For as long as she can remember, UCLA Extension instructor Nicole Charky-Chami has had a passion for storytelling. Growing up watching the news with her family and spending her mornings poring over each page of the newspaper, she always saw news publications as a form of sharing stories about the community.

This interest was put into action when Charky-Chami worked at her school’s newspaper. From her heavy involvement there, she knew she wanted to pursue a career in journalism. She received a scholarship from Loyola University Chicago and wrote at The Loyola Phoenix, which ultimately paved the way for her career.

Since then, she has experienced just about every way journalism has shifted through the years. It is an advantage Charky-Chami leverages in her current gig as a UCLA Extension instructor, teaching students with the same enthusiasm she saw in her younger self.

The road was never steady for Charky-Chami as she bounced around various publications. She worked freelance for several years and then full-time at websites such as ATTN:, Los Angeles Times and Patch. Through these experiences, Charky-Chami said she learned incredibly valuable skills, such as how to design the newspaper and how to produce video content. However, the instability and heavy workload led to burnout, and she wondered if she could keep up with her work.

“I had this epiphany that, ‘Wow, I’ve been working nonstop, I haven’t had a personal life,’ and I was getting a little older and thinking about it,” Charky-Chami said.

To find that work-life balance, she again tried her hand as a freelancer, and she found a lot of success, until the pandemic shut down her work. She recalled losing her entire business overnight, as everything shut down in New York City and her clients could no longer afford to pay her. Finding solid footing was much more difficult moving forward, and she eventually reached a tipping point and went back to news.

Having worked in many areas of the profession, Charky-Chami enjoyed passing along her experience to students. She taught at Loyola Marymount University until 2021, when the pandemic led to the closure of her department. Seeking to continue that professional thread, she decided to apply to work at UCLA Extension.

“I met my boss and we started chatting about my experiences, and I just said to her, ‘You know, this media world is changing a lot, and I know that not every student is going to get what they need out of those traditional journalism programs,’ so I was really interested in bringing my style and the things that I was seeing in my work to students,” Charky-Chami said.

She has now spent four years at UCLA Extension, teaching courses for the Journalism Certificate Program. As the journalism industry has changed drastically over the years, Charky-Chami aims to bridge the gap between old-school journalism and modern media. Given the universal skills taught in her courses, a large variety of students enroll.

“I'll often have people who have never taken a traditional media class or reporting class before, but they actually work at BuzzFeed,” Charky-Chami explained. “I've had people who work at the Hammer Museum, people who work at the Getty, people who are entrepreneurs and run multimillion-dollar international businesses and just so happened to land in my course and have experience beyond the scope of journalism, but are interested in applying their skills and learning more about how to tell stories or how to engage with different audiences.”

She also makes the effort to teach about the different kinds of journalism. Given the large population of international students in her class, she often includes discussions about journalism in other nations and how it differs from the reporting done in the United States. Charky-Chami also examines the crossover between journalism and other industries, explaining how these skills can apply to the tech space, entertainment space and more. Overall, she hopes to help students feel more adept in their work, regardless of their field.

“I want students to walk out feeling much more confident about their futures, their writing, their editing, their reporting and interviewing skills,” Charky-Chami said. “I try to give them the skills that I have and the feeling that they're confident enough to write the story, to call the person they want to interview and to take that chance.”

She helps build this determination by having students practice their interview skills with each other before taking it outside the classroom and interviewing strangers. Charky-Chami also focuses on making sure her students are organized and fluent in AP style.

“I talk a lot about getting organized around what you're making and what you're writing. We heavily review three stages: pre-production, production and post-production,” Charky-Chami said. “I go over everything including how to set up the interview, how to email the person you want to interview and what you're going to say. We practice saying it and we practice writing it.”

She believes journalism is still important, even if print journalism is on the decline.

“We need storytellers. We have to have them,” Charky-Chami said. “So much of the work that we're doing relies on connecting with other people, and connecting with other people is still going to happen. We're still going to want to tell stories. If print is gone tomorrow, there will be something else, so I don't think storytelling is going anywhere. I actually think it's needed now more than ever.”