Biography
James Breiner is a bilingual consultant (English-Spanish) on digital journalism and newsroom leadership with three decades of experience on the editorial and business sides of newspapers. His specialty is entrepreneurial journalism, or new financial models for digital media. He has blogs about entrepreneurial journalism in English and in Spanish.
For the past decade he has focused on helping journalists create viable organizations that serve the public with credible, trustworthy news and information.
He recently retired as assistant professor in the School of Communication, Department of Marketing and Media Businesses, at the University of Navarra in Pamplona, Spain.
He has done teaching and consulting on digital and multimedia journalism in a dozen countries on four continents. He has been a consultant for NewsU of the Poynter Institute, the Fundación Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano (Garcia Marquez Foundation), American City Business Journals, the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ), and Crain Communications. (See video.)
He was co-director of ICFJ’s Master’s Program in Global Business Journalism at Tsinghua University in China, where he developed marketing for the program in social media worldwide. He was the founding director of the Digital Journalism Center at the University of Guadalajara in Mexico, in partnership with (ICFJ). (Video interview, in Spanish.)
Crain Communications retained him as a consultant to supervise the hiring and training of the editorial staff for a new business publication, Crain’s Manchester Business, launched in Manchester, England, in 2008.
Professor Breiner has more than 30 years of experience as a newspaper reporter, editor and publisher, most of that with the Baltimore Business Journal and Business First of Columbus.
Earlier he was special projects editor at the Columbus Dispatch, where led a team of reporters doing investigative and enterprise journalism. Their work won seven awards from the Associated Press Managing Editors.
He is treasurer and a member of the executive board of SembraMedia, a nonprofit dedicated to helping digital media entrepreneurs in the Spanish-speaking world become more sustainable and independent.
He has a master’s degree in English literature from the University of Connecticut and a bachelor’s in English from the College of Wooster (Ohio).