Bostonian, Technology Illustrated, Forbes Magazine, Good Housekeeping and Ladies Home Journal.
She is also the author of four published murder mysteries and sold the rights to “A Confidential Source” to Steven Soderbergh for development into a television series. She is an alumna of Boston University’s College of Communication and the University of Massachusetts, where she earned a master’s degree in English. In 2020, she was named an outstanding educator by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards program.
Stephen Haines, Instructor (Photojournalism)
On Campus and Learn-from-Home (Photojournalism): Haines, a veteran photojournalist and a lecturer at Boston University, leads the photojournalism track at the Summer Journalism Institute. He spent most of his career at The Boston Globe where he worked as a staff photographer, assignment and photo editor. As a freelancer, his work now includes both still and video projects.
Haines is passionate about photography, seeing it as a universal language that helps people better understand and connect to one another. He has taught at Boston University for 14 years where he concentrates on the creative controls of photography, teaching students to take powerful, storytelling photos from which readers can learn.
Meghan Irons, Instructor
Learn-from-Home: Meghan E. Irons is an award-winning Boston journalist and investigative reporter. She is an associate professor of the practice of impact journalism at Boston University, a position she took after more than 20 years at The Boston Globe, where she was a member of the elite Spotlight Team.
Irons grew up in Boston (in Dorchester, Mattapan, and Hyde Park) and is a proud graduate of the Jeremiah E. Burke High School, where she was the volleyball captain for a time and senior class secretary. Irons became a journalist because she loved to write and was always curious about the lives of other people. She has made a career chronicling social justice issues. Irons currently lives in the city with her dogs Marley and JoJo.
Pacinthe Mattar, Instructor
Learn-from-Home: Pacinthe Mattar is an Egyptian-Canadian journalist, writer and producer. She was born in Alexandria, Egypt, and raised between Toronto, Saudi Arabia and Dubai. She spent ten years at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), where she was a long-time radio producer on The Current. Much of her coverage focused on race & racism, police brutality, the Arab Spring, migration and refugees, pop culture, and more. She has taught writing and journalism at Harvard, Boston University and Western University.
In 2020, her feature essay in The Walrus magazine “Objectivity is a Privilege Afforded to White Journalists” won a National Magazine Award in 2021 and a Canadian Online Publishing Award in 2022. She was a 2021/22 Nieman Foundation for Journalism Fellow at Harvard University and the 2023 Asper Fellow in Media at Western University in London, Ontario.
Lara Salahi, Instructor
On Campus / Learn-from-Home: Lara Salahi is an award-winning health journalist, author, and distinguished professor of journalism at Endicott College. She is a regular contributor to local, national, and international digital news outlets, as well as network and cable television. Her book, Outbreak Culture: The Ebola Crisis and the Next Epidemic, critically examines the largest and deadliest Ebola outbreak to date and the fractured system of global outbreak response. Lara was awarded a Rosalynn Carter Mental Health Journalism Fellowship in 2021 to report on suicide and the science of resilience in the U.S. Army National Guard; her 3-part investigative series was published in 2023 in the award-winning publication, The War Horse.
Lara received a dual undergraduate degree in Broadcast Journalism and International Relations and a minor in French from Boston University, a master’s degree in Health Communication from Emerson College, and a doctorate in Education from Regis College.
Stephanie Schorow
On Campus: Stephanie Schorow is an award-winning reporter and editor, college writing instructor, and the author of nine nonfiction books on topics such as urban history, fires, crime, and sexual politics. She has worked as a journalist since graduating from Northwestern University in the dark days before the Internet; she has been an editor, reporter and/or freelance correspondent for the Boston Herald, the Associated Press, The Boston Globe, and newspapers in Missouri, Idaho, Utah, and Connecticut. She coordinated a Citizen Journalism Program in Malden, Mass., and has taught writing and communications at Lasell University, Regis College, and Emerson.
Her books include: The Cocoanut Grove Nightclub Fire; The Great Boston Fire: The Inferno that Nearly Incinerated the City; Inside the Combat Zone: The Stripped Down Story of Boston’s Most Notorious Neighborhood; The Crime of the Century; and East of Boston: Notes from the Harbor Islands. Her first novel, Cat Dreaming, will be published in fall 2023. She has a master’s degree from NYU.
Rochelle Sharpe, Instructor
On Campus / Learn-from-Home: Rochelle Sharpe is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist with more than 30 years of experience. Now a freelance writer in Brookline, MA, Rochelle focuses on public health and education issues. Her freelance work has appeared in such publications as The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, and Prevention. Earlier in her career, she worked as a staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal, Business Week and USA Today. A pioneer in computer-assisted reporting, Rochelle has written many investigative articles, some of which have been discussed at Congressional hearings as well as on Oprah and the David Letterman show. She also has worked as a journalism professor, editor, and writing coach.
Born and raised in Gary, Indiana, Rochelle graduated with honors from Yale University.. In 2012-2013, she was a Knight Science Journalism fellow at MIT, where she studied the intersection of health and technology. She lives in Brookline with her husband and two daughters.