Johnston

About: Lori Johnston teaches a variety of journalism classes, including reporting and writing across platforms, religion reporting, home and garden reporting, critical writing, feature writing and investigative reporting.

View Curriculum Vitae

Education

MFA, Narrative Media Writing, University of Georgia
ABJ, Journalism, University of Georgia

Teaching Specialties

Johnston’s teaching specialities are journalism classes with an emphasis on providing relevant, real-world experiences to help students develop foundational reporting, interviewing and writing skills in today’s fast-paced media landscape.

As director of the Cox Institute’s Journalism Writing Lab, she leads its cornerstone project, Covering Poverty, an online toolkit for journalists and professionals. Covering Poverty provides an extracurricular outlet for undergraduate and graduate students to write about poverty and people-related matters for the site and media outlets including the Atlanta Journal-Constitution/AJC.com, Athens Banner-Herald/OnlineAthens.com and The Current, a nonprofit outlet in coastal Georgia.

She also provides multiplatform materials with tips on journalistic writing and editing for faculty and students through the Cox Institute’s site and her YouTube channel, Skills for Storytelling and Reporting.

Experience

Johnston (ABJ ’95, MFA ’17) is a former Associated Press writer and magazine editor. She is co-founder of Fast Copy News Service with her husband, Andy (ABJ ’88). Fast Copy is a writing and editing business whose work has been published by Cox Media Group/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, CNN, The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Scripps Networks (HGTV.com, DIYNetwork.com and TravelChannel.com), Atlanta Magazine and Georgia Trend, among numerous other media outlets. Lori is a Double Dawg; she graduated from Grady College in 1995 with a journalism degree and in the inaugural class of the Master of Fine Arts in Narrative Media Writing program in 2017.