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. 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.

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.

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

Whenever we talk about epidemics of an infectious disease notthe return of the Spanish Flu, say, we stress the speed with which a virus could travel in the modern era — one person coughing in the Hong Kong Airport today, millions infected on every continent by next week. In the same way, the speed of information today lets us know almost immediately when a bird dies of avian influenza in rural Turkey. This course will look at some recent “scares” including avian flu and anthrax, and will consider coverage of AIDS at home and abroad. We’ll discuss the informational role and responsibilities of the media in a time of possible epidemic, and look at sources of information and misinformation as we do our own reporting and writing in and around the subject.

The aim of this course is to give you tools that will make you a better journalist. These are tools that few journalists have and many are afraid of—mathematical tools. This course will center upon mathematical ideas, but this will still be a journalism class. The mathematical concepts will be presented in a way that is accessible even to mathphobes, and abstract ideas will be pinned to real, concrete events that have caused headlines.

Open to all after GloJo

As it was clear to Hemingway and Hitchcock, foreign correspondents have been the aristocracy of journalism. Yet, in the age of globalization and the new media their role is changing. This course will focus on the necessary skills for a foreign posting in our time—that assignment being New York City. Each student will pick a foreign newspaper and act as its New York “apprentice-correspondent.” In order to become acquainted with the challenges of the job, we will meet correspondents posted in New York and analyze stories and books on international affairs by Pulitzer-winning journalists. The course will also look at the history of foreign reporting and compare news coverage in non-US papers and have the benefit of the instructor’s 16 years as New York correspondent for the Italian daily, La Repubblica.

Students will develop the skills to edit news stories and write headlines and photo captions with attention to libel, news value, fairness, grammar and style under deadline pressure. Students will also become familiar with page layout and design. Students will develop better writing skills by becoming familiar with what good editors expect from writers. They will also learn what writers should expect from editors. Students will edit stories and write headlines with deadlines and space limits to create the atmosphere of a newspaper on deadline. The professor will critique the work according to professional standards. Drills will include style and areas such as thoroughness of reporting, accuracy, wordiness, spelling, grammar, fairness, taste and libel. Stories from various sources, including the textbook, news wire services and reporters of the New York Times, will be used for editing. Every class will include a current events quiz. The final project will be the production of page one of a daily newspaper. The assignment will include selecting stories and photos, laying out the page, editing the stories and writing headlines and captions.

With the Kerner Commission Report as a backdrop, this course examines the portrayals and perspectives of "minorities" in today's media, looking at issues of representation, access, and power.

All narrative voices—but especially the voices in true narratives--are themselves fictions. The world of nonfiction writing is divided between those who know this and those who either don't or else deny it—a division that is roughly contiguous with that between writing that's worth reading and writing that's not. Nonfiction texts are fictions in that they deploy the devices of fiction (pacing, modulation of voice, considered sequence of revelation, irony, metaphor, etc.) but even more so in that they are constructs (they're composed, they're in-formed and made up). In this seminar we will revel in the architectonic of good nonfiction writing. We will consider admirable sentences and marvelous paragraphs. We will study foundations and jointure, account for senses of spaciousness and constriction. We will examine and upend the myth of objectivity. We will try to determine what makes one piece of writing true to life while another lies there simply dead. We will read as if writing mattered, and write as if reading did.

As our texts we will draw on fine examples of contemporary nonfiction writing, including (but not limited to) works by George Orwell, Joseph Mitchell, John McPhee, Susan Sheehan, Jamaica Kincaid, Ian Frazier, Jane Kramer, Ryszard Kapuscinski, Oliver Sacks, and William Finnegan. For comparative purposes we will dip into Ernst Toch's The Shaping Forces in Music.

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.

The purpose of the course is to provide students with a comprehensive exercise in conceiving, shaping, describing, and selling a long-form piece of journalism: a book. The core structure of a “story” is essentially the same, whether it is in the form of a long article or a book, and learning how to write a non-fiction book proposal should make writing a proposal for an article easier. Both forms require: Conceiving a viable and serious subject, creating a structure (outline), selecting a title, crafting the prose (it’s a clear indication of writing ability), considering the advantages of specializing and not specializing, identifying sources, human and otherwise, understanding the role of an agent, choosing a publisher and an audience, selling the idea to an editor or publisher, estimating the time and expenses involved and being flexible about when to move off the proposal.

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.

Open to all

Radio, the world's first mass medium, continues to evolve. In addition to over 12,000 AM and FM stations in this country alone, there are exciting new forms of radio using digital and satellite technology, and of course streaming over the Internet. As for programming, there is short-form and long-form news, information-oriented talk radio, interview programs, just about every kind of musical genre... even drama. This course will provide hands-on experience writing for radio; reporting; audio editing and production. Students will start with one or two short-form pieces; then will progress to long-form, NPR-type pieces. There will be opportunities to develop on-air delivery for those who would like some experience in front of the mic. Generating story ideas will be a priority.

Open to all

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.

Open to All

This is a class for broadcast students and others interested in the documentary tradition. Through screenings of classic and contemporary documentaries, readings and discussions of technology and technique, presentations and assignments - both video and written, students will learn basic elements of documentary storytelling culminating in the creation of a proposal and treatment for a half-hour DOCUMENTARY that each will shoot during Summer 2007. Non-broadcast students will create a research paper comparable to a proposal and treatment for a documentary.

Writing, Research & Reporting II: BER is designed as a feature writing class that focuses on business, and which builds on skills you acquired in WRRI. Over the course of the semester you’ll study the craft of magazine writing, come up with story ideas, participate in editorial meetings, write multiple drafts of feature stories and a column, read and discuss classic business books and articles and create and update your own business-centric blogs. To keep your deadline news skills fresh, you’ll also at times be assigned hard news business articles in class. In addition, I’ll invite magazine editors from some of the big books to come in and relate their experiences.

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”?

Open to all after CRC

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.

Open to all after CRC

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

Open to all after CRC

The focus of this course will be reporting on the myriad small worlds and social groups—generated by social identities, hangouts, neighborhoods, institutions, occupations, beliefs, interests—that define the texture of contemporary life and increasingly shape the news, especially in a city as culturally rich and various as New York. Writing, reading, and discussion will emphasize constructing a narrative and observing and describing the details essential to depicting social and cultural milieus with accuracy and power. Students will also be expected to pay close attention to the assumptions and thought processes that go into shaping their stories. The best writing on social groups and milieus reflects both assiduous attention to reporting and a strong, individual voice and vision. We all belong to a variety of social worlds, and the better we understand our own relationship to those worlds, the more we will be prepared as journalists to understand other people's.

The aim of this advanced course, a capstone of the SERP sequence, is to teach you to produce sophisticated stories on environmental topics. By the time you finish, you should be able to smoothly incorporate all of the important elements of an environmental story: data analysis, expert opinion, real people impact, and descriptive writing -into a finished product that's good enough to be accepted by a major newspaper or magazine. Writing is the focus of the course, but we'll also spend some time getting grounded in the basics of environmental science and environmental issues. This course is open only to SHERP students, although the instructor may make exceptions in the unusual circumstance that space is available.

Open to all after GloJo

As it was clear to Hemingway and Hitchcock, foreign correspondents have been the aristocracy of journalism. Yet, in the age of globalization and the new media their role is changing. This course will focus on the necessary skills for a foreign posting in our time—that assignment being New York City. Each student will pick a foreign newspaper and act as its New York “apprentice-correspondent.” In order to become acquainted with the challenges of the job, we will meet correspondents posted in New York and analyze stories and books on international affairs by Pulitzer-winning journalists. The course will also look at the history of foreign reporting and compare news coverage in non-US papers and have the benefit of the instructor’s 16 years as New York correspondent for the Italian daily, La Repubblica.

Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America was published in France in 1835 (volume one) and 1840 (volume two). The two-volume book is widely and correctly regarded as the finest description of the United States ever written—a masterpiece of journalism, of philosophical inquiry, and of literature. The students will read the entire work very closely, together with examples of other journalism from the same period. The students will also read some modern considerations of Tocqueville. And the students will read some writings by the French philosopher and journalist of today, Bernard-Henri Levy—above all, his book American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville, which was published early in 2006. Students who know French are especially encouraged to take this class, in order to discuss the problems of translation and the differences between French and American journalism. A knowledge of French is not a prerequisite, however. The students will write weekly commentaries, plus a long essay.

Sponsored by The NYU Catherine B. Reynolds Foundation Program in Social Entrepreneurship and the NYU Wagner School of Public Service.

Expressly designed for graduate students outside of Journalism and FAS.

How to translate the specialized languages of particular disciplines in order to reach a larger public is at the heart of this course. Too often, specialists find themselves hostage to the arcane tongues of particular disciplines. Yet they possess knowledge that often cries out to be understood more generally. The course will concentrate on the structure of good storytelling, the marshaling of evidence, the unfolding of convincing narrative, and the rhetorical style necessary for turning useful work into memorable writing. Good writers are good readers and this course will explore some of the more successful practitioners of public writing and the art of advancing an argument for a general readership, including, among others, Lewis Thomas's Lives of the Cell, Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, and Carl Safina's Song for the Blue Ocean.

Fieldwork: GAIR, CRC and Joint Degree students.