Bonnie Layton

Biography

Bonnie has more than 25 years’ experience in journalism and currently teaches a wide variety of skills and critical-thinking media courses. Her skills courses instruct students on video and audio editing, ipad and responsive web design, data visualizations and informational graphics, reporting and editing. In 2015 her immersive journalism course was one of 11 university projects across the country chosen for an Online News Association Challenge grant seeking to “hack journalism curriculums.”  In another of her courses, The Grid, students film innovative Science Forecast programs featuring IU researchers. She has helped chaperone journalism trips to Vancouver, Japan and Hawaii and has brought students to France, London and Normandy as part of the travel course “In the Footsteps of Ernie Pyle.”

When she is not teaching, Bonnie collaborates with other media-minded faculty across campus and beyond. She was part of a Center of Excellence for Women in Technology circle on data analysis and data driven change seeking to understand gender issues within technology-related fields in higher education. She is founder and advisor of the journalism school’s Online News Association chapter and has served as a membership and contest chair for the AEJMC’s Visual Communication division. The “Mapping the Diffusion of 311 Call Systems” paper she co-authored with Steve Layton and IU Informatics graduate student James True was published in “Visual Insights” (MIT Press, 2014).

In the summer of 2014, Bonnie participated in the Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning Course Development Institute at IU, and in 2012-13 was chosen to be part of the IU Engaging Differences Faculty Learning Community.

She also directed the Digital Journalism graduate sequence for three years. The sequence was a  collaborative program between the School of Journalism and WFIU/TIU, IU’s NPR and PBS affiliate. While working in the WTIU/FIU newsroom, Bonnie created the ipad project and graphics for WTIU/FIU reporter Julie Rawe’s award-winning prison series “A Walk Behind the Wire.”

She has guest lectured and conducted workshops on numerous technology topics for ONA, AEJMC, the New York Press Association and Illinois, Florida and Indiana high school press associations.

Before coming to Indiana University in 2010, Bonnie worked as a designer, videographer, copy editor and graphic artist at various media companies, including most recently the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune. In addition to her journalism work, she created Video Mosaics, a business that produced public relations-oriented web videos and DVDs. Before her career in Chicago, she was an assistant professor at the University of Illinois College of Media in Champaign-Urbana.

Bonnie has taught the following IU courses: J460 The Grid, J453 Graphic Design One, J110 Foundations of Journalism and Mass Communication, J460 Immersive Journalism, J261 The New Privacy, J200 Reporting, Writing and Editing, C226 Visual Journalism, J261 Online Reporting, J360 Web Design, J362 Multimedia Storytelling, J404 Depth Multimedia, J516 and J517 Digital Journalism Practicums, C478 Footsteps of Ernie Pyle travel course and J520 Seminar in Visual Communication.