Berlin Metropolitan Area
Robb Montgomery is a scholar-practitioner, media educator, and award-winning documentary filmmaker based in Berlin. His work examines journalism as a social, visual, and cultural practice of trust in an age of platformed media, AI, and unstable authority. He works across journalism studies, visual media anthropology, documentary film, and media education, with a focus on verification, mediated perception, field reporting, cultural memory, and public credibility. His current research trajectory connects The Trust Graph, Trustable, Bikegeist, and Stimulated Reality as one long inquiry into journalism, evidence, mobility, immersive representation, and the changing conditions of trust. The Trust Graph is a monograph, supported by a master evidence repository in which primary materials are curated and organized across six analytic tiers. A documentary film available in two versions: a 44-minute classroom cut and an 88-minute festival and cinema version. Based on the visual research of The Trust Graph and developed over 19 years, it translates the long-form research into a cinematic exploration of journalism, evidence, and public trust. Bikegeist links journalism to anthropological curation and public conversation around cultural memory and material objects. Stimulated Reality extends the work into AI, perception, and immersive media. Montgomery teaches applied media practice, mobile journalism, documentary storytelling, and visual reporting internationally. He is a regular visiting professor at Singapore University of Social Sciences and has taught at the School of New Journalism at EFJ in France, the American University in Cairo, FH Wien, the Danish School of Journalism, Stockholm University, Northwestern University, Ohio University, and Indiana University. His teaching combines practical production with critical reflection on ethics, trust, authorship, and the social life of images. A former visual editor and Deputy News Editor for Design at the Chicago Sun-Times, he brings more than four decades of newsroom and teaching experience into his academic work. His documentary films have received international recognition, and his books include Smartphone Video Storytelling, Mobile Journalism Creator, and The Trust Graph. He is the founder of the Mobile Journalism Awards, the Smart Film School, and long-running workshops that support journalists, educators, and students working across mobile, spatial, and AI-assisted forms of storytelling. His work is distinguished by a combination of newsroom practice, documentary authorship, and cultural curation.
I founded the Smart Film School to scale my mobile journalism pedagogy globally. The academy delivers certificate courses and masterclasses that are actively utilized by international universities and the United Nations to train their public information officers. Through this platform, I have instructed professionals and students across 40 countries—including masterclasses in Vienna, Paris, Stockholm, Berlin, and Ohio. My focus is providing turnkey, field-tested storytelling frameworks that replace outdated legacy broadcasting with agile, mobile-first production methods.
I design and lead the Smartphone Filmmaking & Storytelling curriculum for the Master of Digital Marketing program. This is the institutional sandbox where I field-tested and authored the definitive master syllabus for creator journalism. Rather than teaching basic camera operation, I train graduate students to execute rigorous reporting rituals. I force them out of their digital feeds and into the real world to gather physical evidence, document their environments, and publicly show their reporting receipts. This curriculum ensures students do not simply complete assignments, but author verifiable work that builds durable trust in an era of synthetic media.
In 2019, as the legacy media ecosystem fractured and the "Twin Disruption" of Generative AI and the creator economy accelerated, I launched the Mobile Journalism Awards. Operating alongside a global coalition of journalism schools and non-profit organizations, this initiative was engineered to elevate and protect the rigorous "Ritual of Witnessing" in a decentralized digital landscape. Rather than simply hosting a competition, the Mobile Journalism Awards function as an institutional mechanism to validate the modern survival curriculum. We recognize the absolute best in mobile non-fiction storytelling, proving that premium accountability journalism can be executed entirely on agile, mobile-first devices without relying on the infrastructure of the twentieth-century legacy newsroom. Core Initiatives & Impact: • Standardizing Excellence: We identify and award the highest global standards of mobile documentary filmmaking, providing a necessary benchmark for "Verified Translucency" in an era increasingly flooded with zero-cost synthetic AI content. • Global Exhibition: We actively screen the winning documentary films at elite industry venues, including the NAB Show in Las Vegas and the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, forcefully validating the practitioner-first model to the broader media executive tier. • Combating the Apprenticeship Collapse: By highlighting exemplary field reportage and physical witnessing, the competition provides a vital pedagogical baseline for the next generation of practitioners navigating the algorithmic wilderness.
I author foundational academic textbooks that provide the operational blueprint for the post-institutional media era. My texts, including Smartphone Video Storytelling (Routledge), the Mobile Journalism university edition, and the forthcoming 40,000-word monograph The Trust Graph, are actively adopted as core curricula at leading journalism schools, including Stanford University, Columbia University, and the Indiana University Media School. These publications are anchored by my 19-year longitudinal ethnographic research into the evolution and preservation of journalism rituals.
I founded Visual Editors in 2004 at the moment visual journalists were becoming isolated in shrinking legacy newsrooms. Operating as an independent 501(c)(3) public charity, the organization was engineered then to improve visual journalism literacy and provide a vital educational exchange for student and professional practitioners worldwide. Today, Visual Editors functions as a foundational pillar for industry innovation. We partner with universities, journalism foundations, and global media organizations to raise professional standards, combat the "Apprenticeship Collapse," and make the rigorous rituals of visual verification completely transparent to the public. Core Initiatives & Impact: • The Global Network: Launched a free social network in 2004 that served thousands of isolated visual journalists during the industry's severe contraction, providing a digital sandbox to share feedback and preserve the craft. • Kinetic Training: Produced and directed immersive multimedia journalism workshops across Chicago, Toronto, Florida, London, and Berlin to equip practitioners with the exact tools required to survive the digital wilderness. • The Mobile Journalism Awards: Created and launched this global competition in 2019 alongside a coalition of journalism organizations. We elevate the highest standards of mobile documentary filmmaking and screen the winning work at the NAB Show in Las Vegas and the International Journalism Festival in Perugia. • Academic Publishing: Visual Editors serves as the official publisher and B2B institutional distributor for foundational academic texts, including the Mobile Journalism university textbook and the 40,000-word longitudinal ethnography The Trust Graph. • Philanthropic Stewardship: Actively secures grants, donors, and fundraising to award visual journalism scholarships, ensuring the necessary rituals of truth-telling are transmitted to the next generation. Details and resources available at: https://visualeditors.com