Inquiries regarding books, seminars, lectures, and consulting can be addressed to:
ajsilvia25@gmail.com
Telephone: (401)-301-8489
Also, follow me on X(@tonysilvia2) and Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/Tonyswriter).
Below is the current list of seminars, lectures, and workshops that can be customized to your needs:
Available Seminars and Workshops
New Ethics in the Digital Age (New!)
This seminar/workshop, suitable for universities or newsrooms, teaches essential skills for making news decisions involving social media like twitter and Facebook.
Race, Gender, and Class in News Decisions (New!)
How are decisions made in your newsroom or classroom? To what extent do race, gender, or class play a role in what is covered, how it’s covered, and how much do unconscious assumptions about others factor into those decisions?
Multimedia Storytelling in Today’s News Environment:
When is multimedia of value in telling your story and how, specifically, do you implement to great advantage in stories from hard news to features and sports coverage? This highly interactive seminar can help both students and professionals re-envision the uses of multimedia for effective, compelling storytelling.
In addition, the following seminars focus on corporate, political, marketing, and public relations:
- How can I use social media to my marketing advantage?”
Social media like Facebook and Twitter have opened up a whole new world of access to clients, consumers, and affinity groups. Having an effective presence on these social networking media is a necessity for corporations, educational institutions, and non-profit groups who want to build a sense of community with their constituents or alumni. This seminar will teach you the basics of effective communication in a social networking environment and help you improve your image, brand, and increase your overall value to targeted audiences of consumers, donors, or investors. Beginning with an overview of social media’s potential for message distribution, you will learn how to create effective design and content for your core audience.
- “Tell your story: Creating brand loyalty by showing the good you do.”
Consumers constantly complain that all the news media ever show is bad news. There may be some truth to that perception, but more often than not, the blame is shared by corporations, organizations, and institutions who don’t know how to attract news media attention for good news. In this seminar, you will learn how to craft your message into stories that the news media will find compelling. Beginning with learning those elements of a story that are valued by every form of news media, we will focus on specific elements of your community outreach efforts and that make good news for the media—and make you look good!
- “Telling Compelling Stories: Narrative writing for PR professionals, CEO’s, and Fundraisers.”
For those in newsrooms, the fundamentals of what makes a compelling story are paramount in reaching your audience; for those in PR or public affairs, the same applies. With all the media clutter to which readers, viewers and users are exposed everyday, what makes an audience care enough to pay attention to your story? Fundamentals of storytelling techniques are covered using the Poynter Institute method of conversational learning. Specific workshop scenarios are used to illustrate general methods for reaching an audience by combining the compelling elements of narrative storytelling. This seminar can be customized for newsrooms or agencies as well as non-profits.
Also, one of my favorite talks is this one, in the area of motivation, leadership, and team-building!
- “Lessons learned from baseball: What the national pastime can teach us about life.”
Beyond wins and losses, record books and trophies, baseball can teach us a great deal about the value of teamwork and persistence. In this seminar, you will learn how achievement on the baseball diamond is a group effort, with lessons that can be applied to any field of endeavor. Team building, positive motivation, and perseverance are among the many lessons baseball can teach. Using examples gained from first person experiences, this seminar is designed to instill a cooperative spirit in both the corporate and non-profit environments in an entertaining and engaging manner.
Presenter Biography:
Tony Silvia is Professor of Journalism and Media Studies at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg (2005-the present). Previously, he worked at the University of Rhode Island, where he had been a faculty member since 1988. In his various roles at URI, he had served as chair of the department of journalism, director of the public relations studies program, and coordinator of internships. He holds both an M.A. and PhD from the University of Birmingham, England. Dr. Silvia’s professional background is in television news, having worked as a consumer reporter and news anchor at various television stations in local markets. He also produced a series of media issues programs for PBS and worked as a correspondent for CNN, based in Atlanta, while completing a faculty fellowship with the network. His work for CNN’s science-technology features unit was recognized nationally by an award from the Broadcast Education Association. Dr. Silvia’s work has been recognized with three Emmy Award nominations, an Associated Press Award for best documentary and in 2008 was inducted as a fellow of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles. He has authored more than two dozen published articles in both academic and industry journals, and published five books: Student Television in America: Channels of Change (Iowa State Press, 1998), Global News: Perspectives on the Information Age (Iowa State Press, 2001), Baseball Over the Air: The National Pastime on the Radio and in the Imagination (McFarland, 2007), and Fathers and Sons in Baseball Broadcasting (McFarland, 2009), and Power Performance: Multimedia Storytelling for Journalism and Public Relations (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011). His sixth, and latest, book, Robert Pierpoint: A Life at CBS News, foreword by Bob Schieffer, was published in July, 2014 by McFarland Press. A seventh book, the biography of Felix Cavaliere of the rock group the Rascals, titled King of Blue Eyed Soul, will soon be in publication, and an eighth book about unsung American heroes is in the works.