Journalism (JOUR-UA)

A course for high school students in gathering and writing the news, including news evaluation, reporting and writing techniques, and specialized beats, with New York City, especially the East Village, as the lab. Designed to give the journalism student extensive practice. Covers how reporters are assigned stories, how stories are planned and written, and journalism ethics and responsibilities. Students report and write stories under newsroom conditions. Not open to undergraduates.

This intensive, once-a-week course is designed for students with a serious interest in writing about movies for print and digital media. Students practice various forms of film journalism while developing a deeper understanding of the art form through screenings and close readings of works by Brooks Barnes, Pauline Kael, Peter Bogdanovich, Ellen Willis, James Baldwin and Francois Truffaut. Planned class trips include a major film festival and a tour of the Criterion Collection, a film company specializing in art-house cinema. In addition to discussing individual films and film movements, we will cover essential journalism skills, with guest speakers offering guidance on specific topics like reporting and interviewing techniques. Classwork will include writing exercises, presentations and workshops. By the end of the course, students will have raised their cinema I.Q. and written a variety of film articles that inform and engage.

This is one of two required reporting classes. Students will learn how to report news and features stories using photographs, video and audio, with the emphasis on story-telling techniques. The course will cover how to develop ideas, reporting techniques using audio and video (including how they differ from written pieces), scripting, audio and visual digital editing, and broadcast story-telling structures.

This course is designed to hone the student journalist?s ability to research and report deeply and to be able to imagine and develop fresh ideas, test their ideas with the strength of their reporting and research, and then present them in story form.

The following semester, honors students are required to take a specially designed honors senior seminar, which culminates in each student?s writing a large (6,000-10,000 word/15-20 minutes for broadcast) feature, completing the capstone. The student has to defend his/her work orally before at least two members of the faculty and perhaps a member of the profession.

An elective for students who wish to explore concentrated issues such as sex and American politics, literary nonfiction, and photojournalism and war. Each section concentrates on a different topic chosen by the instructor, a member of the full-time faculty. Such offerings include Ethnography for Journalists; The Art of Opinion Writing and Polemic; and The Journalism of Empathy.

This 14-week class is divided equally between ethics and the law. Through the weekly lecture and assigned readings, students are exposed to the various ethical and legal issues surrounding the field of journalism and come away with a clear sense of the role of the journalist in society and the issues that affect that mission today.

The course description for this Topics in Journalism course varies depending on the topic taught. Please view the course descriptions in the course notes section below.

The course description for this Topics in Journalism course varies depending on the topic taught. Please view the course descriptions in the course notes section below.

The course focuses on combining the creative techniques of fiction with the rigor of journalistic travel writing to produce stories about Prague (not only) that move beyond the constraints of the news and feature story: stories that engage, resonate with readers, provide insight – stories which “produce the emotion”. The course proceeds by the reading and analysis of important contemporary journalism and classic travel pieces: examination of the narrative; fictional and literary devices used in travel writing; examination of and practice with various information gathering strategies; humor; point of view; unique voice. Distinguished Czech travel writers/journalists/photographers will be invited as guest lecturers.

This course is an introduction to how American constitutional law affects journalists and why that matters. It’s also a course about journalistic ethics and how such professional notions as fairness, objectivity, responsibility, and credibility intersect with law – and how they don’t. Other journalism coursework is about how journalists do things – how to report, write, edit; this course will often be about how they avoid problems. We will cover the law of the First Amendment, the values our system places on free expression, the imprecision of legal principles and the problem this poses for journalists (and their lawyers), the changing nature of journalism and the changing nature of law in the digital age. This is not a law course as such, but a survey of the protections and restrictions that the legal system places on journalists. And we will be mindful that legal constraints alone do not govern how a good journalist behaves. Careful and honorable and valuable journalism comes not only from mere compliance with civil and criminal requirements, but attention to ethical principles that transcend law or are outside its boundaries.

The course description for this Topics in Journalism course varies depending on the topic taught. Please view the course descriptions in the course notes section below.

This course aims to bring together diverse issues and perspectives in the rapidly evolving and changing area of international/global communication. Through a historical perspective, a framework will be established for the appreciation of the development of the immense scope, disparity, and complexity of this rapidly evolving field. Students will be encouraged to critically assess shifts in national, regional, and international media patterns of production, distribution, and consumption over time, leading to a critical analysis of the tumultuous contemporary global communication environment. Essential concepts of international communication will be examined, including trends in national and global media consolidation, cultural implications of globalization, international broadcasting, information flows, international communication law and regulation, and trends in communication and information technologies. The focus of the course will be international, with attention being paid both to Western-based multimedia conglomerates, as well as to the increasing global prominence of media corporations based in other regions, contributing to the reversal of international media flows and challenging the global hegemony of the Western media producers. Particular emphasis will be on the Czech Republic, as an empirical example of a national media system affected by global media flows.