Priority: Reporting the Nation & Reporting New York

The goal of this course is to learn how to report and write as part of an investigative team. The class will work on one project for a semester. Each student will pick a section of the project and will be expected to produce a detailed piece of investigative or public service journalism. These pieces should complement each other, making for a compelling look at the subject. The emphasis will be on methods of investigative reporting, as well as on organizing and writing a comprehensive report. Classes will focus on research, reporting, analyzing data, approaching a project logically and thoroughly, and writing clearly on complex matters. Students will be asked to update their project work in weekly memos and discuss them during seminars.

Through careful reading, analysis of structure, a look at books about books (Wayne Booth's Rhetoric of Fiction, for example) and workshop exercises, we will attempt to discover how fine non-fiction books are made. We will read at least five book-length narratives (among them Praying for Sheetrock by Melissa Faye Greene, and 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.

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.

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

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.

Experience a studio and newsroom environment and learn news judgment and broadcast writing skills under tight deadline pressures by producing a newscast each week. The program is carried on NYU TV to dorms and public buildings. The students in the class perform all the editorial and technical roles on the newscast using our newly integrated computer system and state-of-the art facilities. We gather national and international video footage from the CNN Pathfire news service that is accessed on the newsroom computer desktops for editing. Everything is tied together through an AVID central server ISIS system creating a tapeless environment. This is also a chance to develop live interview skills during the newsmaker interviews and get on-camera anchor experience. Reporter packages from TV Reporting II provide day of air and enterprise stories for the newscast. Positions are rotated to give students a sense of the different roles in a newsroom and the importance of teamwork.

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”?

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.

CRC students only.

This is an advanced course in the reading and practice of criticism, with a rigorous focus on the mechanics of the critical essay. How does a great essay work? We will examine the elusive elements of precision, originality, and style. Over the course of the semester students will focus on developing and refining their own critical voice. Critics under discussion will include: Edmund Wilson, Vladimir Nabokov, Kenneth Tynan, Elizabeth Hardwick, Randall Jarrell, Virginia Woolf, Janet Malcolm, and James Wood.

Priority: CRC students.

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.

This course is an introduction to long-form journalism—profiles, trend pieces, investigative reporting, and stories told using narrative techniques borrowed from fiction. Students learn to hone and refine their topics, and how to structure their work to eliminate the “muddle in the middle” problem that writers so often face with long articles. They participate in a “pitch slam” in which their classmates help critique their story ideas, and they learn to write the kind of compelling query letters that will get them assignments. SHERP’s Bench Press program, which sends students into NYU science labs to cover current research for Scienceline and other publications, is an integral part of this class.

The aim of this advanced course, a capstone of the SHERP 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.

Students pursuing joint degree programs in French, Latin American or the Middle East studies will be encouraged to explore related topics. Assignments will reflect our global orientation through coverage of international organizations, reporting on the US for readers abroad and Weblogs written to link people far away to the issues discussed. Field trips will take us to UN agencies, non-governmental organizations, the Council on Foreign Relations and The Associated Press. Our guest speakers will include foreign correspondents. In class discussions, we will examine the different traditions and concepts of journalism in other parts of the world. We will talk about the struggle for press freedom in many forms – from subpoenas for reporters’ notes in the United States to the murders of Iraqi journalists. And we will talk about the life of a foreign correspondent: adapting to new countries, balancing travel and personal life, dealing with editors at a distance, taking responsibility for framing the news, facing risks and reaping the rewards of this remarkable career.

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.

Instructor permission required.

Portfolio 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.

In the hands of a master stylist, the essay can be an instrument for virtuoso improvisations on virtually any theme. Academic writers have long used the essay as their rhetorical form of choice, but the genre is alive and well in the popular press, practiced by cultural critics, public intellectuals, and literary journalists. In this writing course, we'll trace the history of the essay, from Montaigne to Stephen Colbert, then deconstruct the popular essay across various media—print, broadcast, Web—and across genre lines, from the polemical to the personal. As we go, we'll try our hands at every type, from the topical op-ed, a reported polemic inspired by issues in the headlines, to the personal essay, refracting larger ideas and issues through autobiographical anecdote; from the rant, an in-your-face idiom that descends from New Journalism and partakes of slangy, snark-monkey style of blogs, to the humorous essay, a lighter take on the events of the day that often uses sociopolitical satire to make serious points (see Swift, Mencken, Camille Paglia, David Rakoff). Readings will include essays by Michel Montaigne, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Walter Benjamin, Joan Didion, Jorge Borges, Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, and others.

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.

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.

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.

Two-thirds of New Yorkers today are immigrants or their children, and immigration is the most important domestic issue in America today. This course will open students' eyes to the splendid feast of the city's immigrant neighborhoods, explore the complex issues involved in immigration and city life, and help them to come up with a magazine-standard piece at the end of it. Each student will report on a particular immigrant group or enclave, and keep a journal of their interactions. Occasionally, classes will be held in melting pot neighborhoods such as Jackson Heights. Relevant books such as the Population Division's 'The Newest New Yorkers' will be used as reference and inspiration for our journeys.

Instructor permission required.

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.