Whether you're based in Paris or Los Angeles, Beijing or Wyoming, covering a geographic beat is a unique experience because you need the confidence and skills to write about - everything. For this class, our territory is the world situated south of 14th Street. Each of you will be based in a specific neighborhood, where you'll cover a wide range of stories. Whether you're reporting on crime or culture, politics or hot parties, you'll learn what it takes to parachute into a new locale and find your bearings. This class will unleash your inner adventurer by strengthening your interviewing/writing abilities while you're developing a reportorial voice. Guest speakers and field trips will be essential to our journey.

TV or Radio field reporting. Students learn location reporting skills, including interviewing and editing. Students work in small groups, and at term's end, each student produces a three-minute final project. There is a four-hour lecture and a three-hour production lab. STUDENTS MUST ALSO REGISTER FOR RCT/LAB SEC 005 - 008

Many New Yorkers live in two worlds: the cultures that spawned them, and the international city they call home. Students' beats will be the neighborhoods/communities where New Yorkers determinedly straddle two cultures, and bring vibrancy and diversity to this city. They will profile local institutions and businesses within their chosen community, individuals who have achieved success and others who struggle, the neighborhood's historical and political underpinnings, and the community's cultural and artistic contributions. These beats may be communities defined by their residents' lands of origin (the Russians of Brighton Beach, Koreans of "Koreatown" [Manhattan], Albanians of Arthur Avenue [the Bronx], Indians of "Curry Row" [Manhattan], Irish of Woodlawn [Queens]), or by race, religion or identity (Harlem USA, Chassidic Crown Heights, gay community of Chelsea, Williamsburg's artists). Students will be guided in coming up with and pursuing great, fresh story ideas, in writing/rewriting four graded pieces (three shorter ones and one more in-depth final), and in finding appropriate venues to pitch them. The goal here is learning how to craft strong, captivating stories featuring memorable characters and settings - with much emphasis upon resourceful newsgathering and responsible presentation of facts and events, vivid color and detail, coherent and graceful structure, and impeccable mechanics. Course will also feature weekly in-class writing exercises to develop "voice" and point of view, individualized workshopping, guest speakers/group interview opportunities, field trips.

Foreign correspondents shape what we know of the world and what the rest of the world knows about us. Writing from overseas thrusts reporters into the heart of troubling, complicated issues including ethnic, national and religious conflict; natural disasters, financial collapse and terrorism. In this course, we'll examine the practices of the foreign press in New York, read classic and contemporary examples of American foreign correspondence from Twain and Hemingway to the 21st century, and consider some underlying ethical issues including the press corps' relationship with foreign policymakers, Americans' seemingly limited appetite for foreign news, the power politics of representation in cross-cultural reporting and the changing global media business. We'll read long- and short-form journalism as well as critical theory and political science and screen recent and classic films. Throughout, students will receive a continuous supply of individual attention to help them become better writers. The instructor was a Middle East newspaper stringer (JillHamburgCoplan.com) and covered Latin American finance.

Great stories are shaped by daring and often reckless writers and reporters working at the height of their craft. In this class, we will study how front-page news events and personal experience alike can be crafted into original and compelling nonfiction 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 precise use of language and depth and range of reporting and emotional experience. In addition to reading work by Tom Wolfe, Janet Malcolm, Joan Didion, Michael Herr, Joseph Mitchell, David Foster Wallace, Jon Krakauer and other artists of the verifiable world, students will be encouraged to write their own original stories with an eye towards publication.

The historic presidential candidacies of Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton, the strong early showing of former NY Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and the decision to move the New York Primary to Super Duper Tuesday (Feb. 5) have created great opportunities in NYC for budding political reporters. The class will operate as a news organization where beat reporters cover issues and candidates. The instructor, a former political reporter and campaign press secretary, will work as an editor and will show the staff how campaigns poll, develop messages, roll out issues and schedule media events to manipulate coverage - and what journalists who cover campaigns can do to get past propaganda and to elevate public dialog not debase it.

In On The Road in the City, students will go on a series of journeys throughout the city in search of snippets of ordinary life that say something extraordinary about the city and humanity. In the process, students will be in pursuit of the seeds of cultural change. The mission and challenge will be to present those seeds and portraits of life with prose that gives the reader a sense of making the same discoveries. You will also read three books that employ "road" journalism in different ways. The semester will culminate in your own major project that will require you to journey with a social or cultural world of New York.

Boy or girl? It’s the first question asked about who we are – and today what that means is up for grabs as social, cultural and scientific revolutions influence our most deeply-held beliefs and behaviors. In this course, students will report from the front lines of these most private and public questions, developing story ideas, researching and writing about women’s issues, GLBT rights and movements, sex and youth, pornography and the sex trade, reproductive rights, STDs and public health policy. Developing their own beat within the course, students will pick an area of concentration, then write a final 3,000 word story combining grassroots, policy, activist, and academic sides of their subject. While emphasizing rigorous reporting and research, the course takes a practical focus, encouraging students to write and angle stories to publish, shaping their work to fit the tone and style of their target publications. Toward that end, students write queries carefully pitched to magazines and editors of their choosing, developing professional skills and contacts.

These are the life stories which often elude "official" notice unless major scandal erupts, the everyday lives of families and children. Family issues easily become reduced to politicized clichés, but good reporting on these issues involves engaging the complexity of culture, class, and character. In this class, we will look at some of the places in which family stories can be seen -- the department of social services, the pediatric ward of the hospital, the juvenile courts, the schools -- and discuss ways of approaching these situations and these families. We will discuss the ethics of writing about families and about minor children in particular, and read a wide variety of examples. Students will write several short pieces and one long in-depth story.

In previous classes, students have learned the rudiments of story selection, writing, and shooting. This class advances their skills, with the added pressure of meeting real deadlines; i.e., producing pieces that air on a live weekly broadcast. Stories will gradually grow in complexity over the semester.

What does it take to do an in-depth broadcast piece? Apply the skills you learned in TV Beat and explore one topic in-depth over an entire semester. You will learn to pitch ideas, write a proposal as well as advanced reporting, shooting and editing skills. Students will also view and analyze a variety of long form pieces currently on TV and in the theater today.

Prerequisites: None

Why do we think that way? What do we mean by "women" and "men"? If you were a visiting anthropologist from Mars, how could you use our culture's media to understand our ideas about gender? Women & the Media is a collaborative seminar that examines the complex relationship (or different contradictory relationships) between those humans we call "women" and those forms of discourse we call "media." We will consider women both as subjects and objects, as artists and models, as creators of "media" in its many forms and as media's creations. What does our culture's "media" tell us about how we read gender? What, if anything, does our gender tell us about our readings of "media"? Student participation in this seminar is key: students are expected to attend all sessions, to complete all the reading (there's lots of reading!), to participate actively in discussion, and to lead one of the class sessions themselves. Leading a class means opening the day's conversation with a presentation, critiquing and elaborating on the assigned reading, bringing in additional relevant material, and suggesting questions or issues that seem particularly interesting or troublesome. The purpose of the course is to develop our critical and self-critical faculties as journalists, media critics, consumers of media, and women or men; to think clearly, challenge our pet assumptions, and have fun.

Prerequisites: Foundations, Inquiry or Instructor Permission

Demographics alone suggest that America is a different thing than it was just a few years ago. A shifting racial and ethnic makeup has cast the discussion of how news organizations cover minorities in a near-holographic glow, ever-changing. It is the purpose of this lecture course to dissect and understand the constellation of factors that influence coverage, including the Civil Rights movement, the Americans With Disabilities Act, the growing disparity between haves and have-nots, politics, ethics, economics and the mores of the modern print, broadcast and internet newsrooms. We will examine the myriad ways that people, places and whole issues are tagged with labels and become caricatures. We will move beyond conventional wisdom, beyond simply finding fault, to achieve our most important goal -- to arrive at ideas and solutions for richer, more illuminating and precise coverage.

All over the world, people argue over America and its meaning for the rest of the world. Does the United States offer hope to other countries around the world, or does it pose a terrible menace? The debate over this question plays a significant role in world affairs right now. It is not a new debate, however. The same argument has been going on for centuries in different versions, indeed since before the United States declared its independence in 1776. The purpose of this seminar is to examine both sides of this debate, to identify its fundamental themes, and, above all, to trace the history and evolution of the debate in the writings of major authors.

The seminar will read books and essays from the past and present, both primary sources and scholarly studies, including, but not limited to, the following: The American Enemy by Philippe Roger, a history of French dislike of the United States over the centuries; Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, by V. I. Lenin; Essays by Noam Chomsky; Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville; Democratic Vistas by Walt Whitman; What We Think of America, an issue of Granta magazine (essays by Ariel Dorfoman, Orhan Pamuk and writers from many countries).

Learning from The Best To Be The Best is a survey of some of the most entertaining and well-written literary journalism of the last two centuries. We will read these articles and book excerpts carefully - "deep reading," it is called - to discover how good writers take basic journalism and enliven it with literary technique. We want to catalog as much of that technique and structure as we can so that we can "steal it," appropriate the devices for our own work. Students will work in teams; each week a team will "present" the readings and incite a discussion with the rest of the class. There will be some three to five formal academic papers in which students will be asked to demonstrate their understanding of the material, and there will be a number of "creative" assignments as well. The main text for the course is an excellent anthology of non-fiction: The Art of Fact by Kerrane and Yagoda.

In this course, students will explore the visions of American social, cultural and political life and upheaval by way of the travelogue. We will read four major pieces of on the road writing and students will be required to write a short essay on each book. In addition, students will be required to select a writer—not on the list—and perform a major explication of the writer's "on the road" work. The final product will be an oral presentation and written paper. We will read Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed; William Least's Heat Moon and Blue Highways; John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley, In Search of America, and Walt Whitman's Memoranda During War.

This course will explore writing about sexual politics from the age of suffragettes to current debates over motherhood. How have writers tackled the intimate and explosive topic of relations between the sexes over the last century? We will focus on how people have written on both sides of the delicate and controversial issues surrounding what H. G. Wells called "the general problem of men and women." Writers under discussion will include Rebecca West, Virginia Woolf, Norman Mailer, Kate Millett, Betty Friedan, Joan Didion, Ellen Willis, Camille Paglia, Laura Kipnis, and Caitlin Flanagan.

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.

From Marshall McLuhan to The Matrix, philosophers and creators of popular culture have tried to make sense of the media representations that fill our heads, affecting our perceptions of ourselves and the world. In Reading the Media, we view the media as an all-encompassing cultural environment that merits our close, critical scrutiny, whether the medium in question is graphic novels like 300, videogames like Halo, online environments like Second Life, the "mashups" posted all over YouTube, or more conventional media such as TV news, photojournalism, or advertising. Reading the Media is designed to acquaint students with various schools of media analysis and their angles of attack on the media environment.

This course will cover the history of the World Wide Web as a collaboration and publishing platform that sits on top of the Internet. It will review the major innovations and disruptions that have come to the media world and to journalism as a result of the Web's rise. Introductions will be made to the major thinkers, writers and inventors in Web culture. Recent directions the Web has taken (also called Web 2.0) will be studied for clues to the future. Students will choose an editorial or information web site to study in depth and thereby test what they learned from their reading.

Journalism is often the first step towards a life of professional storytelling. Newspaper stories, magazine pieces, scripts, books, ad copy, radio and TV writing, are all based on solid journalistic principle. With that in mind, this course has one goal: teach the basic structure of first person writing. Emphasis is on reporting, then telling what you saw with clarity. We will focus on cutting the fat out of writing, getting to the bone, the nub, by learning to work the finite details of what you report—what you actually see or think you see—into a story that has length, power, and accuracy, told from your perspective.

No computers in this class. No iPods, no taping lectures, no slam poetry, no meandering first person accounts. Bring a pencil and a yellow legal pad. Any motivated student with good pair of walking shoes and an interest in writing is welcome. Students will be expected to wander the city as reporters with specific assignments, then come back and write about what they have experienced. Reading list includes Dispatches by Micheal Herr, Beyond the Game, by Gary Smith, and A Nietzsche Reader translated by R.J. Hollingdale, and a Marvel comic book to be selected later.

As newspapers fight to survive in a traditional manner, newspaper photojournalists are reevaluating and changing their ways of storytelling. Websites are giving new life and lots of space to journalists who are using these new methods of information delivery.

Visual reporting will reinforce basics of image making, will look at trends in visual journalism today and learn how to improve our storytelling by adding audio and multimedia presentations to our websites. Prerequisite for this class is Photojournalism I or presentation of a strong portfolio that demonstrates a high level of ability in photojournalism. A digital camera and audio gathering equipment is needed for this class.

The goal of this course is to give you insight and practical experience in the field of photojournalism. Through weekly assignments and the development of a multiple picture photo essay, you will develop the skills needed to effectively tell stories through pictures. Weekly assignments will require submission of 2-3 images per assignment (handed in at the beginning of class each week), and the final project must consist of 6-10 images, all of which must be effectively captioned (due at the final session).

In case you haven't noticed, RADIO is everywhere. And millions of people rely on it to keep up with late breaking developments. Radio, the first mass medium, continues to evolve...rapidly. In addition to over 12,000 AM and FM radio stations in this country alone...there are new forms of radio using digital and satellite technology. 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. One of the big success stories is public radio. NPR reaches 26-million people. "All Things Considered", the acclaimed afternoon news broadcast reaches 11,400,000 listeners. Compare that to the New York Times with about one million daily readers. NBC Nightly News pulls in between seven and eight million viewers. It's clear, then, that NPR and its major news broadcasts -- "All Things Considered" and "Morning Edition" have carved out an important niche for themselves...and they have clout. In this course, we will concentrate on longer form pieces. We'll discuss ideas and how to develop them for radio. We'll explore the various skills a good reporter brings to the job including field work, broadcast-style writing and audio editing with the software program Adobe Audition. You will hone your interview skills. We'll help you with your on-air delivery. But if you prefer to write and produce, but not go before the mic, that's okay. The final project will be a Radio Magazine featuring your best pieces plus some extra live material.

Principles and methods of magazine editing and production. Includes practical training and instruction in editorial work such as editing stories, layout, proofreading, planning issues, and desktop publishing. The main assignment is a class project editing and designing the departmental magazine, Manhattan South.

Writing and producing TV news programs. During the term, students produce 12 complete broadcasts that are fed live to residence halls and other locations on campus. Many of these casts are also fed to the Internet for online viewing. Responsibilities include all aspects of TV news: story selection and development, field production, anchoring, reporting, operation of all studio and control room equipment, writing, copy editing, and directing. Deadline realities are emphasized as live broadcasts begin on an exact-time basis.

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.

Additional Prerequisite: Honors Advanced Reporting (V54.0351)

Prerequisites: Foundations, Inquiry, The Beat

Prerequisites: Foundations, Inquiry, The Beat

Students develop their ability to analyze and critique a variety of arts, particularly theatre and other live performances. The course emphasizes discussion of the debates on art, politics, and cultural issues that provide the context for informed critical writing. Students take advantage of London's vibrant theatre, music, and art scenes and should expect to see two performances a week, hear a BBC Proms classical concert, and visit museums such as the Tate and the National Gallery.

Seminar on current issues in journalism as seen from a global perspective, including such topics as the role of international news agencies, the influence of humanitarian agencies on newsgathering, photojournalism in a digital age, how local journalists report the news in countries without a First Amendment, and the risks of covering dangerous or traumatic stories. Looks both at international media and at U.S. media from an international point of view. Includes field trips and guest speakers.

Using the cultural life of Prague as its focus, students will learn to report on the diversity of cultural and artistic activity in the Czech capital in eight main areas—film, photography, literature, architecture, music, visual arts, travel, and literature. Several forms and techniques will be explored including news reports, interviews, reviews (film, literature, theater), feature stories, essays, and commentaries. During the course, students will learn not only about Prague's cultural landscape but they will be encouraged to examine it in various journalistic and literary forms. One of the leading aims of this course is also to introduce the students to extraordinary artists whose work has gained international attention.

The course focuses on combining the techniques of fiction with the rigor of journalistic travel reporting to produce stories that move beyond the constraints of the news and feature story: stories that engage, resonate with readers, provide insight - stories that "produce the emotion." The course proceeds by reading and analysis of contemporary journalism and classic travel pieces; careful examination of the narrative, fictional and literary devices used in travel writing; examination of and practice with various information gathering strategies; and consideration of the ethics of representation. Students will produce travel articles on deadline in several different styles and genres.

This course aims to give students a strong grounding in radio journalism and radio production and unlock the secrets of being a successful freelance stringer. Topics include: organization of a radio station, stringers and the industry, cultivating sources, writing the radio news dispatch, on-air voice and delivery, the technology of radio reporting, conducting the interview, press conferences, covering a news event, sound editing, producing the radio feature. During the semester students will write several news dispatches; record and edit a ten-minute interview; and write, edit, record and produce a radio feature story.

A collaborative seminar designed to question the impact of various forms of media on "society" and various notions of society on "media." Students consider conventional and unconventional media in Central Europe—from the International Herald Tribune to movies to fashion magazines—in an effort to interpret Central European culture. The key question is not "Is this text 'good'?" but "What does this text mean?"

The course will focus on foreign reporting in American and British newspapers and journals (not wire, radio or television) from Evelyn Waugh's Scoop! to the present. How has foreign news in print evolved and what does it take to be a foreign correspondent today? History, extensive reading and guest lectures by contemporary foreign correspondents will bring context to the practical second half of the course in which the class will produce its own stories.

After the fall of Communism in 1989 the old centralized command media system had to be replaced with a new open plural media system. Transformation of print media was relatively simple — it needed only deregulation (abolishing the administrative control of the state, abolishing censorship, opening the system up to free enterprise, etc.). Due to their nature and history, the transformation of radio and television was more complex and problematic — it required not only deregulation, but also re-regulation (rewriting the old laws, transforming the old government agencies into public corporations, delegating regulatory authority to non-governmental bodies, etc.). The course will describe the history of the Czech media since 1989 and will try to analyze results of the transformation and developing trends.

Qualified students will be placed in a variety of English-language print and broadcast outlets.

Students report, in teams and individually, on political, economic, and social issues in Accra and beyond. NYU journalism students will be teamed up with journalism students from the University of Ghana/Legon. Reporting will focus around thematic areas (typically, politics, health/environment, and social issues). Frequent field trips and guest lectures.

See the writing, photos and video of the Spring 2006 class in Ghana at Africa House.

Qualified students will be placed in a variety of English-language print and broadcast outlets.

This course will examine stories in their many different manifestations. Its objective is to give students a critical appreciation of how stories are told through different media and to serve different agendas-be it art or advertising, journalism or national history. Guest lecturers, using real-world examples from different disciplines, will play a significant role in helping students understand how stories are told. Students will be expected to produce stories of their own through media of their choosing.

Qualified students will be placed in a variety of English-language print and broadcast outlets.