Academic Efforts that Aim to Challenge and Improve Journalism Practice


  • Journalism of Empathy
    • Empathy in narrative has roots in some of the earliest written stories—what is a literary character, after all, if not an imagining of the world through someone else’s eyes? But empathy is not exclusively the tool of novelists and playwrights. In our time, journalists such as Alex Kotlowitz, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, William Finnegan and Susan Orlean (and earlier, John Hersey and others) have used a fiercely empathetic approach to create memorable and powerful nonfiction, often with social justice concerns. This course will survey the history and current practice of empathetic writing, focusing on seminal readings but looking briefly at links to literature, psychology, neuroscience, and human rights. Along the way, we’ll try our own hand at empathetic writing, with assignments that require original reporting and offer a chance to experiment with fundamentals of narrative writing such as scene-setting, character development, and writer’s voice.

    • Where: New York University
    • Instructor: Ted Conover
    • Syllabus: view
  • Dostoevsky: The Novelist as Journalist, the Journalist as Novelist
    • “In Dostoevsky,” Ernest Hemingway wrote, “there are things believable and not to be believed, but some so true that they changed you as you read them.” For generations of writers he has been the towering novelist, the writer able to reach such psychological and philosophical depths that he transformed the medium of fiction. And yet it was common knowledge among contemporary critics that Dostoyevsky’s metier, the urban novel of atmospheres and ideas, was born out of the feuillton, the nineteenth’s century’s newspaper genre of the urban sketch, and nourished on the headlines: the sensational crime stories and ideological warfare that gave life to the emerging medium of the daily newspaper. This course offers a chance to read some of Dostoevsky’s journalism, early and late; his most important work of non-fiction, Notes from the House of the Dead, an account of his imprisonment for participation in a terrorist plot; and several of the major novels, including Crime and Punishment, Demons and The Brothers Karamazov, with an eye to the interplay between fiction and journalism.

    • Where: UC Berkeley
    • Instructors: Robert Hass and Mark Danner
  • Writing Science Long
    • It’s a truism that the success of any modern society relies, in part, on scientific literacy. Often overlooked is the importance of an ingredient essential to maintaining that literacy: long-form journalism. Long form is particularly qualified to bridge the gap between science and society, but as science becomes ever more powerful and ever more arcane, the journalist’s role can be a double-edged honor: more essential, and vastly more daunting. The journalist must understand (as most laypeople do not) the nature of science, both the technicalities of specific fields and the general tenets of scientific process, and must also understand (as many scientists do not) how to translate results and processes into lay terms. The journalist must also learn to critique the larger effects of science and technology, not only the ways they contribute to our material comfort and the ultimate fate of the planet, but also their role in defining our society and providing the terms and metaphors by which we perceive our individual lives. Scientific advancements may be well presented in short newspaper articles and technical papers, but only long-form journalism has the descriptive space and the creative leeway to fully portray the subtlety of science, scientists at work, science as process, and science as shaper of our world and our times.

    • Where: UC Berkeley
  • Covering Race and Ethnicity with an Authentic Voice
    • This course will be based primarily on The Authentic Voice: The Best Reporting on Race and Ethnicity a textbook, DVD and website composed of award-winning stories (eight print; seven television). All of the stories have been honored by the Let’s Do It Better Workshop on Journalism, Race and Ethnicity here at The Journalism School. We will integrate assignments with vibrant class discussions to educate you on what it takes to report and write with authority, complexity, context and voice about one of the most sensitive and challenging topics you’ll face as journalists.

    • Where: Columbia
    • Instructors: Arlene Morgan and Alice Pifer
    • More Information: The Authentic Voice, Let’s Do It Better!
  • How To Tell The Story: Chekhov and the Depiction of Reality
    • In the twenty-five years of his writing life Anton Chekhov invented the modern short story and reinvented the form of the stage play, and in so doing chronicled the sweep of pre-revolutionary Russian society in a way that surpassed the achievements of Balzac, Zola and the other great 19th century social novelists. Chekhov was heir to a whole century of the realist enterprise in European writing and he focused and refined it as perhaps no other writer did. In this seminar, taught by a journalist and a poet, we will examine Chekhov’s poetics: the conventions and techniques of a realism able to give us a vivid sense of lived life in a particular time and place. We will examine the arc of the telling of a story that shows us what we need to know about people, their inner lives and their social possibilities, and what we need to know to understand the shape of an event. These techniques made Chekhov, both as playwright and as fiction writer, one of the most influential artists in his time. The writing assignments will be developed to reflect the individual interests of the journalism and literature students in the course.

    • Instructor: Mark Danner
  • Social Impact of Mass Media
    • In this course we explore the social consequences of what journalists do and the complex relationships between the press and the public. Through readings, class discussions, and close observations of media past and present, we locate the work of journalism in its social, historical, and theoretical context, focusing on such topics as the media’s obligation to society; relationships between the press and the theory and practice of democracy; the media and storytelling; social ramifications of new technologies and new economic structures; and how the media are implicated in our perceptions of time, space, memory, and identity.

    • Where: Columbia
    • Instructor: Andie Tucher
  • Cataclysm and Commitment
    • What are the key political events of the 20th century? And how did journalists—those on the spot, and those who reflected on subsequent events—write about these events? This class is predicated on two ideas: that historical knowledge is necessary for any journalist (and any citizen); and that journalists—far from simply writing the “first draft” of history—have, throughout the last century, created works of lasting literary, moral, intellectual and historical resonance. This seminar will focus explicitly on extraordinary political events that made, and changed, the life of the past century, and that created the world we inhabit now. Throughout the term we will return to certain questions, including the changing nature of violence; the tension between nationalism and universalism; and the emergence of disputed concepts such as “crimes against humanity.” The events and situations we’ll study we’ll study include the Russian Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, World War II and the Holocaust, the Iranian Revolution, the Israel-Palestine conflict, the fall of the Soviet Union, the transition from apartheid in South Africa, the military dictatorships of Latin America, the war in Bosnia, and the crisis in Iraq.

    • Where: New York University
    • Instructor: Susie Linfield
    • Syllabus: view
  • Media Past and Future
    • This course will use a historical analysis of earlier communications revolutions (going back to the introduction of writing) in an attempt to gain perspective on our own. Then it will challenge students to use that perspective and perhaps advance the revolution by experimenting with journalism that employs new styles or techniques or tackles new subjects. Readings will range from Plato to Sontag to Kundera. Assignments may wander into video or digital forms as well as print, though no previous experience with these media is required. A willingness to rethink and reinvent is required.

    • Where: New York University
    • Instructor: Mitchell Stephens
    • Syllabus: view
  • International Reporting: Covering Burma (Spring 2008)
    • Recent demonstrations against Burma’s military junta led by monks in cinnamon robes drew the attention of the world. As the crackdown against participants, sympathizers and the opposition National League for Democracy continues, the Covering Burma class in spring semester will plunge students into the history, politics, economy and culture of a repressive country. Burma/Myanmar offers a special reporting challenge for journalists. Information is strictly controlled, censorship is tightly imposed, Internet and phone lines are monitored, visas are denied, international contacts are scrutinized. Propaganda floods the local media, exile news organizations cover internal events from abroad and Western reporters are based primarily in Thailand. The course will offer a rigorous journalistic introduction to Burma through lectures and discussions, readings, video clips, documentaries and reporting assignments. Students will choose from a range of topics as they prepare to report from Thailand: military rule, political opposition, ethnic insurgency, public health, environment, development, trade, refugees, NGOs, education, religion, media, popular culture and the arts. We expect to provide funding for 8-10 students to travel over spring break to Bangkok, Chiang Mai and Mae Sot. If there is interest, we will launch a website like the one created by the Covering North Korea class in 2005.

    • Where: UC Berkeley
    • More Information: view
  • The Elements of Storytelling
    • This course examines the universal elements of great stories and helps students put those elements into practice for narrative journalism. The best works of narrative journalism are stories of real people in real places that tap into eternal truths and meaning: “the ineluctable within the everyday,”‘ as writer Mark Kramer puts it. This course will deepen the students’ interviewing, reporting, organization and writing skills so they can produce compelling, literate stories, whether in print, radio or television. Students will study structure, language, voice, symbolism of facts, character development, dialogue, thematic unity, point of view, sense of place and the telling details that bring people, places and events alive on the page—and illuminate a social issue or universal theme. Students will analyze great pieces of narrative journalism to become more clear-eyed in reading their own writing so they can make each piece as lean and lively as it can be.

    • Where: UC Berkeley
  • Key Issues with Faculty and Campus Experts
    • The difference between an adequate journalist and a good one is knowing enough to find the powerful stories and knowing how to anchor those stories with more than just quotes from the usual suspects. This course will bring you up to speed on subjects you’ll be covering in one way or another for the rest of your career. We’ve brought together JSchool faculty members, other UC professors and professionals to give you the background you need on Education, Immigration, Presidential Elections, Health Care Policy, and International Trade. The EDUCATION block, for example, will cover Brown v Board of Education and how the Supreme Court decision has played out since 1954; the effects of Proposition 209 and Proposition 13 in California and the national impact of No Child Left Behind. The IMMIGRATION section will give you the history of immigration, how the issue became so divisive, the impact on heavily immigrant communities in California, the economics of immigration and a look at the legislation on the table. The ELECTION segment will help you understand why modern parties and campaigns work they way they do, how “issues” do and don’t influence elections and challenge what you think you know about voting behavior.

    • Where: UC Berkeley
  • Oakland Jazz and Blues
    • This class is using a video game program to recreate and tell the story of the jazz and blues club scene on Oakland’s 7th Street during its heyday in the 1940s and 1950s—a remarkable part of the city’s history that has been all but lost to urban decay. An eight-block stretch of 7th Street is being recreated as a virtual world, which people can access over the Internet and then adopt avatar figures to walk up and down the streets, enter the clubs, listen to the music of the era and interact with other people logged onto the site. The virtual reality program used in the class was developed by the UC Berkeley Architecture Department, which is collaborating on this year-long project. This class involves reporting and research on the stories of the clubs and other establishments on 7th Street, the musicians and other characters who frequented the scene, the music played in the clubs, and the redevelopment projects that destroyed the area. And the class will work on how to tell the story of the clubs and the history of the area using video game narratives.

    • Where: UC Berkeley
    • Instructors: Paul Grabowicz and Yehuda Kalay
    • More Information: view
  • Evidence and Inference
    • Evidence and Inference is a full-year course that is required of all students in the M.A. program. It aims to instill in students a combination of skills and habits of reflection that are much more easily acquired in a university than in a newsroom, and that will stand them in good stead over the long haul of their careers as working journalists. Students ought to finish the course with a mix of enhanced confidence about their ability to obtain and understand complex information, and increased humility about how subtle and necessarily-imperfect concepts such as facts, truth, and proof really are.

    • Where: Columbia
    • Instructors: Nicholas Lemann and Evan Cornog
  • Participatory Media / Collective Action
    • This participatory class explores political activism in the Net context, as well as key aspects such as mass media, political communications, and smart mobs: emerging forms of technology-enabled collective actions. We will read and discuss issues, theories and real world examples from the US, Philippines, Korea, Mexico, China, and elsewhere. We will focus on blogging, online forums and other emerging media forms such as podcasting, photo-sharing, tagging, RSS, wiki-based communities and read about theoretical aspects of socio-technological networks as well. In addition to analytic readings, students will learn how to use a wiki for collaborative work, to blog and read and comment on blogs via RSS as part of the coursework, to listen to and produce podcasts. The class will directly engage in collective knowledge-gathering and construction of a public good. Students will engage in social bookmarking and collectively construct a resource wiki on class topics.

    • Where: UC Berkeley
  • Presidential Election: What’s at Stake (Spring 2008)
    • Our broad project topic this election year is “What’s At Stake.” That frees us from the drudgery of the formal campaign trail and gives us room to cover everything from nukes, civil liberties and climate change to middle class angst, election fraud or political corruption. We need reporters, video and radio producers, writers, photographers, multi-media producers and web designers.

    • Where: UC Berkeley
  • Cultural Conversation
    • The primary purpose of this course is to inculcate habits of thinking that are vital to informed and intelligent cultural reporting and criticism. This does not mean that students will be taught “theories” of cultural writing, which they can then apply to their “practice.” Rather, the point is that your thought process-as you write a piece, as you prepare to write it, or even before that, as you go through your daily life in a world full of potential subject matter-is an integral part of your work as a writer. We all carry on some kind of conversation with ourselves, and with the people we know, about the culture we live in. As writers, however, our task is to self-consciously translate that private conversation into a public one that connects with readers. In this course I ask you to address two questions that bear on this translation. One is historical: what has been said in the cultural conversation before you came to it? To find your place in the conversation (just as you would have to do if you joined a roomful of people talking) you will need to grapple with cultural issues and debates that go back half a century-debates about the nature of art and criticism, technology and mass media, high culture versus mass culture, art and politics, social groups and cultural difference. The second question is personal: what experiences, ideas, emotions, and prejudices do you bring to the conversation? While conventional news writers are simply expected to put their own attitudes aside, cultural journalists must be conscious of their standpoint and its impact on their observation and judgment. Your credibility and the power of your literary voice depend a good deal on your ability to develop this capacity for self-reflection.

    • Where: New York University
    • Instructor: Katie Roiphe
    • Syllabus: view
  • Journalistic Tradition
    • A survey of non-fiction literature in English from John Milton to John McPhee...and beyond. This is a section for writers who want to learn the technique of “deep reading,” sometimes called explication de text, a method of teasing out the literary technique, literary devices and secrets of syntax and language that make great writing great. Students who have taken this course report that it changes forever the way they read and look at text, any text. This is a section for students who want to learn to read like a writer, think like a writer, see the world through a writer’s eyes.

    • Where: New York University
  • Portfolio
    • The NYU Portfolio Program is designed to educate journalists in a way that is both conservative and revolutionary: Conservative in that it emphasizes knowledge of various journalistic traditions, basic literary skills, and practical outcomes (aka getting published) and revolutionary in that we are going to pursue these goals without primary emphasis on the “boot-camp” model (“skills” courses, “content” courses, etc.) that has dominated journalism education for the last half century. By invitation, we encourage and enable a select group of students to use their NYU Journalism Department experience to develop a coherent, sophisticated body of work.

    • Where: New York University
    • Instructor: Robert Boynton
    • More Information: view
  • Graduate School Courses Outside the Journalism School
    • Students in the M.A. program will be taking at least one course per semester in a school or department outside the Journalism School. The courses are selected after consultation with the faculty advisors. These courses will be a vital part of the student’s process of sub-specialization within his/her major. Along with the master’s thesis, these courses will provide a crucial part of the path from being a “politics” concentrator to being an education reporter, or from an “arts and culture” concentrator to being an architecture critic.

    • Where: Columbia