Fandango, USC Annenberg Partner to Launch Multi-Year Fellowship in Digital Innovation, Film Criticism

Fandango, the parent company of review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, has partnered with the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism to launch a fellowship for students.

The Rotten Tomatoes Fellowship will cover partial tuition for students enrolled in Annenberg’s master of arts journalism program. It will combine academic coursework from Annenberg and across USC’s six arts schools with on-site experience working with Rotten Tomatoes’ editorial team, across their online, mobile, and social platforms.

“We are thrilled that our top students will have the opportunity to work with an innovator like Fandango, and their movie and TV platform Rotten Tomatoes, to expand their impact on the industry, while pursuing their masters of arts journalism degree,” said Willow Bay, director of the School of Journalism.

The fellowship will launch in the 2017-18 academic year, and the first fellowship has been awarded to Rosemarie Alejandrino, a first-generation college student graduating from University of California, Berkeley, in May with a bachelor’s degree in English and American studies with a concentration in popular culture and American media. She is currently the arts editor of UC Berkeley’s Daily Californian and headed up marketing for Caliber Magazine. A Filipino American, Alejandrino speaks Spanish and Tagalog.

“I’m so grateful for the opportunity to collaborate with Rotten Tomatoes and to utilize the resources that are available to USC Annenberg students,” Alejandrino said. “I know this is the best option for what I want to do — work that is based in cultural context, attempting to understand popular culture and its relationship to the world around us.”

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