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”?

CRC Priority.

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 Priority; others, permission of instructor.

This is an advanced writing course with a rigorous focus on the mechanics of the 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 voice. Writers under discussion will include: Edmund Wilson, Vladimir Nabokov, Kenneth Tynan, Elizabeth Hardwick, Randall Jarrell, Virginia Woolf, Janet Malcolm, David Foster Wallace and James Wood.

CRC Priority; others, permission of instructor.

This  seminar examines the ways in which some of the major writers of the 20th and early 21st-centuries 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 and essayists 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, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., William Finnegan, Anthony Lewis., and Orlando Patterson. We'll explore controversial issues such as affirmative action, the increasing polarization of wealth, and the legacy of slavery. This is an intensive reading course with a major final project.

WRII is the second half of our year-long writing and reporting class. This semester you will ramp up the basic skills to tackle more challenging writing assignments typical to magazines, both online and print. You will also choose a beat in an area that interests you and learn to develop story ideas, to access experts and research, and to report and write articles ranging from service pieces, to profiles, to personal essays to narratives. You will keep a blog on your research and reporting that will become, by semester’s end, a calling card to demonstrate your depth of knowledge on a particular beat. The blog will include multi-media elements such as slide shows. You will also work on developing your own distinctive voice. The gal of this class is to have students produce –and pitch—magazine articles.

This course will essentially put you to work as a magazine writer. You will try your hand at a range of magazine pieces: a Q&A, a narrative feature, a service piece, a trend piece, a personal essay, a profile. In each case, we’ll read some examples of the genre, exploring what makes them exciting pieces of writing, and effective for a particular publication, whether print or online. We’ll focus on structure, voice, point of view, the money quote, the kind of detail that effectively invokes character and makes pieces memorable.

You’ll pitch ideas before you tackle each piece; we’ll talk about reporting, interviewing and writing strategies before you jump in. Each of the pieces you write will be critiqued (by me and by other students) and you’ll be asked, as you would be by your editor, to revise.

We’ll hear from visiting writers and editors who will talk about some of these things (among others): How to get people to say interesting, revealing, surprising, indiscreet things. How to use public sources of information to give pieces teeth. How to work and play well with editors: What editors love (and hate) in a writer, and vice versa. What might a journalism career look like over the next 10 years? How can you prepare for a field in which not only the technology but the business model is up for grabs?

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.

Prerequisite: G54.1040 (required)

This advanced video journalism class is intended to sharpen your reporting, and production skills.

You will be challenged to research and pitch compelling stories, and then produce short and long-form video segments. These segments will be produced for online and cable distribution.

You will be expected to master traditional news production techniques -and experiment.

An emphasis will be placed on developing your proficiency as a one-person production unit in the field, a "digital backpack journalist" able to shoot and edit without assistance.

During the semester we will also spend plenty of time examining the changing form of video journalism on broadcast television, cable television and the web.

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.

This aim of this intermediate course is to teach you to produce sophisticated stories on environmental topics. We'll spend time getting grounded in the basics of environmental science and environmental issues, and then you'll put that knowledge to work in your journalism. By the time we're done, 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 publication.

We will begin the semester by going over the basics of environmental law, followed by units on investigative environmental reporting, nature writing, climate change, energy issues, communicating risk, toxicology, epidemiology, advocacy journalism, and dealing with spin. There will be frequent guest speakers from the worlds of environmental journalism and environmental science. This course is open only to SHERP students, although the instructor may make exceptions in the unusual circumstance that space is available.

In this second half of the two-semester Writing, Research & Reporting course, we will build on the fundamentals of news reporting and writing that you learned during the fall semester. You will learn to write clearly and concisely, and to produce enterprise and feature stories on deadline. These are skills you will need to master no matter what medium you work in-newspapers, websites, magazines, TV or radio-and whether you aspire to report on local, national or international topics.

We will focus on longer-form feature and enterprise writing that is grounded in solid reporting. We will learn by doing, with reporting and writing assignments inside and outside class. Our lab will be New York City, which is rich in stories that can challenge the most seasoned reporters. We will begin by learning the basics of feature and enterprise reporting: story organization, interview techniques, building scenes, developing sources, research methods, and grammar and style. Through classroom discussions, field trips and guest speakers, we will explore journalistic practices and how they are changing. We will discuss news judgment, ethical standards, fairness and balance, writing for different audiences, and the role of journalists in society. We will also discuss the challenges facing foreign correspondents today and the changing role of international reporting.

This class will  explore the art of National reporting dating back to 1948, when the Pulitzer committee first recognized distinctive reporting on national affairs. Through readings, lectures and special guest speakers, the class will examine both the general assignment reporting that characterizes the work of a versatile National correspondent and the specialized “beat” focus that leads to outstanding coverage of the federal government, national politics, domestic affairs and international issues impacting life in the United States. The class will include segments on political and federal government reporting; health care; science and the environment; education policy, Pentagon and war coverage; and investigative reporting that has had dramatic impact on the shaping of  federal policy.

The class will include at least two field trips to Washington, D.C. – one to meet with news executives at The Washington Post and other major outlets, another to conduct specific independent research and interviews for a semester-long national reporting project.

Along with regular writing assignments based on readings and guest speakers, students also will complete a 2,500 word original piece on a national topic of their choosing. In consultation with the professor, the students will map out a plan for conducting at least five interviews with experts from government, citizen and advocacy groups or media covering a particular subject area. Interviews must be taped and transcribed for inclusion in the final presentation. The project will also include a multimedia component, either audio or video, to be presented to the class.

In this class, you'll be on the job. You will be a professional journalist who will meet deadlines and make your stories stand out. You will work on the skills you need to succeed in this field, but that only happens with practice. You and your classmates will become colleagues who will work together on stories to become an efficient newsroom. Your goal is to finish this class with the skills, experiences, confidence and swagger that will be key to your success in a business that is changing dramatically. You will file stories on our online site, "Pavement Pieces," which is a showcase to premiere your best work. This is a multimedia class so you will be shooting video, taking photos and creating slideshows on your city beat, in addition to writing lots of stories. You will also have to blog your beat.

WRII is the second half of our year-long writing and reporting class. Last semester you learned news judgment, interviewing techniques, research skills, and how to write news articles and news features. This semester you will apply those basic skills to more challenging writing assignments, especially longform narrative and features. The emphasis will be on generating story ideas and turning them into compelling, well-written articles -- and on preparing queries to get those stories published. Students will occasionally still do spot and shorter drills and street assignments, but the backbone of the course will be 4-5 longer features.

Instructor permission required for students outside LitRep.

Portfolio Workshop has evolved from the Portfolio honors program into a key component of the Literary Reportage concentration. Its goal is to teach students the kind of in-depth research and writing required to create a sophisticated, cohesive body of work. Building a body of work takes time and a willingness to experiment with many different forms, among them blogging, short features, profiles, reviews, and long articles—all around one's main LitRep project. Our seminar meetings will involve group critique as well as experimentation with voice and writerly style, including the many variations of the first person.

WRRII is the second half of the two-semester Studio 20 Writing, Researching and Reporting Class. This semester we will focus on producing long-form, in-depth multimedia reporting projects for the web. These projects will require students to integrate text, video and photo journalism.

Students will also be asked to evaluate the best and worst current news platforms and products and to create a blueprint of their own.

A full spectrum of guest lecturers will offer students a real-world view of the changing landscape of journalism today.

In Studio Two, students in the Studio 20 program, and others who request to take the course and receive permission from the instructor, tackle one large project in web development: as a team.  The project chosen will vary from term to term, but it always be an adventure in web journalism, and it will always have a media partner-- typically a news organization or existing journalism site that wants to do something new or collaborate with Studio 20 on an extension of its current editorial presence.

Students participate in all phases of the project: background research, news ecosystem analysis, technology assessment, design and conception, prototyping, editorial work flow, content production, testing, launch, feedback and adjustment, de-bugging, iteration and evaluation.  They collaborate actively and in person with the media partner.  They learn to divide up tasks and coordinate the different parts of the project.  They try to push the envelope and do something effective but also innovative in web journalism that meets the partner's goals, works for the users and adds to the reputation of Studio 20.

Studio Two is a required course for students in the Studio 20 concentration. A limited number of spaces are available for students in other programs and disciplines, especially if they bring skills to the project that the project needs.  Permission of instructor is required.  Contact Professor Jay Rosen if you are interested in being added to the course.  Professor Rosen is particularly seeking students with knowledge of graphic design for the web, all aspects of web production, computer programming, or expertise in the wordpress.com content management system.

For spring 2010: Studio 20 is planning to launch, with a major media partner, a local news site focused on the East Village in Manhattan. Students will also be involved in figuring out how to make the site successful and sustainable as a regular part of  East Village life, and a teaching platform in the Reporting New York program at the Arthur L. Carter Institute.

Magazine priority.

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.

If celebrity journalism now represents the primary way in which society establishes and transmits accepted norms and morality, sports journalism fits within that paradigm in a unique and complex way. Athletics have long served as the preoccupation through which ordinary individuals idealize values such as fair play, sportsmanship, discipline, camaraderie and competition. That remains true today, but the growth of sports as a business and as a cultural touchstone has put athletes, governing bodies and fans in a vortex of competing interests and obligations, with intriguing challenges and opportunities for the modern sports journalist. Even as developing technologies—the Internet in general and social networking sites in particular—bridge gaps between athletes, teams, leagues  and fans, the need for mediation, investigation and enterprise reporting has become even more relevant and urgent. “Sports Reporting and Writing in a Modern Cultural Landscape” will familiarize aspiring journalists with the history of sports reporting, its current state and expected trajectories. Through a combination of literary and journalist readings, paired with an ambitious slate of reporting and writing assignments, students will emerge from the class possessing a comprehensive understanding of the modern sports media landscape and the skills necessary to find gainful employment within it. Guest speakers will incoude some of the best sportswriters and journalists in the country.

Magazine profiles are a license to pry into the private world of a stranger and turn the encounter, be it surprising, unnerving, exhilarating, boring, odd, depressing, moving, educational, awkward or hilarious, into a fresh understanding of what animates people. Profiles engage specific journalistic muscles, challenging you to elicit trust and information from a single person, notice the revealing details, and turn the material into a fulfilling narrative yarn with a distinct point of view. The core of it, what pulls the writer and the reader through to the conclusion, is a genuine curiosity about what motivates people, whether it¹s a Hollywood celebrity, a terrorist or an eccentric woodworker living in the sticks. In this class, we¹ll write and edit two short profiles, construct a tightly-edited Q&A, and work up to a final, 2,500-word story that will hopefully be the most fully realized profile you¹ve ever written. Along the way, we¹ll be reading and discussing published works to explore ways of thinking about profiles, from the conventional methods to the experimental possibilities. We¹ll have several successful writers visiting the class to talk about their own techniques and experiences, as well as a top magazine editor and an experienced profile subject who can talk about the receiving end of the encounter.

CRC Priority.

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.

This class will expose students to outstanding examples of the   different ways that reporters make friends and become part of a story   while maintaining the distance required to understand and analyze   their surroundings. Frances Fitzgerald, Denis Johnson and Tom Wolfe   use a high-powered talent for literary imagination to project   themselves into unfamiliar worlds, while Joseph Mitchell and Jennifer   Toth employ their empathy for marginal characters to gain the trust of   wary subjects. Reporters like Hunter S. Thompson seem happy to endure   insults and privation in pursuit of a story, while others like Anne   Fadiman rely on a more low-key talent for precise observation and   hanging out. By studying how reporters choose to approach their   subjects, we will also look at how they turn their lived experience   into revealing narratives that illuminate the shared world that is   inhabited by author, subjects, and readers alike.

In addition to reading one classic of subculture reporting each week,   students will also be required to identity a particular subculture in   New York City that interests them. A series of short pieces will focus   on the experience of individuals within a given subculture as seen   through their practice of rituals and their relation to other members   of the group. Bi-weekly dispatches will become the basis for a final   paper that will use the reportorial methods and literary techniques we   have studied and practiced to draw a convincing and original picture   of someone else's world.

Celebrity chefs and their tv empires, illegal immigrant waiters living an underground existence, an activist city government banning transfats and upgrading school cafeteria food, street vendors fighting for space in front of the Metropolitan Museum, stores advertising low-cal ice cream that in reality packs on the pounds, blocks with dozens of Indian restaurants side-by-side - there are an endless number of great stories to be done about Manhattan's high and low food chain. Combining intensive reading, reporting and writing, this course would use the food world as a laboratory. Students will tackle a wide array of  stories revolving around food, dealing with larger issues such as economics, social class, environmental and health safety issues, government action and pure aesthetics. The goal is to make students comfortable with the subject area, as well as teach them how to find memorable stories in seemingly humdrum situations. Required for this course: a good appetite and a healthy curiosity.

This class will help invent the sound-driven journalism of the future, serving both as production house and research lab. 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. After a crash course in tools (students will learn the equipment and software required for traditional radio reporting as well as other applications used in multimedia production) class time will be structured as a weekly production/editorial meeting. It is hoped that mistakes will be made in an effort to learn what works and what doesn't. Class will meet once a week. Attendance is required.

This is a lively seminar/workshop about the most difficult aspect of book writing: How to structure a narrative. Through careful reading and workshop exercises, we will attempt to discover how fine non-fiction books are made. We will read five book-length narratives (among them Praying for Sheetrock by Melissa Faye Greene, and The Duke of Deception by Geoff Wolf) then take those books apart, chapter by chapter, to discover what material the writer collected, how the writer organized that material and, finally, what structure the writer used to create a compelling narrative that attempts to hold the reader from first page to last. Seminar members, working in teams with protocols supplied by the instructor, will "present" the books for analysis and lead a discussion of them. The final paper can take several forms: either a chapter from a work in progress (yours) with an outline to show where that chapter fits into the structure of the book; a monograph that might appear in the middle of your book; or a formal academic paper codifying the lessons learned about structure and language across the semester.

It has been more than four decades since President Johnson's National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders released its findings on the civil unrest that erupted in urban areas across the nation.  The panel, commonly referred to as the Kerner Commission, concluded that we are living in two nations, "black, white, separate and unequal," and devoted an entire chapter to the impact the media had on our society's race relations.  "We believe that the media have thus far failed to report adequately on the causes and consequences of civil disorders and the underlying problems of race relations," the report said. It added: "The media report and write from the standpoint of a white man's world. The ills of the ghetto, the difficulties of life there, the Negro's burning sense of grievance, are seldom conveyed."

The report criticized as "shockingly backward" the industry's failure to hire, train and promote African Americans. At the time, fewer than five percent of the newsroom jobs in the United States were held by African Americans.  Today, despite the election of President Obama and the progress that's been made in the hiring and coverage of African Americans and other so-called minorities, many critics say that the Kerner Report findings continue to resonate today.   With the report as a backdrop, we will examine the portrayals of racial and ethnic minorities in the media, paying particular attention to African Americans - the subject of the Kerner Report - but also other marginalized groups, including Latinos, Asians, women, and gays and lesbians.

This course examines the long, thoughtful, and well-written personal essay, to look at the way the personal perspective can go beyond the strictly personal, and take writer and reader out into the world to examine topics from politics to health, from travel and food to arts and sciences. We will discuss the pleasures and pitfalls of writing about yourself as a character in serious nonfiction, the complexities of keeping your distance and coming too close, and of course, the interplay of experience and accuracy, memory and narrative. We will look at readings which specifically engage the issues of memory and truth, ranging from childhood memoirs to first person accounts of world events, great and small, stories of professional training, narratives of illness and adventure. And we shall consider the always intriguing question raised by the first line of David Copperfield: "Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.

This course will explore how public policies, global trends and  and technological change will influence the development of metropolitan regions. Key topics include immigration and demographic trends, the spatial impact of new information and telecommunications technologies, metropolitan planning and regional governments, cultural innovation and creative cities, biotechnology and economic development, air transportation and high speed rail, policies for the future of cities and large urban regions.

NewsDoc and CRC priority.

In contemporary war, "the other" is viewed not only as an enemy to be fought but, often, as one to be eliminated. How do journalists and filmmakers fight against (or, alternately, reinforce) such deadly representations? This class will focus primarily (though not exclusively) on one of the world's most conflict-ridden regions--the Middle East--though it will also explore films from Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, and the United States. Through journalistic readings and film screenings, we will explore how "the other" is constructed: politically, aesthetically, ethically. This class is designed for anyone interested in contemporary politics and history, especially those of the Mideast; the journalism of conflict and violence, and the ethical questions associated with them; filmmaking; and film criticism.

The course, which will be cross-listed with the Journalism department, is a study of how journalists cover stories where business and the law intersect. Case studies will include a unit on affirmative action and predatory lending as well as product liability litigation against Dow Corning and Big Tobacco. For each unit, as background, we will read and discuss related academic literature; we will then read and critique press coverage of the events as they unfolded. Following the discussion of each case, each student will write her or his own journalistic or other account of an aspect of the case. The course will be co-taught by Barry Adler, of the NYU Law Faculty, and adjunct Professor Paul Barett, who is an editor at Business Week and a former editor and reporter at the Wall Street Journal.

Please Note: This is a two-credit course.

Please Note: This is a one credit supplement to G54.1182.012 (Law, Economics and Journalism)

Journalists who can successfully navigate these turbulent media times must be equal parts journalist and entrepreneur. In this seminar students will learn how to build successful freelance careers, manage their own journalism brands that they will extend through social media platforms like Twitter, pitch ideas for media start ups, write their own business plans or book proposals, and explore ways to attract venture capital. There will be a lot of learning by doing. Students will work as media entrepreneurs and run their own online publications, which they will operate as a business. At its center will be a blog, where students will post several times a week. They'll retain an ad server, market their work to the blogosphere (and beyond) and track traffic. The semester will culminate with students either drafting their own business plan for a media start-up that they will pitch in class to a venture capitalist, or penning a formal book proposal, which a literary agent will also critique in class. Guests will include well-known journalists, successful media entrepreneurs, literary agents and venture capitalists.

Instructor permission required.

Instructor permission required.

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 by a broader public. 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, George Orwell and Joan Didion.