Career Development Committee Explores Modern Media Landscape

 

Moderated by Larry Glazer ’86, the panel featured current parents Rochelle Sharpe P’21 and Tony Massarotti P’24, both of whom have decades of experience in print journalism, alongside Adam Greene ’02, whose company Green Lens Media creates video content for businesses and nonprofit organizations with environmentally focused missions. All three offered their insights on both the present state of content and media and how things have changed since their careers started.

 

Ms. Sharpe is a Pulitzer Prize winning print journalist who has been a staff writer for The Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and USA TODAY whose focus has traditionally been on health, labor, and various social issues. After 13 years of working in the Washington, D.C. area, she now works independently as a journalism professor, editor, and writing coach and recently helped develop an investigative reporting workshop for high school students with Boston University.

 

“Investigative reporting actually coming back right now and while I agree that most newspapers have fallen on hard times, a few of the big ones have seen circulation spike in the last year or so,” Ms. Sharpe said. “Newspapers are now hiring more reporters and there are now more than 100 non-profit investigative reporting groups around the country, so we are in something of a heyday for investigative reporting.”

 

Mr. Massarotti joined the staff at the Boston Herald in 1989 and covered the Boston Red Sox from 1994 until 2008, when he moved to the Boston Globe to cover baseball until 2013. Simultaneously, Tony has been a co-host of Felger & Mazz on 98.5 The Sports Hub, one of Boston’s highest-rated radio sports talk shows, since 2009.

 

“The death of traditional radio media is exaggerated, the death of print, however, is not,” Mr. Massarotti said. “Radio is still a unique opportunity because we are the only source of information for people in their cars. Talk radio has become a larger source for information because of apps like Spotify and Pandora, so people are listening to the radio less for music and more for information. It’s the rare time where you truly have a captive audience.”

 

Mr. Greene attended Bard College after Rivers and earned bachelors degrees in creative writing and film before moving on to the New York Film Academy. He launched Green Lens Media in 2009 and has worked with companies as large as Johnson & Johnson and as local as the Nantucket Tackle Center. All of his films, however, are socially conscious and aim to bring awareness to sustainability and “green” initiatives.

 

“The technology shifts in video so quickly so anybody can shoot a video today, but in order to shoot it well you need to be creative, capable of producing a lot of content, maintain a personal connection to the audience, and have that ‘x factor’ that separates you from someone with their iPhone,” Greene said. “We produced a movie trailer in the style of Ocean’s 11 for a real estate company. They can then share that with their users and communicate their business in a way that is entertaining.”

 

The Career Development Committee is already hard at work planning its next event, so stay tuned to the Alumni page and monthly newsletters for opportunities to engage and network with Rivers parents and alumni.