Advanced Management

Janice Castro
Senior Director, Graduate Education and Teaching Excellence, Medill Northwestern University

A reporter, writer and editor at Time magazine for more than 20 years, Castro won awards for science and business reporting. She also headed Time's interactive operations for five years, where her news team produced one of the first daily news blogs, starting in 1993. While running Time’s interactive operations, which included managing partnerships with Yahoo!, America Online, Apple and Microsoft, she also supervised online news for People, Fortune, Money, Life, Entertainment Weekly, and other Time Warner sites. Her online teams won numerous journalism awards, including top new media honors from Editor & Publisher, the Society for News Design, and the White House Press Photographers Association.  

A founding editor of Discover magazine, Castro also participated in several other Time Inc. magazine startups and launched several Time Warner Web sites. She has written for news, finance, science, business and entertainment magazines. She is the author of The American Way of Health (Little, Brown, 1994). She was the founding editorial director of Britannica.com, the Web site from Encyclopaedia Britannica that outpaced all editorial-based Web sites except CNN.com and MSNBC.com in its first year and won numerous awards for editorial excellence and innovation.  

Castro serves on the boards of the Online News Association and Consumer Reports WebWatch and co-chairs the board committee on New Media for the Inland Press Association, which represents more than 900 member newspapers. She co-authored the Consumer Reports WebWatch media credibility guidelines.

Castro joined the Medill faculty in 2000. She teaches new media, media management, reporting and magazine publishing, and directs Medill's graduate studies programs. She is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists, the Chicago Headline Club, the Overseas Press Club of New York, the Online News Association, the American Association of University Women and the Association of Woman Journalists. She is a graduate of National-Louis University and the Advanced Executive Program at the Kellogg School of Business/Medill Media Management Center.