Classes

This fall M.A. course teaches a disciplined “journalistic method” of testing assumptions and hypotheses, recognizing the ways that stories can distort the truth and exploring how to make sure that reporting firmly proves its points.

Students also develop useful skills for working with statistics, conducting in-depth interviews and combining anecdote and narrative with the big picture in their writing.

The spring semester of the M.A. Politics seminar focuses on political institutions. Just about everywhere in the world, there are political parties, interest groups, legislatures, executives, judiciaries, regulatory agencies, and so on. The seminar looks at how these developed and the varied forms they take, using the United States as the primary, but not exclusive, example. Readings are a mix of political theory, empirical political science, and journalism. Assignments aim to teach students to understand the political personalities and events that journalists cover into an institutional context. Recent guests include journalist Emily Bazelon, political scientist Robert Y. Shapiro, political scientist Kimberley Johnson and law professor Olivier Sylvain.

The spring semester focuses on evolution and genetics, neuroscience, public health and medicine. Students often travel to see fossils in situ and at the American Museum of Natural History, and they learn about mass extinction events and how the movements of the cosmos are reflected in sediments on Earth. They learn how to take apart medical studies and flex the statistics they have learned in Evidence & Inference in the fall. They also discuss some of the newest developments in epigenetics and in neuroscience. Recent spring lecturers have included paleontologist Paul Olsen, neuroscientist Stuart Firestein, animal behaviorist Diana Reiss, medical historian David Rosner and sociologist Alondra Nelson. 

This class is intended to equip every student with confidence about how to be an ethical journalist. Some of that will involve discussing and defining certain core rules and principles that every Journalism School graduate should understand and try to follow, while aspiring to professionalism. More of the class, however, will involve learning to recognize repetitious dilemmas in journalism that have no absolute solutions but must be reexamined case by case, each in its own context. Just as most newsrooms resolve the most difficult ethical dilemmas through transparent, collaborative discussion, our class will mainly turn on open discussion about shared readings that highlight the range of ethical issues that are most important and common to journalism. 

Multiple instructors teach sections of this class.

This course is designed to acquaint students with the basic protections and restrictions of the law as they apply to the media. Significant court cases and fundamental legal rules will be explored in the context of political and historical realities, and in terms of journalistic standards and practices; contemporary media law issues will also be focused on. Among the issues that will be examined are libel, invasion of privacy, prior restraints, newsgathering and newsgathering torts, copyright and the reporter’s privilege.

Multiple instructors teach sections of this class.

Magazine journalism presents an opportunity to break out of the conventions of newspaperese and find one’s voice. But writing for magazines also involves rules and challenges – not the least of which is figuring out how to position yourself in an uncertain field. In this course, we’ll discuss different forms of magazine writing and focus especially on substantive general-interest publications like The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and The New York Times Magazine – as well as their websites. We’ll examine the types of proposals that appeal to editors, ways of getting in the door and some useful frameworks for structuring longer magazine pieces. We’ll work on developing or refining a more natural and conversational writing style by reading articles by accomplished writers and workshopping student pieces. In addition to weekly assignments involving the study of individual magazines, students will practice pitching and writing short pieces. At the end of the course, each student will have produced a suitable magazine article of 2,500 to 3,000 words.

Despite the frequency with which it is bandied about on social media and in our news, the phrase “criminal justice system” is a misnomer. In truth, we as Americans deal with crime and its consequences through a patchwork of thousands of individual justice systems. They are archaic and opaque, difficult to navigate or even understand for direct, much less the journalists trying to cover them. By their very nature the police, courts and prisons are steeped in arcane procedures and language and locked behind closed doors. These systems resist inspection with great vigor.

And yet criminal justice — investigating crimes on behalf of victims, identifying culprits and holding them to account — is one of the very core responsibilities of any government. Its success at this task, or failure, has enormous consequences for our communities and influence on our economy. The lives of roughly 2.4 million people are managed by various arms of the justice system at any moment; they’re on probation, in our local jails or in state or federal prisons.

This intensive production course covers the fundamentals of using data, design and animation to tell deeply-reported, compelling stories. Students will learn how to use industry-standard multimedia production tools, as well as advanced animation storytelling techniques. Students will be taught how to source data, storyboard, design, produce, and animate journalistic stories. Several short- and long-form projects will guide students through the process of conceptualizing, visualizing and producing animated stories.

Multimedia Storytelling: Data, Design and Animation combines data sourcing, motion design and video production exploring the powerful potential of digital visualization methods for journalism. Students will be taught how to research, report, source data, storyboard, design, produce, edit and animate in-depth journalistic video content to acquire advanced industry-standard storytelling techniques.

This course will explore a versatile, durable, lively and evolving approach to news writing. Using writing exercises and story assignments, students will develop skills in the elements of narrative writing – imagery, theme, characters and dialogue, even with tight word counts. The news feature gives journalists a vehicle for examining a topic or event through firsthand accounts, background facts and context. It is widely used in publications and online. Assignments will range in length from 500 words to 1,200 words. The objective is to produce sparkling news features that are sharply and tightly written; and fit these characteristics outlined a few years ago by Roy Peter Clark: “You can read it, if you want to, in a single sitting on the day the story was published. You can read a short one in five minutes and a long one in 15 minutes. It is not a news story but can be inspired by the news. It has, at its heart, human interest. It illuminates lives lived in our times.”

All of the best stories in journalism, whether as short as a column or as long as a book, share the same basic narrative principles. The aim of this course is to master those principles, to study them in the work of others and apply them to your own. The first class sessions are spent in an overview of the narrative form, discussing how to recognize, report, structure and write stories that move confidently through time, place, character and event. The remaining weeks proceed through a series of more specific narrative strategies and tactics: using dialogue, choosing and depicting characters, compressing and expanding time, managing transitions, providing historical context, establishing a voice. Beyond the regular readings, the main requirement is to find one good story idea and then write it and rewrite it, as a short narrative first (800 words) and then as longer one (2,500-3,000), gradually working your way deeper into the narrative form as the semester progresses.

Journalistic organizations are continually experimenting with new ways to engage with their readers — crafting novel approaches to creating, curating and delivering content. According to a recent Shorenstein/Lenfest whitepaper, the ability to manage and build innovative “news products” is an integral part of the industry’s ability to attract and retain subscribers. News products are everything from the custom data visualizations we experience on an almost daily basis from major news organizations around the globe, to novel newsletters or podcasts; from cooking apps for your iPhone to advanced recommendation engines; all of which seek to enhance the relationship between outlet and user. By positioning a class on news products, we hope to not only teach new skills within the school, but also to bolster novel thinking from our students on the ways journalism is created, experienced and distributed.

In news organizations, the most inventive engagement techniques are being developed by cross-functional teams that cut across the outlet’s business and newsroom. To be effective working on news products requires a key set of skills — skills that typically reside in disciplines outside journalism. This course seeks to address that gap, introducing concepts to developing news products through the product development process. Over the course of a semester, students will engage with methods, practices (and experts) from journalism, design, engineering, entrepreneurship and business.

The News Products course will be broken into three core components: design, engineering, and business models. The course will largely be project-based, pairing students with similar interests to work on a news product over the course of a semester. In the first segment, students will learn the principles of product design and will rapidly test ideas by building interactive prototypes. Incorporating the latest approaches to “design thinking,” especially as they relate to strategies for developing content.