Freelance writer/journalism teacher, Oakland, Calif.
bymota@stanford.edu, @writergirl
Beatrice Motamedi seeks the teachable moment. During her fellowship year, she launched Global Student Square, an international youth journalism platform that promotes online collaboration, mobile-first reporting and student leadership. At Stanford, she dove deeply into design thinking, including classes at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (the d.school) in designing creative organizations, mapmaking, creating for social good and reinventing news ecosystems, plus project work for First Look Media. At the Graduate School of Business, she learned about new venture formation, risk and scaling for global impact. In other classes, she explored graphic novels, radio stories, and the politics of Iran and Islam. A media literacy tutor for UNESCO, Motamedi is now working on ways to elevate youth storytelling and make it viral, relevant, and boldly global.
Journalism Challenge
Q: How might we create a space for student journalists to connect and create global stories?
A: Let’s begin by helping young people be makers and not just consumers of news. At Global Student Square, students can pitch ideas, edit, package and publish their work. We want to produce global stories on common themes, such as poverty or global warming, while surfacing the uncommon perspectives that emerge when youth of the world can connect, collaborate and create.
Learn more about this Journalism Challenge »
Posts by Beatrice
What millennials want: ‘To show the world our world’
"It’s just easy to assume that millennials don’t care about real news ... The news should be the same for each generation.”
About Beatrice
Beatrice Motamedi is executive director of Global Student Square and co-director of Newsroom by the Bay, a digital media program for high school students. A longtime youth advocate, teacher and journalist, she turns classrooms into newsrooms.
Prior to her Knight fellowship, Beatrice was a journalism teacher in public and private high schools. She was named a Dow Jones News Fund Distinguished Adviser and California Journalism Educator of the Year, and helped students launch publications in Oakland, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Ha Noi, Vietnam. Her students have won more than 200 awards, including the Pacemaker, also known as the high school Pulitzer. Before becoming a teacher, Beatrice worked as a staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, United Press International, and WebMD. She also served as associate editor for “24 Hours in Cyberspace,” the landmark book on one day in the life of the Internet. Beatrice has been a Kaiser Foundation Fellow and a California Endowment Health Journalism Fellow. Prior to entering journalism, Beatrice was a Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford.
Beatrice lives in Oakland with her husband, Andy, and has two children, Claire and Evan. Her interests include Iranian culture, French cuisine, and hiking with her dog, Kihei.