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Lisa Waananen Jones

Lisa Waananen Jones
Assistant Professor Professor of Practice 509-335-5229 Murrow Hall 209  

Biography

None of the classes Lisa Waananen Jones teaches existed when she was a student.

As a clinical assistant professor in the Edward R. Murrow College of Communication, she teaches Multimedia Content Creation, Reporting Across Platforms, and Professional Multimedia Content Creation, along with various 400-level seminar courses in data visualization and narrative storytelling.

She graduated from Washington State University with undergraduate degrees in communication (journalism) and political science and entered the workforce as a reporter for The Spokesman Review during the recession of 2008.

Forced to reconsider her professional goals just a year after graduation, she attended graduate school at the Columbia School of Journalism. After staying at Columbia for a year as a teaching assistant, she took an internship at the graphics desk in The New York Times for two years, winning multiple awards for group projects.

It’s this professional skill set she most enjoys sharing with her students. With teaching focuses on visual communication and data, she wants to make students feel data and analytics are approachable.

She also enjoys the visualization of data and graphics, she said, because they get to the core of civic journalism, which explains difficult or obscure topics in a simpler way.

Bio authored by Gabriella Ramos, Class of 2019