Retha Hill is the Executive Director of the New Media Innovation and Entrepreneurship Lab at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. The Lab’s journalism and computer science majors create innovative products, including virtual, augmented and mixed reality apps and content; Web applications; news game tools; social media tools and mobile apps for media clients. On the entrepreneurship side of the Lab, students create their own media companies and products.
Retha is helping her students at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication push the limits in digital storytelling. After a semester in the New Media Innovation and Entrepreneurship Lab, her students can create video games, mobile applications and 3D scenes for virtual reality – all to help newsrooms tell stories in new ways. Hill, the executive director of the Lab, is a leader in both innovation and entrepreneurship.
The Lab’s journalism and computer science majors create innovative products, including virtual, augmented and mixed reality apps; Web applications; news game tools; social media tools and mobile apps for media clients. On the entrepreneurship side of the Lab, students create their own media companies and products.
Hill is a 2019 NAB Pilot winner for a project to rethink weather reporting and visualization; a 2017 Knight News Challenge Winner for a project to create a virtual reality data tool; a 2015 Knight News Prototype winner to create a narrative games tool for journalists; a 2012 AEJMC/Knight Innovations Award grant winner; a 2010 Knight News Challenge winner and a 2010 J-Lab Women Entrepreneurs grant winner for a mobile app that uses Augmented Reality to find black history in cities across the country. Hill joined the ASU faculty in 2007 after eight years at BET, where she was vice president for content for BET Interactive. Before joining BET, Hill was executive producer for special projects at washingtonpost.com.
She started her career as a reporter for The Charlotte Observer, followed by The Washington Post. She is writing a book on blacks and dementia. She is a founder of Playable Media, LLC, a news game studio, which created the fake news game simulator, “Hoaxes & Havoc” and a game about sexual harassment in the work place called “Inappropriate Behavior.”
