MTC @ Medill
Executive Fellowship Program
Since 2007, nearly 450 senior media executives have realized critical performance results, built lifelong career skills and relationships, and made major contributions to industry transformation through this yearlong program (formerly operated as the original Punch Sulzberger Program at Columbia).
Learning Outcomes:
With help from highly experienced coaches and deep ties to your peer group, you will learn:
A repeatable set of tools and concepts to deliver results and transformation
How to build your own leadership capacity as you actually lead the accomplishment of your challenge
Pragmatic, carefully curated tools of strategy, innovation, organizational change, racial equity and personal leadership
$29,750.00
Overview
- As a senior news executive, identify and pursue the most significant business performance challenge you face.
- Deliver real results with help from MTC’s world-class tools, concepts, coaches, peer group and alumni network.
- Build your lifelong leadership capacity through actually achieving outcomes.
- Join a community of hundreds of alumni who have made enormous contributions to reshape the journalism industry.
- Hold yourself accountable with regular coaching calls and online peer group check-ins.
- Convene with other fellows four times in person and multiple times virtually throughout the program.
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What makes MTC @ Medill special?
Most executive programs focus on their particular curriculum with the hope that something will change back home. It rarely does — at least not compared to upfront expectations and cost in time and money.
MTC Executive Director Charlie Baum facilitated group work during an MTC session at Poynter in September 2022.
Our program turns this paradigm on its head. In MTC, Fellows are required to select and pursue an urgent, compelling, measurable performance challenge (not a project or a “pitch,” but outcomes). Everything else — our tools and concepts, coaching, peer relationships and the alumni network — are there to help you make that happen, with a caring dose of peer and program accountability to reinforce your own commitment.
Our performance-driven, challenge-centric approach, pioneered by Doug Smith, Charlie Baum and coaching colleagues, is unique in the media industry and beyond. It helps account for the extraordinary accomplishments of over 430 Fellows, and the common tools, disciplines, language, alumni community, and coaching relationships they share. Meet another Fellow? You will have an immediate connection and common understanding that makes collaboration so much easier.
Many now-common innovations in journalism either got their start or accelerated their development as part of the program. These include NPR’s Code Switch, CIR’s Reveal, the News Revenue Hub, NAHJ’s Palabra, Report for the World, ABC News’ use of one-person bureaus, Columbia Global Reports, Gannett/McClatchy’s Table Stakes program, the AP Video Hub, the Pulitzer Center’s education arm, Hearken, The NewStart Alliance, Subtext, News Product Alliance, El Tímpano and others.
Today’s most crucial journalism challenges demand focus and persistence over time. You can’t expect to change your enterprise in shorter-term efforts of three to four months, especially if those efforts dwell only on helping you make a pitch or learning technical skills or tactics. In MTC, you won’t be busy with checklists and technical projects over a few weeks, or tons of reading and lectures. Rather, you will focus deeply on strategic performance challenges right at the heart of your journalistic enterprise, and indeed the industry itself.
If you want to steer your organization toward a new level of success, build your lifelong leadership capacity with world-class coaching, and become part of an incredible interconnected Alumni network, it’s time for you to join the Media Transformation Challenge Program.
Since 2007, the MTC program has had an unparalleled impact on the journalism world.
Virtually anywhere you go, whatever conferences you might attend, MTC Fellows and alumni are prominent in sharing their performance results, insights, and innovations as they help lead industry transformations in their organizations and across the media world.
Founded as the Sulzberger Program at Columbia University in 2007, the program transitioned to Media Transformation Challenge in 2019, continuing its mission of strengthening leadership capacity across the journalism industry.
The MTC value proposition: Increasing the odds
MTC’s fundamental value proposition is helping Fellows increase the odds of success at the challenges they and their organizations most need to achieve. Early wins – within weeks of the opening session – build insights, momentum and Fellows’ confidence to realize larger-scale outcomes and change. Additional tools and concepts are introduced in absorbable chunks over the year, so that Fellows are much more likely to achieve success and learn a core set of tools. Your challenges are the program’s yearlong case studies, and everyone’s invested in each others’ success.
2024 Fellow Fisnik Abrashi, Director of Global Customer Engagement for the Associated Press, presents his performance challenge update.
Fellows also grow as leaders by actually leading the accomplishment of outcomes that matter to their organizations, no matter their size or type. Not simply by talking or reading about leadership, though we do. Not simply through coaching, which we facilitate with multiple, diverse and deeply experienced coaches. And not simply with curriculum, which we originated and adapted over the last two decades.
Instead, you will develop your leadership capacity by holding yourself and other Fellows accountable for achieving their own unique strategic performance challenges. Our approach offers Fellows the perspectives, tools, relationships and confidence needed for foundational, career-lasting success. This helps explain why so many alumni hold senior, influential positions in for-profit, nonprofit and public media organizations — and also why alumni have gone on to initiate so many impactful shifts in the industry, including, for example, Report for America, STAT, URL Media and Blue Engine Collaborative.
A unique approach to performance-driven change
We build the entire MTC @ Medill program around real performance challenges confronting the news enterprises of Fellows in the program. Along with our alumni community, this is the differentiator of our program.
Each Fellow selects and commits to a unique, outcome-driven performance challenge, using criteria such as “one of the most urgent, crucial challenges confronting the enterprise.”
Beginning with the first session, Fellows apply pragmatic tools of strategy, innovation, organizational change, racial equity and personal leadership to identify and articulate their overall “from/to” performance challenges — and then quickly and steadily accomplish important outcomes against them. It’s easy to get excited over a set of ideas and plans; it’s entirely different to translate them into outcomes that matter.
Four multi-day sessions over the course of the year, plus a two-day wrap-up, are used for participants to share progress, absorb just-in-time content, and help each other move “up the S-curve” toward performance challenge outcomes.
Each Fellow receives individualized coaching from highly experienced coaches deeply familiar with the tools and concepts in a broad array of applications. Our coaches:
Fellows from the Class of 2024 hike above Park City, Utah.
Help Fellows select the most appropriate performance challenge for their MTC experience.
Offer just-in-time assistance with the program tools throughout the year, geared to S-curve progress.
Serve as confidantes regarding Fellows’ own leadership style and effectiveness.
Hold participants accountable for their commitment to meaningful results and personal learning. — well beyond what could be achieved without the program.
Connect Fellows to the MTC alumni network and alumni of similar performance-driven programs.
Each coach is deeply grounded in the tools of performance-driven change. Each also brings specialty expertise and relationships, whether in strategy, leadership, business models, public media or racial justice. Though one coach will be your “primary” coach, you’ll have access to all coaches, who also deliver much of our unique and curated curriculum. Collectively, our coaches have over 100 years of experience in journalism — in local, national and international arenas.
Timeline
MTC Fellows meet five times over the course of the Fellowship. These sessions take place in January, March, June and September of 2026, with a final wrap-up in January 2027. The first session takes place in person at The Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida, followed by sessions on Northwestern’s campus, with a final session at Poynter in January 2027.
Throughout the year, Fellows are provided detailed assignments designed to drive success at the challenges. Between sessions, we will have periodic virtual small group sessions for Fellows to share progress on their performance challenges. We also will offer content-related pop-up sessions for Fellows who want to go deeper on a particular topic. In addition, the coaches regularly speak with Fellows to assess progress, identify and address issues and provide guidance.
Key 2026 Dates (Tentative)
- January 12-16, 2026
- March 16-20, 2026
- June 15-19, 2026
- September 14-18, 2026
- January 9-11, 2027
How the program unfolds
January
Poynter president and MTC alum Neil Brown (center) talked with his MTC coach Karen Gordon (left) and executive director Charlie Baum (right) during the an MTC happy hour at Poynter in 2022.
Jan. 12-16, 2026, is the kick-off week. Incoming 2025 Fellows overlap with the graduating 2025 MTC Fellows to build relationships and learn from their program experience.
We then introduce MTC’s essential tools, frameworks and insights about leading performance-driven change, strategy and innovation. This is the first exposure to the key vocabulary and mindset common across all MTC Fellows. In large and small group sessions, Fellows apply tools to their own situation and initial sense of their performance challenges. Fellows also plan for early wins to be achieved prior to the March session, so that they can test ideas, achieve results, and build confidence for more. There also is plenty of time for socializing and building connections amongst the cohort.
Between January and March, Fellows simultaneously “design” (begin developing approaches to their overall challenge) and “do” (achieve wins against initial challenge articulation). During this time, Fellows engage in a series of coaching calls to get a clearer idea of the forces at work for their challenge, key gaps, “from-to” assessments, desired outcomes, who will be involved, and a sense of readiness and resistance. Coaches also will discuss Fellows’ own personal growth objectives for development through their performance challenges.
March
The March session focuses on debriefing early wins and helping Fellows think further about their performance challenge for the year. Curriculum is introduced “just in time” – in particular, related to schools of strategy for further challenge development, personal leadership dynamics, and thoughts on building momentum. Also, each Fellow presents their first “update” that helps others understand their organization, their role, progress made thus far and further observations about performance challenge development.
June
By this point, Fellows will have made substantial progress against their challenges — they will also have run into obstacles and opportunities as their challenges unfold. Roughly half the session will be devoted to challenge updates and peer conversation. The other half is dedicated to concepts of negotiation and influence, performance scorecards, personal leadership effectiveness, and ways to exploit momentum. By this juncture, Fellows also will have built more comprehensive approaches to their challenges, based on our hallmark mix of “design/do” loops. We also work on identifying each Fellow’s “crux” – the dynamics they will need to resolve to realize continued success.
September
By September, Fellows are enjoying the outcomes of their efforts. We use the September session for sharing progress, showing how the tools come together at increasingly sophisticated levels, and reinforcing Fellows’ confidence in the skillset they now have. This session is also the “last call” for changes in approach, and “first call” for looking into 2027.
January
At the final session in January 2027, Fellows present their results and insights, and receive their certificate of completion. In addition, Fellows describe their “next performance challenge” moving forward, and use this as we review and reinforce the core approaches of the program.
Questions?
For questions relating to the MTC program, please contact us using the below form.