M.S. Investigative Specialization

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.

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.