COMMLD 530B: Storytelling Across Mediums

Course Description

Marketing professor and entrepreneur Scott Galloway recently called storytelling “the enduring skill” of the AI age. As AI accelerates the onslaught of content, including a lot of slop, the ability to tell a compelling, human story is becoming a critical professional differentiator.

This course is about harnessing the human superpower of storytelling to reach you or your organization’s audiences, customers, and constituents. You will examine storytelling fundamentals supporting historical and cultural traditions and expressed across mediums–from cave paintings to virtual reality games, from campfires to podcasts–then apply those lessons to multiple contemporary media and strategic communications. Through hands-on projects, you will develop and adapt stories across multiple formats while exploring how narrative functions in commercial, educational, journalistic, and advocacy communications.

By the end of this course students will be able to:

Develop stories across multiple media formats for different audiences and platforms;

Apply core storytelling principles to commercial, educational, and advocacy-based communications;

Evaluate how narrative shapes audience understanding, emotion, and action;

Integrate storytelling into broader strategic communications goals and campaigns;

Adapt narrative structure, tone, and medium to meet specific communication objectives.