Classes | Columbia Journalism School

Please note: The classes listed here represent recent offerings at the Journalism School. These include M.S., M.S. in Data Journalism and M.A. courses. Choices vary each semester depending on faculty availability and other considerations. Classes described now may change or be dropped to make room for new additions. We cannot promise that students will gain a seat in any specific class.

How to Cover Armies and Spies

Steve Coll

Armies and intelligence services are among the most powerful and secretive of institutions, in democracies and authoritarian states alike. They are monopolists of the legitimate use of force, arbiters of war and peace and outsized consumers of national budgets. Covering militaries and spies well and revealingly is hard work that requires preparation and commitment. But it is vital journalism with a public purpose. And occasionally it is journalism that changes the world, from Sy Hersh’s My Lai massacre reporting to Abu Ghraib to Edward Snowden.

This course will prepare students to cover militaries and intelligence services, whether in the United States or abroad. We will take a broad approach, understanding security issues to include human rights, migration and the environment. We will review diverse sourcing strategies, durable story genres and professional and ethical conundrums on the beat. The intention is to equip students to take on defense, intelligence and related human rights reporting as a subject area for daily reporting, longform investigation or as a recurring part of a diversified career, with the understanding that the best sourcing in this field can require years to develop.

Each student will complete a significant piece of narrative reporting accessible from the United States.

We will also undertake a class project about the war in Syria, incorporating data journalism methods and investigative reporting on public records, satellite imagery, user-generated content and confidential source development. The project should provide a strong, accessible body of collaborative work for each enrolled student to highlight in a portfolio. The class will satisfy workshop requirements for both investigative and data concentrators in the M.S. program.

Investigating Health Care

Charles Ornstein

If the U.S. health care system were a patient, it would be undergoing treatment for whiplash. After years in which the number of Americans without health insurance dropped to historic lows, President Donald Trump is pledging to undo his predecessor's legacy while delivering "great health care" to the American public. Can that be done? Welcome to investigating health care.

During this class, we will explore hospitals in disarray, exploding prescription drug prices, a mental health system in crisis and consumers struggling to afford their health insurance premiums. You will learn how to navigate one of journalism's most complicated beats, all with an investigative reporter's eye. Individual classes will focus on hospitals, health professionals, our aging society, controversies in medicine, insurance companies, health reform and the pharmaceutical industry. We also will dissect the implementation of the Affordable Care Act and what's taken place under Trump. The course will explore many issues beyond health care, including politics, consumer affairs, finances, the law, ethics and demographics. Along the way, students will become skilled in using public records, understanding bureaucratic agencies and querying databases that can be put to use on practically any beat. Class assignments will require use of investigative skills, interviewing techniques and interaction with bureaucracies. You'll work hard in this class but may leave with clips published in major U.S. media outlets.

Investigating the Failures of the Mental Health System

Meg Kissinger

Mental illness is all around us. One in five Americans struggle with some form of it. We spend more than $300 billion a year on psychiatric care in this country. Still, these diseases are widely misunderstood and rarely discussed in non-judgmental, clear-headed ways. Care for people is often poorly managed and unavailable for those who need it most. We tend to blame the victims, shove them out of sight, into prisons and onto the streets.

Increasingly, we are seeing the results of these flawed policies played out to tragic ends. This investigative reporting class will examine the failures of the system and their consequences for all of us. Students will produce stories about what is broken and consider what can be fixed.

We will learn how to build an investigation of a mental health system by interviewing people with mental illness and hearing about their struggles and success. We'll go to where they live, talk to those who care for them, question policy makers and advocates. We'll mine for data, explore trends, analyze social policy and spending priorities. In short, we'll give light to what has been a very dark corner.

Investigative Project

Walt Bogdanich

We will explore the mission, methods and history of investigative reporting, as seen through a semester-long project examining a single subject. Our goal will be to build the foundation for a publishable, investigative article based on original research, not recycled government reports. You will learn how to find topics worthy of investigating, how to prove or disprove your investigative hypothesis through interviews, public records and data, and how to present your findings in narrative form.This class is much more than just learning the tools used in investigative reporting.It is also about developing the mindset to make the best use of those tools.

Students will divide into teams, each focusing on a separate topic. Seminars will include a general lecture and an opportunity for teams to share their findings and agree upon reporting assignments for the upcoming week.

Each student must write a weekly memo that includes: 1) a list of individuals you approached for interviews and records searched; 2) a detailed memo on each significant interview.You must exchange these memos with your team members before our seminar.At the end of the semester, each student will be required to write a 2,500-word investigative article based on team reports.

Shoe Leather: Multi-Casting Investigative Stories

Joanne Faryon

Rachel Quester

Peter Leonard

This class is for students who want to take their long-form journalism beyond print. In it, students will work in small teams to produce episodes for an original podcast — SHOE LEATHER — and create a corresponding web page with text, photos, primary source documents and short videos. Students will take a deep dive into a specific news event from New York City in the 1980’s, and explore how it was covered at the time, and its impact decades later.

Using online resources and old fashioned shoe leather reporting, the goal of each podcast episode will be to find the main newsmakers of the past event and reveal how the news coverage influenced their lives. Students might pursue crime stories, missing persons cases, the rise and fall of political figures, catastrophic events that impacted a neighborhood, natural disasters that swept through a community, or an act of heroism that received wide acclaim. The stories will take the listener back in time using clear narrative writing and archival tape, and explain the significance of the news event and the role the newsmaker played.

Three seminars will be co-taught by professors Faryon and Maharidge. They will focus on the cross-over between long-form print narratives and storytelling for journalism-driven podcasts. Students will learn how to plan their reporting to ensure a three-act structure, and animate stories beyond talking heads. They’ll learn to think in scenes, and how those scenes translate into print, audio and video. This class prepares students to produce long form audio for a digital newsroom such as the LA Times, or podcast creation company. It will also train students to think like a “platform neutral” journalist — in other words — open to telling stories in different ways for different audiences.

Using Data to Investigate Across Borders

Giannina Segnini

Exponential amounts of information about the world are being produced daily and journalists everywhere need to have a global mindset if they are to write about organized crime, corruption, human trafficking, global trade and threats to the environment.

We live in an increasingly borderless world. Goods, money, people and ideas flow freely across borders thanks to technology and the liberalization of customs and money controls. We all benefit from globalization and the free flow of commerce that it makes possible. But there’s a dark side: A borderless world also makes it easier for crooks and criminals to do their work.

Around the world, journalists are developing techniques to cope with the globalization of crime, corruption and environmental damage. They are adopting strategies that include the smart use of data and collaboration across borders. The volume and velocity with which information and data are being produced and the variety of open sources currently available make it possible to develop reporting strategies that are truly global.

This course will prepare students to find global data, process and analyze it; and to report on it from New York while working with sources and possibly other journalists overseas. Students will learn skills like doing background checks on people and companies, mining the social web, tracking offshore entities and finding assets and cargo. They will be divided into reporting teams and will be able to find, scrape, consolidate, analyze and visualize data in the context of a big global story by the end of the semester.