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 inter-connected alumni network, it’s time for you to join the Media Transformation Challenge (MTC) program at Poynter.

Since 2007, the MTC program has had 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 transformation — in their organizations and across the media world.

Note: From 2007-2018, MTC was widely known as the Punch Sulzberger Program at Columbia Journalism School. Since 2019, Columbia has operated a substantially different program called Sulzberger, that is unrelated to MTC in tools, approach, leadership, and alumni relationships. 

What makes MTC 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.

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. This is what makes MTC special.

Our performance-driven, challenge-centric approach, pioneered by Doug Smith and coaching colleagues, is unique in the media industry and beyond. It helps account for the extraordinary accomplishments of over 300 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 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.

“MTC has been a game changer for me both professionally and personally. The cohort and the coaches became a like a second family. One of my favorite (tools) was From-To: It helped me with clarity as to the essential practices needed to ensure NAHJ’s palabra will be here for a long time.”
— Alberto Mendoza, Executive Director, National Association of Hispanic Journalists (now managing director of John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships at Stanford)

The MTC value proposition

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’ own confidence to realize larger scale outcomes and change. Additional tools and concepts are introduced in absorbable chunks over the year — such 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.

Fellows also grow as leaders by actually leading the accomplishment of outcomes that matter to your organizations, of whatever 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 14 years.

Instead, you will develop your leadership capacity by holding yourself and other Fellows accountable to 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.

READ MORE: A Q&A with URL Media co-founders S. Mitra Kalita and Sara Lomax-Reese about connecting during the Media Transformation Challenge Program

MTC leaders and alumni have spawned many other challenge-centric programs that use MTC performance-driven tools and approaches. These include the cluster of Table Stakes programs in the United States and Europe, and various well-known accelerator programs. MTC has contributed to, and draws upon, insights and relationships across all these initiatives.

Our coaching team, with deep ties to these alumni since 2007, fosters alumni connections relevant to your own performance challenge and matches you with leaders who share your personal interests. A spirit of generosity, openness and connectedness is at the core.

So when you enter MTC, you simultaneously enter a broad community of leaders and organizations at the center of journalism’s transformation.

“I am the only Fellow to take part in the MTC experience twice (to pursue two different challenges), and each time, I grew personally and professionally. The tools I learned allowed me to apply rigor and an outcome-based thinking to the projects at hand. I continue to draw on them in my daily work, but they are only part of the story. Individual coaching made those tools come alive for me and the insights, friendship and support of my fellow alumni have been invaluable. I expect those relationships to last long into the future.”
— Amanda Barrett, deputy managing editor, Associated Press