This graduate seminar will examine how information circulates in a networked, two-way culture where the line between producers and consumers has been blurred. We will examine the premise that the web itself is undergoing a revolution -- sometimes called Web 2.0 -- that may well be as important as the one launched by the first graphical browsers in the mid-nineties. We will look at platforms for self-publishing (blogs, podcasts), categorization (google, del.icio.us), and social reputation (myspace, linkedin.) The seminar will also explore the ways in which these new tools engage with conventional journalistic institutions such as newspapers or magazines. Requirements for the course will include both readings in media theory and hands-on engagement with many of these new software tools. The seminar will focus on several case-studies of news and opinion circulating through the media environment, including the Trent Lott affair and Rathergate, as well as earlier events, such as the Lewinsky scandal and Watergate. The goal will be to explore how different media architectures alter the way societies share information and build consensus, and to examine what those changes mean for the professional journalist.

In "The Journalistic Tradition," we'll read the best literary journalism, from Dickens to Didion to what Robert S. Boynton calls "the new new journalism" of Lawrence Weschler, Ron Rosenbaum, and other masters of narrative nonfiction. In so doing, we'll learn the arts of close reading and critical thinking—skills that can transform us from just-the-facts hacks into reportorial storytellers.

Through close readings of narrative nonfiction as well as fiction, drama, documentary photography, and texts from a variety of scholarly disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, and religious studies we'll investigate character, voice, motivation, and sequence, as well as archetypes, parables, allusion. The focus of our inquiry will be the basics: sex, death, and democracy. But we'll conduct our investigation through excursions into faith, faithlessness, and the vast territory in between. Our goal will be to learn how, inasmuch as possible, to inhabit the ideas as well as the experience of other people's beliefs and imaginations. This is an essential first step in the writing of narrative nonfiction.

The "American Gods" of the course's title include not just the official deities of formal religion, but also pop culture icons, mammon, and other objects of desire. We'll search for the overlaps of facts and mythology, the empirical world and the not-so-separate realities of ritual and belief. Students who want to learn how to write about religion—an overlooked-but-defining force of American life and of globalization—will find this course especially relevant. But the course is primarily intended for anyone who simply wants to bring to the practice of literary nonfiction the ability to report and write on (with apologies to St. Paul) "evidence of things not seen."

Readings will include: Jane Kramer, The Last Cowboy / Dennis Covington, Salvation on Sand Mountain / Joan Didion, Slouching Toward Bethlehem / Charles Bowden, Blues for Cannibals / James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men / Garry Wills, Nixon Agonistes / John Edgar Wideman, Brothers and Keepers / Tony Kushner, Angels in America. Students will produce one short and one long narrative and contribute numerous short pieces of bylined media criticism to The Revealer, a review of religion and the press produced by NYU and USC journalism students in collaboration with working journalists and scholars.

Through careful reading, analysis of structure, a survey of critical literature and a look at books about books (Wayne Booth's Rhetoric of Fiction, for example) we will attempt to discover how fine non-fiction books are made. We will read at least five book-length narratives (among them, Young Men and Fire by Norman Maclean, Praying for Sheetrock by Melissa Faye Greene, The Duke of Deception by Geoff Wolf) in an advanced graduate seminar in which the seminar members "present" the books for analysis and discussion. The final paper can take several forms: either a chapter from a work in progress (yours), a monograph that might appear in the middle of a book you are considering writing, a detailed outline for a book you want to write or a formal academic paper.

By application only.

Observe, Report, and Write About the Real New York: Reporting New York City is a class in reporting and writing about people, neighborhoods, and communities in New York City. The idea is to deal with the everyday life of New Yorkers: we will explore immigration, ethnicity, race, culture, income, work, and the like. We probably will do about six stories, starting small, perhaps with a profile of a New Yorker, with each story getting larger and more complex. We'll take field trips and a walking tour, have guest speakers, look at New York movies and documentaries.

This will be a big and bold class that will get students out of the classroom and into neighborhoods in the five New York boroughs. Both print and broadcast students are welcome.

• Study history, immigration, economics, culture, neighborhoods, working-class New York...
• With walking tours, New York City movies and documentaries...
• A chance to talk to people who write and report about the city...
• A class that will improve your reporting and writing and thus enhance the skills you will need to go from the classroom to the newsroom.

Books we will read include: Manhattan 45 by Jan Morris, The Power Broker by Robert Carol, Working Class New York by Joshua Freeman, McSorley's Wonderful Saloon by Joseph Mitchell, Gotham by Mike Wallace and Edwin Burroughs, This is New York by E.B. White.

Empathy in narrative has roots in some of the earliest written stories—what is a literary character, after all, if not the storyteller's attempt to imagine 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 briefly survey the history and current practice of empathetic writing, with links to literature, psychology, neuroscience, and human rights. We will consider to which uses such writing is well-suited and to which it may not be; and finally, in writing assignments that are few but rigorous, we will experiment with various approaches to this compelling school of journalism.

This course will focus on forms of arts journalism and issues in arts reporting though reading and research and on the ground investigation. Students will engage in their own arts reporting by selecting a cultural institution to investigate and report, and by writing a book review and a final paper of their own devising.

This course will introduce basic investigative skills, tools and methods, as well as how to apply them to a major magazine or newspaper feature. We will analyze the two main sources of information: documents and people, because the best investigative features rely on both.

Some topics include:

• Patent searches
• Domain registrations
• Building permits
• Obtaining and deciphering court documents
• Parsing corporate earnings reports
• Locating key sources
• Handling skittish sources and whistleblowers
• Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests
• Pulling up mortgages
• Voter registration and political donor information

Besides research assignments and a story memo that will indicate the scope and direction of a final project the student wishes to undertake, the class will culminate with 3 drafts of a 3,000-word + magazine feature, which we will post on the Web.