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.Open to CRC students only.

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. Open to CRC students only.

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. Open to CRC students only.

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.

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.

This is "Part I" of the department's year-long course in non-fiction narrative. [NB: Students in our new Literary Reportage program are required to take either Part I or Part II, and may, if they choose, take both. Students in other programs are also welcome to enroll in one or both courses.] "Non-Fiction Narrative, Part I" focuses on "the language of narrative," those compelling and interesting sentences that drive narrative discourse, and how to create them. We do this through close reading of literary non-fiction and through regular workshop writing exercises. We will read a survey of non-fiction literature in English from John Milton to John McPhee...and beyond.

As writers who want to learn the technique of "deep reading," sometimes called explication de text, a method of teasing out the literary technique, we will concentrate on literary devices and the 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. The class is always lively, an animated discussion of non-fiction literature led by well-prepared 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. The readings are collected in a coursepack. Two additional books, Whitman's Memoranda During the War, and Hersey's Hiroshima, are also required. Open to third semester students.

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. Open to third semester students.

New York is the most storied city in America; generations of writers have been entranced by it, and have produced masterpieces in tribute. We will look at the city as a character, in journalism, memoir, fiction, poetry, and film. What is the idea of New York in historical and contemporary imagination, and how different or similar are today's chroniclers of the city from their predecessors? What can we learn about urban reportage from the best practitioners of the genre? The course will be structured around extensive class discussion; grading will be based on oral presentations, and a midterm and a final paper. Open to third semester students.

Course Description Pending

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.

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 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 nation, rich with culture, diversity, money and power, to learn and practice your skills. Journalism is about people, their stories, the government and services that enable them to live their lives. This class is about finding your voice and embracing your beat with passion, respect and understanding. This is a multimedia class. In the course of our year together you will learn to shoot and edit video, discover the magic of audio and create compelling slideshows, all for the web and for our website, "NYC Pavement Pieces." But remember, the words always come first.

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.

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.

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.

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. Open to CRC students only.

How does one insert oneself into a public debate over social issues? How does one construct an effective opinion piece? This course will examine the art of argument through various journalistic forms: the longer essay, the personal essay, the op-ed, and the book review. We will read various spectacular & skillful & odious polemics, with close attention to how they work rhetorically. Writing assignments will emphasize building a clear and cohorent argument, and honing one's voice to most effectively convey an argument. Readings will include James Wolcott, Joan Didion, Mary McCarthy, Andrew Sullivan, David Brooks, Sam Harris, among others. CRC students will be given priority when registering. Enrollment limited to fifteen students.

How does a writer capture a political, social, philosophical, or artistic movement or idea by telling the life story of a particular person? Some of the best American journalism — both feature-length and book-length — has resulted in answer to this question. In this course, we'll read a wide range of 'profiles of ideas,' and try to understand the complicated connection between the individual life story and the broader social/political/artistic context. Students will also learn research techniques for this kind of work, which involve intense immersion in, and mastery of, the broader subject matter. Students will work on a major critical profile throughout the term, with an eye to ultimate publication. Readings will span history, politics, literature, academia, and art and popular art, and may include books (or selections from books) such as To The Finland Station by Edmund Wilson, Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers by Tom Wolfe, Whittaker Chambers by Sam Tanenhaus, Po! wer and the Idealists by Paul Berman, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession by Janet Malcolm, Political Fictions by Joan Didion, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Common Ground by J. Anthony Lukas, The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand, The Solitude of Self by Vivian Gornick, Off the Wall: The Art World of Our Time by Calvin Tomkins, New York Jew by Alfred Kazin, and Quick Studies: The Best of Lingua Franca.Open to CRC students only.

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

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.

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.

Open to third semester SHERP students only.

See: Electives

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 year we have a unique opportunity to cover a political campaign, with a significant part of the campaign being held in New York City. We intend to take full advantage of this opportunity. In doing this, we must be intelligent, creative, and have a sense of history.

Here are some matters that we should consider as we work our way through the semester: What are the forces that shape and have shaped American politics? Are politics and campaigns changing, or are they much the same? How good or how bad is the press in covering politics? How do questions of race, class and gender figure into the fall 2008 campaign? Are politics over-covered or under-covered or do they get what they deserve? How good is the political press? What's the role of money in politics? Who has the money and what do politicians do to get it? What has been the effect, or lack of effect, of the McCain-Feingold law, or, in other words, public monies vs. private monies? What groups are important in American politics, other than political parties? For example, corporations, political action groups, labor unions, and the like? Do Americans get an honest government? Do they get a government they deserve? What are the roles of third parties and third-party candidates, and what obstacles do they face? What is the role of religion in politics? What role do poverty and immigration play in this election and American politics?

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.

People have predicted the death of radio for 50 years. It survived the threat of television by continuing to reach into a person's innermost being and achieving an intimacy like no other medium. Now, traditional radio must now compete with satellite and the Internet for listeners' ears. It is still unclear how what we used to call "radio reporting" will fit into the multimedia landscape that includes these new delivery systems and others yet to come.

This class will help invent the sound-driven journalism of the future. By experimenting with new forms of storytelling in sound, we will try to address the following challenges:

1. The Web, in particular, presents problems because it is inherently visual. How do we meet this demand for images in a way that is true to our medium — in other words, how do we preserve what we value about radio? We resist the addition of photos or video, since the beauty of working in sound is that it requires the listener to supply the pictures. If we wanted to do our audiences' seeing for them, we'd have become filmmakers.
2. Can we take advantage of the Internet to compensate for radio's main weakness, which is that it is a terrible medium for communicating information? Without distracting the listener, is it possible to offload some overly specific information onto the screen, as text, thus freeing the audio storytelling from encumbrances? How many senses (and which ones) can we stimulate before overloading the audience?
3. Is it possible to serve two masters by producing enhanced audio reporting that also satisfies audiences who want only to listen and not look at a screen—i.e., create work that is self-sufficient as sound but that offers added value when viewed?

This course will serve both as production house and research laboratory. Students will draw on studies of human perception to guide our experiments.

The class will regularly engage in critical listening: to one another's work and also to exemplary audio and multimedia journalism from the U.S., U.K. and Canada.

People have predicted the death of radio for 50 years. It survived the threat of television by continuing to reach into a person's innermost being and achieving an intimacy like no other medium. Now, traditional radio must now compete with satellite and the Internet for listeners' ears. It is still unclear how what we used to call "radio reporting" will fit into the multimedia landscape that includes these new delivery systems and others yet to come.

This class will help invent the sound-driven journalism of the future. By experimenting with new forms of storytelling in sound, we will try to address the following challenges:

1. The Web, in particular, presents problems because it is inherently visual. How do we meet this demand for images in a way that is true to our medium — in other words, how do we preserve what we value about radio? We resist the addition of photos or video, since the beauty of working in sound is that it requires the listener to supply the pictures. If we wanted to do our audiences' seeing for them, we'd have become filmmakers.
2. Can we take advantage of the Internet to compensate for radio's main weakness, which is that it is a terrible medium for communicating information? Without distracting the listener, is it possible to offload some overly specific information onto the screen, as text, thus freeing the audio storytelling from encumbrances? How many senses (and which ones) can we stimulate before overloading the audience?
3. Is it possible to serve two masters by producing enhanced audio reporting that also satisfies audiences who want only to listen and not look at a screen—i.e., create work that is self-sufficient as sound but that offers added value when viewed?

This course will serve both as production house and research laboratory. Students will draw on studies of human perception to guide our experiments.

The class will regularly engage in critical listening: to one another's work and also to exemplary audio and multimedia journalism from the U.S., U.K. and Canada.

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.

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.

Your objective will be to master basic investigative tools and techniques, as well as how to apply them to everyday reporting and major enterprise pieces. We will explore how to take advantage of the two main sources of information — documents and people — and discuss when and how to use computer data to both enhance a story or provide the foundation for a major project. Throughout the course, the goal will be to constantly delve beneath the surface. Going deep is the essence of investigative reporting, which pulls together all publicly available information, as well as harder-to-find material, to present the fullest possible picture. Corporations and powerful individuals employ armies of PR experts, lawyers and lobbyists to ensure that only their version of reality prevails, and it is the lonely duty of journalists to dispel this fog of self-interest. At least as important as mastering the technical skills will be learning to think critically and skeptically. The relentlessly upbeat press release, the carefully worded SEC filing or the late-Friday-afternoon earnings statement each, as a matter of course, should be probed for accuracy and omission. What important development went unsaid? Did the company chairman really resign to "spend more time with his family"?

Religion permeates numerous news stories, from Iraq and Israel to stem-cell research; to school curricula and gay marriage; to sports, politics and the arts. Religion is a beat that not only encompasses organized religion but also branches out into ethics, morality, and spirituality. What it means is that all reporters are somehow on the religion beat, even at small-town newspapers. We will use the insights of media criticism combined with a study of a variety of approaches to journalism writing to inform our own production of short pieces and a long narrative essay. Religion stories often present terrific opportunities for lively narrative articles, engaging profiles, personal essays, and diverse writing styles. We will investigate the ways in which journalism confronts belief and the ways in which it makes the peculiarities of beliefs presentable in the public sphere.