Cross-Registration
The Spring 2025 classes listed below are available for cross-registration by seniors and graduate students from other divisions of Columbia University.
It is not possible to self-register for Journalism School courses. To request admission to a class, students must submit the cross registration request form. The form is open from January 13, 2024 at 10 a.m. until January 31 at 10 a.m.
All classes are six points unless otherwise noted.
Spring 2025 Class Offerings
This course carries 6 points.
Day/Time: W 2:00pm - 5:00pm and R 9:00 am - 5:00 pm
Notes:
- Fees: This class requires ProTools ($99). Information on subscribing can be found here.
Description: Are you ready to learn what it takes to make a radio show and podcast? Now’s your chance! Podcast and Radio Workshop is operated as a working, real world audio newsroom. Each reporter is responsible for covering a critical, local beat and each week you and the rest of your team produce a live radio show and podcast. While helping you to develop the skills you need to tell compelling, sound-driven stories, this class also allows you to generate multiple clips and hone those skills as you rotate through various positions in the newsroom. Over the course of the semester, you will produce four feature stories of increasing complexity, a personal essay, day-of stories and conduct interviews as show host. Local news has never been more important. Learn what it’s like to cover the community you live in and all that comes with it: developing sources, finding and pitching stories and developing a nose for news. Alumni from class have gone on to jobs and internships at Atlas Obscura, BBC, CNN Audio, Frontline, Gimlet, Insider, Latino USA, Marketplace, NPR, Planet Money, LA Times Audio, StoryCorps, public radio stations around the country and many others. By the time you leave you’ll have the fundamentals of audio reporting firmly under your belt. From The Daily to Alaska Public Radio, long-form podcasts to quick turn radio reporting you’ll be ready.
This course carries 6 points.
Day/Time: T 9:00am-12:00pm
Description: During the 2024 election campaign, no other issue incited deep public division like immigration. The “invasion” narrative has become entrenched and immigrants are to blame for everything from rising gas prices to rising crime. But it has been building. In the past eight years, the tide of public opinion and voter sentiment has steadily turned against immigration. More Americans and Europeans are in favor of stricter immigration rules than ever before. And much of the public perception is based on narratives that have dominated the national political discourse stirring fears while mostly ignoring local realities. There will be a lot to report - and our goal will be to produce stories for publication in Documented and other venues. No doubt, 2025 will bring countless stories on immigration as the new administration begins to implement promises to deport immigrants en masse and limit or end protections for hundreds of thousands of war refugees, asylum seekers and others unable to return to their countries safely. In this course, you will learn to cover breaking and developing stories as new anti-immigrant measures are implemented. You will learn to cut through the accepted tropes to report well-sourced stories, to look critically at the fiscal and social policies that have fueled public perceptions, to break down the cost of deporting immigrants for industries and ultimately the consumer and to hear, see and tell the story that is the human impact on immigrants and the local communities they integrate - whether they did so twenty years ago or are trying to now.
This course carries 6 points.
Day/Time: M 2:00pm - 5:00pm
Notes:
- Fees: This class requires subscribing to the Adobe Creative Suite ($240)
Description: This class is designed for students who want to understand and report on the global economy but want to tell those stories in broadcast form. Audio and video can bring the characters of business to life. They can be the fastest media when news breaks. They can also be the most immersive form of storytelling, explaining to an audience how money works and how it affects us all. In class, we will focus on audio, but we will also demonstrate how those broadcast skills can be used in the business TV world. Each class will have two parts. You’ll learn how to think like an economist when tackling the questions that will be the most relevant over the next four years, including:
- What happens when a country puts up trade barriers?
- How do tax cuts affect an economy?
- What are the consequences of restrictions on immigration?
- Should regulators break up the giant tech companies?
Then you’ll learn the writing and technical skills to cover those stories. Over the semester, we’ll have you work in a variety of audio formats: live reporting, interviews, short features, and an explanatory podcast episode.
This course carries 6 points.
Day/Time: T 9:00am-12:00pm
Description: Students in this class will learn how to report on and discover the many stories of climate change, with a particular emphasis on connecting the dots between the global and the local and between climate and nearly every realm of society. Students will choose a topic they are interested in—health, mental health, immigration, environmental justice, politics, infrastructure, sports, transportation, biodiversity, business, education, labor, art, AI, energy, and the list goes on—and will write three stories about the intersection of that topic and climate change. Over the course of the semester, the stories will move from the international scale to the local scale: the first will be a study-based international news story; the second, a longer national news story or profile; the final capstone piece will be a locally reported narrative feature. (All stories will be print stories, but students are welcome, and encouraged, to incorporate skills that they want to practice or are learning in other classes, such as data viz, photography, audio, mapping, etc.) Students will have the chance to meet with experts from many fields, including climate scientists, and with journalists covering this expansive beat. Climate change is the story of the century. This course will help students learn how to cover it correctly, comprehensively, and creatively.
This course carries 6 points.
Day/Time: R 9:00am-12:00pm
Description: Deep interviewing, oral history, research, a passion for social justice and a love of eloquent writing -- these are the tools we will use in this class to combine writing and immersive reporting into beautifully written journalism about the important issues of our times. To get there, we will study nonfiction writers whose work is as compelling and graceful as that of the best novelists, such as Valeria Luiselli, James Baldwin, Kao Kalia Yang, Sonia Nazario, Donovan X. Ramsey, Joan Didion, Susan Orlean, and Ryszard Kapuscinski.
Students read and analyze these and other writers, and write a few short writing exercises and one long article in order to develop compelling stories and a voice. The class will include discussions of student work and of the assigned authors with a goal to publish.
This course carries 6 points.
Day/Time: M 9:00am-12:00pm
Description: This seminar will sample coverage of broad swaths of the world that are sometimes called the Global South, and were once commonly referred to as the Third World. Together, we will discuss why these parts of the world have so long been portrayed in distorted ways, and ask also why, considering their rising demographic and economic weight, they continue to be under-covered by leading international news organizations? The course will draw prominently upon examples from Africa, Asia and Latin America. For classroom discussion we will also read studies of international population trends, migration dynamics, global economics, history and political science. Our ultimate aim is to propose better coverage models, both in terms of general principles and concrete examples. In this class, students will pitch, report and write three articles, ranging from off-the-news features to analysis and commentary.
This course carries 6 points.
Day/Time: T 2:00pm - 5:00pm
Description: Forced migration and its primary causes—conflict, inequality, and climate change—are among the most important issues of our times. Today more than 120 million people globally are forcibly displaced, and some predict that hundreds of millions more will face that same fate due to conflict and climate change in the next 25 years. News media often treat immigration as a domestic story, but migration does not begin at America’s doorstep. As hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans and other asylum seekers arrive in New York, globally-minded journalists must be able to distinguish between the different reasons people leave their homes and the corresponding legal statuses and protections that result. Students will also need to navigate rapidly emerging ethical dilemmas inherent to reporting on the
Displaced. In this course students will learn longform magazine writing through the lens of global migration and by elevating the voices of some of the many people who have been displaced. Students will complete weekly, ‘front of the book’ writing drills in formats used by magazines such as The New Yorker, Harper’s, VQR, and The Dial. They’ll write a book review of a journalistic book on displacement or migration. They’ll conduct an oral history interview with someone who was displaced, then curate their story in their own words. The capstone of the course will be a 3,500-word longform magazine piece about a New York City
refugee. The story will chronicle their displacement and the forces that caused it, including a foreign policy or action that exacerbated or prolonged their plight. We’ll publish all of our stories on our class Medium page so that students can use them as clips. Finally, students will propose a feasible, international reporting trip in the form of a Pulitzer Center grant that would allow them to advance their capstone story through on-the-ground reporting in a country their source fled or traveled through. Students will also read one ambitious piece of longform journalism each week, some of which will come from renowned migration writers and correspondents who will join us as guest speakers—Pooja Bhatia, April Zhu, Atossa Abrahamian, Nanjala Nyabola, Tamerat Negera, and more. Each guest will workshop a magazine-writing skill as well discuss how to navigate a particular ethical quandary inherent to reporting on the displaced.
This course carries 6 points.
Day/Time: M 2:00pm - 5:00pm and T 2:00pm - 5:00pm
Notes:
- Fees: This class requires purchasing a Hindenburg subscription ($49.50/yr for students)
Description: How do you tell compelling, moving stories in sound? How do you cover this city to produce creative, beautiful stories that stay with the listener weeks, even months later?
Turns out it isn’t so easy. The goal of this course is to teach the skills of long-form audio journalism, the techniques used at established shows like This American Life or Radiolab, with a focus on life in New York City. We aim for a combination of in-depth reporting and strong character-driven narrative. We’ll spend a lot of time talking – obsessing – about creative approaches to storytelling, narrative structure, writing, as well as learning a sound-first approach to reporting. You will work very hard in this course – but we, your professors, will too. We'll be joined by the occasional guest, producers and editors from some of our favorite shows, who'll discuss their work and offer insight as they listen to yours. You’ll produce three audio stories in the course of the semester, working with one of the instructors as your lead editor, and learn the skills of tracking, scoring and mixing along the way; but perhaps just as important, as a member of this newsroom, you'll participate in the conversation around every piece the class produces, gaining valuable editorial experience as well.
This course carries 6 points.
Day/Time: M 2:00pm - 5:00pm
Info: See this slideshow for more information.
Description: This spring, you'll have the opportunity to embark on a journey, as Star Trek's Captain Picard once said, "where no one has gone before." The "Using Data to Investigate Across Borders" class will be the first group of investigative journalists to dive into a largely uncharted beat: genetic engineering and its global impact. In collaboration with scientists and cross-border networks, we will explore how researchers are editing, modifying, and enhancing the genes of plants, animals, and humans using revolutionary tools like CRISPR and other emerging bioengineering technologies. This course will address both the limitless possibilities and the significant risks posed by gene editing, including ethical concerns, the implications for future generations, and the global lack of regulation.The discovery of CRISPR brought hopes of curing genetic disorders, optimizing food production, and even reversing climate change. Yet, it also sparked fears of misuse—such as the creation of "designer babies," engineered pathogens, or even armies of enhanced super soldiers. Five years after urgent warnings from scientists, there is still no comprehensive international regulation on gene editing, and no cross-border investigative project has taken a rigorous, data-driven approach to understand the full scope of what is being done, why, and who is funding it.This class will take on this challenge. We will focus on identifying and analyzing key actors in the genetic engineering space by collecting, transforming, and connecting different types of data—from research papers and clinical trials to government grants, investments, patents, and more. Students will learn how to build an international database to reveal the networks behind genetic research, bringing transparency to this underreported field.
This course carries 6 points.
Day/Time: T 9:00am-12:00pm
Description: Medicine is one of the greatest subjects in journalism. There’s always news—news of universal interest. And there is often human drama. In this course, we will focus on the drama. We will read (and dissect) powerful longform narratives about surgeons in the O.R.; researchers at the laboratory bench; patients in the throes of some of the most intense times in their lives. In a series of reporting and writing projects, we’ll sharpen the skills you need to produce these stories. Most of the skill set is fundamental to all narrative journalism. How do you find strong characters? How do write vivid scenes? How do you build momentum? How do you stir in hard information without losing that momentum? We’ll also work on a few specialized skills. How do you read a technical report in a medical journal? How do you decide if it’s any good? How do you explain what it says? By the end of the course, you’ll have written one short medical news story and one longform narrative. Guests will include J School alumni who are now writing about medicine for places like The New Yorker, the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, and ProPublica.
This course carries 3 points.
Day/Time: W 2:10am–4:00pm
An exploration of the history and current role of fake news, disinformation, conspiracy theories, and purposeful deception in public life. This course distinguishes itself from others on the topic of disinformation in that we place our analysis in the context of the long history and wide variety of deceptions perpetrated on the public by institutions and individuals of power—or by those seeking power. Drawing on historical examples as well as on secondary sources, we focus on the creation and distribution of conspiracy theories, propaganda, and journalism that has been seen as fake in some way, from the mischievous and the satirical to the opportunistic and the subversive, and we consider possible responses, from policy changes to technological fixes. The emphasis is on identifying the changing relationships among journalism, power, authority, and democracy.
This course carries 3 points.
Day/Time: T 10:00am-12:00pm
Michael Schudson
This seminar introduces students to that part of the sociology of mass media that takes news or journalism as its central subject. Sociology, like other social sciences, paid little attention to journalism until journalism as it has developed became more problematic in the 1950s and 1960s (for reasons we will take up in the seminar). From that point on, a serious social science-based study ofjournalism began to emerge and we will review some of its influential texts as well as very recent additions to the literature. Most of this work centers on the United States, but comparative studies in news analysis have grown in the past twenty years and we will attend to some of this work, too. Several approaches to understanding the impact of the digital revolution on journalism will also be discussed.
Registration Details
To request cross-registration in a Journalism School course, please complete this form. Request forms are processed on a first-come, first-serve basis; and spots are assigned to non-Journalism graduate students based on available space, with top priority given to IMC SIPA students.
If you have more than one course for which you want to be considered, please submit a separate form for each class. You do not need to submit multiple forms for the same cross-registration request. Please be certain that you are not requesting a class that conflicts with any of your other classes.
Please note that this is only a request, and CJS cannot guarantee your request will be accommodated.
If your form is submitted correctly, you will receive a request confirmation e-mail within 24 hours. Please remember to include the @columbia.edu after your UNI.
You will not receive an e-mail from the Student Life office saying that your request was granted or not granted. Check your class schedule to determine if your request was granted. All requests remain on file during the cross-registration period.
Direct any questions to Melanie Huff.