Writing, Research & Reporting I: BER is designed to teach the basic skills you'll need to write news stories for business publications. You'll learn everything from how to write on a daily (or even hourly) deadline for newspapers and wire services to penning short pieces for magazines. The emphasis will be on learning by doing, with regular reporting and writing assignments inside and outside of class. We'll workshop your stories in class, dissect current media coverage, take field trips to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Conference Board and New York Stock Exchange, and analyze the merit and structure of good (and bad) news stories. You'll be expected to stay abreast of the news, and to read The New York Times and Wall Street Journal regularly, as well as a number of business magazines (Fortune, Forbes, BusinessWeek, etc.) and websites. By the end of the semester, you should be able to write snappy ledes and smart nut grafs in your sleep—the first step in becoming a first rate journalist—and have the requisite skills to write tight, informative business stories. (Note: WRII covers longer magazine features.) In addition, we'll be working closely with the Internship Director to prepare you for landing a quality internship.

Although the First Amendment appears on its face to prohibit any governmental restrictions on the press, the U.S. Supreme Court in fact balances free and open expression against other vital interests of society. This course begins by examining the struggle against seditious libel (the crime of criticizing government or its officials) that was not won in this country until the landmark decision in New York Times v. Sullivan in 1964. Students will examine freedom of the press through the prism of a rich variety of contemporary conflicts, including libel, newsgathering problems, the right of privacy, prior restraint, and the conflict between free press and fair trial. Readings include a The First Amendment and the Fourth Estate; Make No Law by Anthony Lewis, The Unwanted Gaze by Jeffrey Rosen, and Origins of the Bill of Rights by Leonard Levy. Students write five papers during the semester.

This is the basic reporting, research and journalistic writing class for CRC students, which involves a balance of short- and long-term reporting assignments and intensive rewriting.

This is a course in reading and writing criticism. Our goal is to introduce ourselves to some of the best cultural critics (mainly of the 20th century); chart the ways in which the nature of 20th-century criticism — and art — have changed; investigate some of the major questions that preoccupy contemporary critics (especially the nature of modernism/postmodernism, high and low culture, irony and sincerity, and the culture wars); and begin to master some forms of critical writing. The paradox of how to develop a critical voice without writing directly about oneself will be explored. Among the critics we'll study are James Agee, Pauline Kael, John Berger, George Orwell, Gilbert Seldes, Susan Sontag, Lionel Trilling, Greil Marcus, Albert Murray, Norman Mailer and Wendy Steiner.

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.

Whether your audience is newspaper readers, magazine browsers, television viewers, web surfers or book buyers, you need to know how to write clearly, concisely, and with style. Good writing is grounded in critical thinking, extensive research and comprehensive reporting, and that's what this class will teach you how to do. The only way to learn is by doing, and you do lots with New York City as your classroom. You will cover a myriad of topics from 9/11 memorials, to tourist traps, to Halloween business, to election issues, to the New York City marathon, to holiday rituals. You'll also do several "ridealongs" with police, night court judges and assorted characters, journalists, marathon runners, and politicians. The goal is to give you a full range of research, reporting and writing experiences, with more than 20 assignments. Books include Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, The Girls on the Van by Beth Harpaz and On Writing Well by William Zinsser. The class is open to first-semester graduate students only.

This is a professional course, concentrating on the basics of the craft of journalism — coming up with an idea, getting it approved, reporting the facts, organizing the material and writing the story. Students will spend a lot of time looking for story ideas, and pitching them — a critical part of the real-world newsroom experience. Perhaps the biggest emphasis of the class will be on the most important part of journalism: gathering the facts. Students will have many reporting exercises during in-class drill sessions, but will also do a great deal of "live" street reporting. We will rely much more on primary sources — original documents, and especially what people tell us — rather than secondary sources that are better suited for the background that sends us to primary sources. (new paragraph)In drills and in the stories produced outside of class, students will learn the classic styles of organizing and writing, and will begin learning what works best for them on different types of stories. We'll read and analyze many examples of the day's news, looking at what works, what doesn't and why. We'll look at what gets covered, what doesn't, and the impact of both. The ethics of journalism will be a constant undercurrent for all our work and discussions. (new paragraph)In addition to exercises produced during drill sessions, students will do a number of street-reporting assignments. Possible story ideas might cover some aspect of a city agency, the courts, police, the arts, culture, business and sports. The story assignments are not merely drills; goal is to produce stories that can be published. (new paragraph)This class aims to lay the foundation for a career in journalism, extremely challenging but extremely stimulating, with the focus always on best practices for the communications professional in the 21st century.

No matter what medium you aspire to work in-online, magazines, television, newspapers or even books--you need to know how to write clearly and concisely. And, good writing is grounded in logical thinking, solid research, and comprehensive reporting. That's what this class will teach you how to do. During the semester, we will: 1) Cover all aspects of magazine writing: developing and pitching story ideas; researching and interviewing; writing; critiquing, and re-writing. 2) Discuss a variety of topics related to the magazine industry, including copy flow and production, fact-checking, freelancing, and professional opportunities for writers and editors. 3) Learn many strategies through class exercises, writing and editing your work, peer feedback, reading top-rate journalism, and talking with NYC writers and magazine editors.

This course is designed to acquaint students with the basic protections and restrictions of the law as they apply to the media, as well as the ethical problems and dilemmas journalists face. First Amendment rights and legal and ethical responsibilities and limitations will be examined and discussed. The course will look at these questions from five viewpoints: from (i) the practical view of a journalist doing his job with (ii) heavy consideration of ethical imperatives, and (iii) from a legal prospective, all the while (iv) considering the rules in a public policy context -- are they fair and appropriate in our society? -- while (v) noting the historical context in which they arise. Significant court cases and fundamental legal rules as well as past ethical scandals and issues will be explored in the context of political and historical realities, and in terms of journalistic standards and practices; contemporary media law issues and ethical problems and guidelines will also be focused on. Among the basic First Amendment issues which will be examined are libel, invasion of privacy, prior restraints, newsgathering and newsgathering torts, and the reporter's privilege; some of the ethical issues to be explored include objectivity in reporting, bias and transparency, conflicts of interest, and fair dealings with subjects, sources and advertisers.

Priority: First semester students. Open to all if space available.

This course is designed to provide students with an understanding of the history of journalism in America and why the news today is as it is -- that is, how the news business functions in America today and why and what the historic reasons for this are. The course is premised on the idea that an understanding of the history of American journalism and that the media is important to the journalist and the informed citizen and the history of journalism is as important as the history of any subject in America. I also believe that journalism is an ignored subject, in the writing of American history and in the American newsroom. I keep trying to do my part to change this. In addition, while there is much in American journalism that is good-without journalism there would be no democracy-there is much in journalism that needs change. I think that without a knowledge of journalism history, that change is most difficult to bring about. We will begin by examining the beginnings and rise of print communication in what is today the Middle East, Asia, and particularly in Europe, and particularly then in England. We will then examine journalism in America beginning from, so to speak, the beginning -- that is, from the first crude hand presses and wooden types -- and follow the history of that journalism through the Colonial and Revolutionary eras in America, the pioneer and western settlement eras, the Civil War, the expansion West, the time of Yellow Journalism, the rise of the magazine, the rise of the radio, the rise of television, the coming of computer technology, corporate ownership, the vast media conglomerates that have emerged in the last decades, and other areas that define journalism today. We will also look -- and this is most important -- at the errors of journalism, why these are so, and how journalism might be made better.

A special section of the department's standard 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. It is a classic seminar, a lively and animated discussion of non-fiction literature led by student seminar leaders following protocols set by the instructor. There are five graded "explications," short analyses of sections of text. (The instructor has written a 30-page guide to explication that makes this practice both painless and profitable.) The final is a 2,000-word paper. And there is an optional final for extra credit, a five-minute "oral" final to be delivered in a gallery at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The reading are collected in a coursepack. Two additional books, Whitman's Memoranda During the War, and Hersey's Hiroshima, are also required.

Throughout the twentieth century, certain magazines have defined New York's cultural sensibility during particular decades. One thinks of McClure's at the turn of the century, The New Yorker in the thirties and forties, The Village Voice in the fifties, Esquire and Harper's in the sixties, New York and Rolling Stone in the seventies, and Vanity Fair in eighties. In this course, we will read the best journalism produced by these, and other, magazines, studying their institutional identities, their financial goals and the strategies of their editors. Magazine journalism is inherently shaped by the context, the periodicals, in which it appears. The goal of this course will be to understand that context so that you will be smarter in navigating its limits. This is a heavy reading course and will conclude with a final paper.

This seminar will consider the tradition of women cultural critics in England and America, tracing its development through the work of critics including Rebecca West, Mary McCarthy, Joan Didion and Janet Malcolm, and concluding with contemporary debates about sexual politics. Through close readings of their works, the seminar will explore the stylistic innovations of these writers; the different ways, delicate, subtle, blunt, in which politics inform their writing; and the various tactics, polemical, whimsical, intimate, that these critics employ. We will pay particular attention to the use of the personal voice in cultural criticism, that is, the balance of lived experience and ideas, in its most literary and debased forms. We will also touch on the ways in which these writers have influenced or informed each other's work. There will be two short papers and one longer final paper: either a critical essay on one or more of the writers we have studied, or an original piece of cultural criticism.

Nonfiction is grounded in solid reporting. It is the backbone of worthy journalism and the source of your authority as a writer. Conversely, good reporting must be carried in the arms of lucid prose. You will learn these skills in this class. We will cover each step in producing a news story: developing and pitching ideas, researching and interviewing, writing, editing and re-writing. We'll read and discuss good journalism, including Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, and talk with New York writers and editors. Research: You will learn to tap a variety of documentary sources—not just Google. Reporting: You will talk to strangers and work the phone. Be prepared to go out on the streets at night and on weekends. Be ready to approach voters, cops and a man dressed as Jacqueline Kennedy in the Halloween Parade. Jamaican livery drivers, Chinese restaurant workers, Dominican barbers. Distracted political operatives and C-List TV actors. Writing: First, you will meet deadlines; second, you will learn from your mistakes; third, you will become a maniac for revision. Finally: You will endure a weekly News Quiz, which will mostly be based on The New York Times with a couple of fun questions from The Onion. Your humorous answers will be collected in a recap and shared with your classmates. These recaps are a Comedy Riot. But please don't call the police—The Quiz is harmless.

This course offers through the case method a critical examination of current and recurring ethical and legal issues in journalism. Areas covered include reporting practices, roles of editors and executives, conflict of interest, sources, defamation and privacy, criminal justice and national security.

This beginning course introduces students to field reporting. Students learn to develop story ideas, write to picture, structure a story and conduct interviews and shoot and edit. Beat assignments cover a variety of topics in the neighborhoods of New York. As the course develops, detailed script analysis is combined with in-depth discussions of the completed pieces. Students work in teams of 2-3. They use small DV cameras, linear and non-linear editing systems.

This is the department's standard graduate introductory writing and reporting course, mutated to form the foundation for the rest of the editorial sequence in the Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program (SHERP). It has two purposes: 1) To teach you the rudiments of news gathering and writing under realistic deadline conditions, and 2) To introduce you to the culture of American journalism in its various forms, including the precepts of the First Amendment and the concept of a free press that goes back at least to Milton's Areopagitica of 1644. Open to first semester SHERP students only.

This course will introduce you to the world of science journalism by looking at scientific topics that are at the cutting-edge of current research and also have profound implications for the way we live. In other words, they are the raw material for great journalism. As you immerse yourselves in some challenging areas of current science, you will read the work of highly accomplished researchers and journalists, and will also hear from them directly in class. Our goal throughout will be to understand and adopt the processes that the best science journalists use when they cover controversial science. You will learn how journalists interact with scientists, conduct research, organize information and write stories. Just as importantly, you will be sharpening your analytical skills by writing almost every week for the new SHERP webzine. You'll be covering an assigned beat, and will be following the peer-reviewed journals and other sources to stay on top of the news as it happens. If all goes well, you won't just be covering science news, you'll be breaking it. Open to first semester SHERP students only.

This course aims to give SHERP students a historical and literary context for science journalism, and will also introduce them to crucial concepts in statistics, probability and data analysis. The course will be rigorous, with an extensive reading list tracing the development of science journalism and examining the science journalist's role in society. There will also be heavy usage of problem sets and writing assignments aimed at showing students how to recognize "good science" and it's opposite. Open to first semester SHERP students only.

International reporting casts a different eye on a society; this course is designed to help students develop that eye as they practice the fundamentals of reporting and writing the news. We will tap the resources of this international city to learn what to report for readers far away and how to convey useful context and a deep sense of humanity. We will learn by doing, seeing, listening and asking – through field trips to the United Nations and The Associated Press, assignments at foreign missions and in ethnic neighborhoods, workshops in class and talks with foreign correspondents. We will discuss different concepts of journalism in other regions of the world and strengthen our appreciation of other societies. We also will read the works of noted correspondents and hone interviewing and writing techniques. Students pursuing joint degree programs in French, Latin America or the Middle East will be encouraged to explore related topics. All the while, we will work on the skills essential to accurate and evocative reporting: thorough research on the issues, reporting to gather news and views, clear thinking and writing that brings stories to life.

It’s a big country. Three hundred million people, sprinkled ocean-to-ocean. That should be enough to write about. The nation and its issues — the list of those is long — are the means by which students in this course will start morphing into journalists. Wondering how you ask someone a question? What comes first in a story? Who’s fair and what’s balanced? How to make prose golden? It will all become clear as you think, report and write about Campaign 2008. Or same-sex marriage. Or Darwinism vs. Intelligent Design. Or whatever else is on the nation’s mind.

This course examines the application of ethical and legal principles to journalistic decision making, in print, broadcast and on-line. Unlike other professionals, journalists must make their ethical decisions rapidly, often without clear guidelines, and on their own, and the results of their decisions are open to public view. Also unlike other professionals, violations of ethical precepts are not punished by professional discipline or revocation of a license. This makes it vital that journalists weigh the value of how and what they choose to report against the potential harm to subjects, sources and society as a whole. The objective of this course is to provide guidance, through consideration of hypothetical and actual situations and analysis of case decisions, in developing a framework to help you make ethical and legal professional choices and to suggest some criteria against which those decisions may be measured.

This class is your newsroom. You will learn to research, pitch story ideas, find the right angles, hit the streets and write it up on deadline. You will use this incredible city, rich with culture, diversity, money and power, to learn and practice your skills. There will be numerous opportunities to get out in the city and cover news. We will cover events, but we will always be looking for the twist that makes it different, that makes our work the best read in town. We will hunt for news in neighborhoods, city hall, police stations and anywhere else we can find it. There will be news quizzes and "Newscheck" where each one of you will have to pick a story out of the front pages of The New York Times and lead the class in a discussion of it. We will have journalists come to our newsroom and tell us what life is like on the job. Ultimately journalism is about people, their stories and the government and services that enable them to live their lives. This class is about finding your voice and embracing the community you cover with passion, respect and understanding. In the process you will strengthen you skills in the fundamentals of journalism.

This course is designed to acquaint students with the basic protections and restrictions of the law as they apply to the media, as well as the ethical problems and dilemmas journalists face. First Amendment rights and legal and ethical responsibilities and limitations will be examined and discussed. The course will look at these questions from five viewpoints: from (i) the practical view of a journalist doing his job with (ii) heavy consideration of ethical imperatives, and (iii) from a legal prospective, all the while (iv) considering the rules in a public policy context -- are they fair and appropriate in our society? -- while (v) noting the historical context in which they arise. Significant court cases and fundamental legal rules as well as past ethical scandals and issues will be explored in the context of political and historical realities, and in terms of journalistic standards and practices; contemporary media law issues and ethical problems and guidelines will also be focused on. Among the basic First Amendment issues which will be examined are libel, invasion of privacy, prior restraints, newsgathering and newsgathering torts, and the reporter's privilege; some of the ethical issues to be explored include objectivity in reporting, bias and transparency, conflicts of interest, and fair dealings with subjects, sources and advertisers.

Students in this third-semester course will use all the skills and knowledge they've acquired in the program to produce their own business publication. Under the guidance of an instructor, they will assign, write, and edit the articles that will appear in the publication.

Business reporting, perhaps more than any other specialized field of journalism requires a working knowledge of the law. That includes not just the language and intent of laws, but also the legal system within which the written word is interpreted, adjudicated and given meaning. This class will provide an overview of the fields of law you will most likely need to understand as reporters. In addition, you will become familiar with the roles of the courts and lawyers, as well as methods of legal research, all necessary to understanding the American system of jurisprudence as it applies to business and economic reporting. By the end of the term, students will be expected to know how to cover a court case; where to find legal precedent for a judges decision; how to analyze a Supreme Court decision; and how to get what you need from lawyers, witnesses and other players in the legal system. Students will complete four or five writing assignments. Readings include Covering the Courts: A Handbook for Journalists; Storm Center: The Supreme Court in American Politics; Conspiracy of Fools; The Deal of the Century: The Breakup of AT&T; and Business Law.

This seminar examines the ways in which some of the major writers of the 20th century have reported on the key and ever-controversial issues of race and class. We will look at how these issues have, historically, been written about, and at how some of today's best reporters are approaching them; and we will explore how concepts of class and race have changed over the last century. Among the writers whose works we'll study are W.E.B. Du Bois, James Agee, George Orwell, James Baldwin, Jamaica Kincaid, Barbara Ehrenreich, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., William Finnegan and Joan Didion. This is an intensive reading course; please do not come to class unless you have thoughtfully and critically completed each week's readings, and are prepared to discuss them in an open-minded manner with others.

This seminar will consider the tradition of women cultural critics in England and America, tracing its development through the work of critics including Rebecca West, Mary McCarthy, Joan Didion and Janet Malcolm, and concluding with contemporary debates about sexual politics. Through close readings of their works, the seminar will explore the stylistic innovations of these writers; the different ways, delicate, subtle, blunt, in which politics inform their writing; and the various tactics, polemical, whimsical, intimate, that these critics employ. We will pay particular attention to the use of the personal voice in cultural criticism, that is, the balance of lived experience and ideas, in its most literary and debased forms. We will also touch on the ways in which these writers have influenced or informed each other's work. There will be two short papers and one longer final paper: either a critical essay on one or more of the writers we have studied, or an original piece of cultural criticism.

See: Electives

See: Electives

We have several objectives in this class this semester. One is to finish your long piece. The other is to produce a short piece for our Election Special. You will work in groups of 2 for the election stories and then report live from various locations on election night as a follow-up to your reports. We will discuss this in class tonight and you will pitch stories on 9/21. This is very much a workshop class. You will present your work during the various stages of production—developing your story, reviewing your raw tapes, scripts and rough-cuts during class. Each of you will develop a schedule with deadlines for both stories and submit this by 9/28. During class, I will also bring in tapes to discuss that will stimulate discussion of form and content. Classes may run past 8:00 PM as we get more involved in story development so please don't schedule yourself too tightly on Wednesdays. Before you edit your election pieces, I will conduct an AVID session to give you some shortcuts. If you want to work on FCP, you have access to the 504 A computers, but you will compete with all the other students for time on those machines. Our final class is Dec 14. From past experience, that is not enough time to view all projects so I suggest we also meet on the 15th. We can meet in the afternoon as well since formal classes are over on the 14th. If you need the time, we could also have our last meeting on 12/19. Please do not schedule airline tickets before then. We will also pick a date in early February for your film festival screening. We normally have it on a Saturday, be we could try for a Friday. Please choose from Jan 28 or Feb 4. Parents and friends, of course, are invited.

Dedicated to the news magazine, broadcast journalism's long-form storytelling vehicle. The course is broken into three elements: (1) hands-on AVID editing where students edit a segment from field cassettes, narration and a script from a story previously broadcast on CBS News. (2) reviewing the news magazine genre with lectures that emphasize visual demonstrations of the editing process as well as student evaluations of weekly news magazine broadcasts. (3) application of learned editing techniques to the students own documentary work.

See: Electives

Medical Reporting provides an in-depth look at many of the most important contemporary topics in the always dynamic field of medical journalism, including the biology of cancer, environment-related illness, epidemiology, and the precepts of sound medical research and peer review. Students write several short pieces on journal reports, medical conferences and community health lectures, and one longer, feature-length piece on a health topic of their choice. Medical researchers and prominent journalists are frequent guest speakers. Open to third semester SHERP students only.

This advanced SHERP class is intended to give a realistic preview of life as a working science journalist. We will explore the process step by step, from finding a story idea to pitching it to surviving the editing process to making sure the final product is accurate, clear and compelling. We will also look at science journalism from the editor's point of view. Open to third semester SHERP students only.

Open to third semester SHERP students only.

See: Electives

This course will be broken into four parts: print/magazine, web video, audio podcast, and web. Over the course of the semester, students will produce a magazine feature, a video segment, an audio podcast, an online column, and various forms of web-based multimedia. Students will also maintain individual blogs.

This course will be broken into four parts: print/magazine, web video, audio podcast, and web. Over the course of the semester, students will produce a magazine feature, a video segment, an audio podcast, an online column, and various forms of web-based multimedia. Students will also maintain individual blogs.

NewsAssignment is a course in pushing the envelope in Web journalism. Students will learn about the philosophy and practice of "open source" journalism and take a crash course in the Web's inherent potential as a reporting medium. They will also work directly on NewAssignment.Net's editorial projects and participate in building, operating, critiquing and improving the site. NewAssignment's first active project is Assignment Zero.

This will be a third-semester graduate writing and reporting class in which students will read the great works of muckraking and social justice through the country's history, to include journalists who are doing this work today. We will write several journalism pieces, each longer and more difficult than the one before, that, based on facts, will express a point of view and, it would be hoped, illustrate a wrong or wrongs in America. This is not an editorial writing class or a personal essay class, but a class of journalism. We will not seek to be objective; we will, however, seek to be truthful—that is, where the facts take us—and be fair. Students must be interviewed by Professor Serrin to gain admittance to the class. The final piece will a piece of some 2,500-3,000 words or more that will explore in depth, with extensive research, readings, and reporting, a single subject (in other words, a thesis). Class size will be limited to 12-15 students, Readings will include Muckraking: The Journalism That Changed America, by William and Judith Serrin, and other books and pieces to be selected by the professor, and which include such works as How the Other Half Lives, by Jacob Riis, The Jungle by Upton Sinclair The Other America by Michael Harrington, Night Comes to the Cumberlands, by Harry M. Caudill , A Civil Action by Jonathan Harr, Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser, and Homestead: The Glory and Tragedy of an American Steel Town by William Serrin.

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.

This workshop covers the essentials of writing for magazines. In addition to reading and discussing articles from a variety of publications, students will write two or three stories of their own. We'll explore the complete process of getting your articles in print. This includes: generating ideas, writing query letters, working with editors, conducting research and interviews, organizing features, and revising drafts. We'll also look at how magazine writers establish a niche and expand their stories into books.

Great stories are shaped by talented, reckless, funny, arrogant and often misanthropic writers and reporters working at the height of their craft. In this class, we will study how world-shaking historical events and everyday experiences alike can be crafted into original journalistic narratives. We will concentrate on the writer’s angle of approach to the subject – his or her “voice” – which is made more or less convincing through his or her control over language and the depth and range of his/her reporting. ¶ The first half of each class will consist of close readings of nonfiction narratives on Balkan wars, acid trips, nervous breakdowns, rock and roll concerts, a sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subways, a visit to the Iowa State Fair and assorted other subjects by some of my favorite journalists and novelists including Tom Wolfe, Joan Dideon, David Foster Wallace, Denis Johnson, Rebecca West, Ryszard Kapucinski, Haruki Murakami, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Joseph Mitchell. Each class will begin promptly at 12:30 PM and will be divided between an hour and thirty minute discussion of the assigned reading and an hour and fifteen minute discussion of your written work. Latecomers will be greeted with derision. We will break at 2 PM for afternoon snack. ¶ We will also enjoy visits from enlivening and informative guests from Harper’s, The New Yorker and other high-class venues, who can answer any questions you might have about reporting and editing, and who will help you shape your ideas with an eye towards publishing your own work.

This course will focus on the skills and techniques essential to arts reporting and criticism. By the end of the semester, students will have produced a substantial and varied body of arts journalism. You will learn to express insights and formulate arguments concisely through a series of writing assignments and a collective class blog that will report on and respond to current cultural events. You will also work on two in-depth reported pieces--a profile and a piece on a cultural scene or phenomenon-- that will provide an opportunity to synthesize a critical sensibility with research, interviewing, and reporting techniques. We will read a wide range of arts critics and reporters, including Joan Acocella, Ken Auletta, Peter Biskind, Joan Didion, J. Hoberman, John Leonard, Janet Malcolm, David Remnick, Susan Sontag, David Foster Wallace, Edmund Wilson, and James Wood.

What makes a magazine profile grab you from the first paragraph—and keep you interested for 5,000 words? How do you get story subjects to co-operate and give you enough time to get behind the public veneer, whether it's a politician, a movie star, a business leader, or an ordinary person caught in the middle of an extraordinary situation? What are the different narrative ways to tell a story and make the person come alive on the page? The goal of this course is to learn the basic rules of profile writing, and also how and when to break them. The emphasis will be on writing a series of profiles of different types and lengths, from a 500-word person-in-the-news story to a write-around without co-operation from the subject to a full-fledged richly-textured portrait. Unlike covering most breaking news, writing a magazine profile offers the opportunity to display a distinctive authorial voice and to project attitude in the give-and-take with your subject. We will read and analyze current profiles on the newsstand, as well as collections of magazine work from such greats as Tom Wolfe to "The Woman at the Washington Zoo" by Marjorie Williams. Guest speakers will include major magazine writers, and hopefully, a profile subject who can talk about the experience of being profiled by different writers.

Priority: First semester students. Open to all if space available.

This course is designed to provide students with an understanding of the history of journalism in America and why the news today is as it is -- that is, how the news business functions in America today and why and what the historic reasons for this are. The course is premised on the idea that an understanding of the history of American journalism and that the media is important to the journalist and the informed citizen and the history of journalism is as important as the history of any subject in America. I also believe that journalism is an ignored subject, in the writing of American history and in the American newsroom. I keep trying to do my part to change this. In addition, while there is much in American journalism that is good-without journalism there would be no democracy-there is much in journalism that needs change. I think that without a knowledge of journalism history, that change is most difficult to bring about. We will begin by examining the beginnings and rise of print communication in what is today the Middle East, Asia, and particularly in Europe, and particularly then in England. We will then examine journalism in America beginning from, so to speak, the beginning -- that is, from the first crude hand presses and wooden types -- and follow the history of that journalism through the Colonial and Revolutionary eras in America, the pioneer and western settlement eras, the Civil War, the expansion West, the time of Yellow Journalism, the rise of the magazine, the rise of the radio, the rise of television, the coming of computer technology, corporate ownership, the vast media conglomerates that have emerged in the last decades, and other areas that define journalism today. We will also look -- and this is most important -- at the errors of journalism, why these are so, and how journalism might be made better.

Are the mainstream media part of a vast, left-wing conspiracy, as conservatives allege? Or are they stenographers to power, as left-wing critics insist? Are they weapons of mass distraction, giving Martha Stewart's trial front-page play while virtually ignoring events that have a more profound impact in the long run, such as the Enron meltdown? Or are they vigilant guardians of the public interest, in the Sy Hersh mold? Are they blind to the issues of gender, race, and class that lurk in the shadows of many news stories? Or do they force us to confront the ugly realities most of us would rather ignore? What is the state, and fate, of journalism in the age of corporate consolidation and post-9/11 restrictions of press freedoms? In this course, we'll delve into a century's worth of media criticism, from Upton Sinclair to C. Wright Mills, Walter Lippmann to Noam Chomsky in search of answers to these urgent questions. The readings, many of them taken from Our Unfree Press by Robert McChesney and supplemented by topical articles and documentary films, will include George Seldes on media ownership, Upton Sinclair on interlocking business interests ("synergy"), James Rorty and Gloria Steinem on advertising, Ben Bagdikian and John Dewey on the effects of profit and partisan politics in commercial journalism, W.E.B. Du Bois and Mark Hertsgaard on the press's role in a democracy. ¶ We'll talk about Fox News, the brainchild of media spinmeister Roger Ailes that has seemingly struck such a responsive chord with the news-consuming public (or has it?). We'll debate the "liberal bias" charge leveled by neocon pundit Ann Coulter. We'll consider the case made by Noam Chomsky, the activist critic who damns the newsmedia as a propaganda tool of U.S. imperialism and corporate profiteering. We'll examine the effects of Clear Channel's near-total monopolization of the radio airwaves. We'll wrestle with the overarching question of why so many ordinary Americans hate the press, and why so many media critics feel journalists aren't living up to their responsibility to speak truth to power. And who gave media critics a bully pulpit, anyway? Why should we listen to them? We'll end by critiquing media criticism itself.

In an era of "culture war," holy war, technological revolution, and secular crisis, religion in the broad sense permeates at least half the stories in the news. Iraq, Iran, Israel -- we know that religion is a major part of these stories. George W. Bush's administration is a religion story. Stem cell research and same-sex marriage and school vouchers are religion stories, although not at all limited to the narrow pro and con set of beliefs with which they are typically framed. The question of race in America is infused with religion. News stories about sex are more often than not involve religiously-rooted moralities; stories about violence revolve around ideas about religious concepts of evil. In "The 'R' Word" we'll examine how the press both confronts and represents religion in the public sphere. What is "religion" anyway? Why do secular journalists need to understand it? Must it be experienced to be documented? How can understanding "religion" help us examine beliefs and rituals not normally defined as religious? We'll use the insights of media criticism combined with a study of a variety of approaches to narrative nonfiction writing to inform our own production of several short pieces that will address these questions explicitly. We'll investigate the ways in which journalism confronts, contains, and secularizes "religion" to make it presentable in a public sphere. "Belief" -- another term we'll interrogate -- is not required for this course.

Priority: CRC students. Open to all if space available.

This seminar examines the ways in which some of the major writers of the 20th century have reported on the key and ever-controversial issues of race and class. We will look at how these issues have, historically, been written about, and at how some of today's best reporters are approaching them; and we will explore how concepts of class and race have changed over the last century. Among the writers whose works we'll study are W.E.B. Du Bois, James Agee, George Orwell, James Baldwin, Jamaica Kincaid, Barbara Ehrenreich, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., William Finnegan and Joan Didion. This is an intensive reading course; please do not come to class unless you have thoughtfully and critically completed each week's readings, and are prepared to discuss them in an open-minded manner with others.