Contact: caseycora@gmail.com
EXPERIENCE
SouthtownStar – Tinley Park, Ill.
Reporter - Municipal beat reporter for Oak Lawn, a village of about 60,000 on Chicago’s southwest side. I’m trying to incorporate more multimedia and Web 2.0 tools into my beat coverage, and at the newspaper’s Web site.
St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times
Reporter – tampabay.com April 2007 – present
Produced the newspaper’s breaking news blog; responsibilities on any given day include police reporting, news photography, finding and creating multimedia opportunities, crafting Web headlines and coordinating breaking news coverage across multiple bureaus.
Reporter – Dec. 2006 – April 2007
Covered the evening shift as a police reporter and general assignment writer in the newspaper’s flagship newsroom in St. Petersburg.
Reporter – May 2006 – Dec. 2006
Covered community news, including city government and general assignment, for the twice-weekly Neighborhood Times section.
EDUCATION
•Master of Arts, Journalism and Media Studies – Dec. 2007
University of South Florida St. Petersburg
•Bachelor of Arts, Journalism – Dec. 2004
Eastern Illinois University
ADDITIONAL EDUCATION, TRAINING and SEMINARS
• Attended the Chicago Journalism Town Hall in February 2009.
• Screened entries for the Online Journalism Association 2008 Awards in the “Investigative Journalism: Large” category.
• Participated in audio storytelling, online writing and video planning classes at the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors multimedia workshop in Tampa, Fla. in May 2008.
• Attended (virtually) “Writing Headlines for the Web,” a NewsU.org webinar sponsored by the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, July 31, 2007.
•Taught an Introduction to Mass Media class to 40+ undergraduates while serving as a teaching assistant to two nationally-recognized scholars in journalism ethics.
WEB JOURNALISM and SOFTWARE
Proficient in Web-based news platforms and multiple blogging software suites; iMovie; SoundSlides; Audacity; learning to operate in a Django framework; above-average familiarity with the Adobe software suite, including Flash, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Photoshop and GoLive; can adapt quickly to new content management systems. Initiating an ambitious database-driven project about Tampa Bay homicides.
