Do you have something to say? A story to tell? An original voice? This course will nurture that voice, help shape the stories, sharpen your skills. The personal essay is a popular form of nonfiction writing, cherished by both writers and readers, but crafting a successful essay is a difficult skill. How can we be self-revealing without being self-indulgent? How can we make our own experiences powerful for others? In this course students will read some of the best essays around, from Langston Hughes to Joan Didion to Oliver Sacks to Marjorie Williams, and write their own, taking each one through several drafts. The heart of the course will be close reading and editing of students' work.

Is everything we see on the news always true and accurate? What are the different perspectives a story can be told from? Where should a broadcast journalist point the camera? Who should be interviewed? What are the most efficient interviewing techniques in broadcast? Is the story affected by the way one shoots the footage or asks the questions? Can truth be manipulated in editing so it fits a premise? Could there be a different impact on the viewer if a sequence is reversed and shot B is shown before shot A? Truth and Manipulation is a course that invites the broadcast students to take a closer look at news coverage, from short 2 minutes long hard news packages to longer 6-7 minutes long feature stories. Based on class screenings and discussions of actual newscasts, complimented by simple field exercises and editing exercises, this course is meant to help the student reach a better understanding of the broadcast story telling technique and some of its pitfalls. Parallel with their simple exercises and class discussions, students will work on one feature story ( 3-4 minutes long) to be presented in class as their final project. In addition to the story students are required to submit a 4-5 pages long paper explaining the process and how they applied what was discussed in class.

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.

Literature of Journalism: Travel the world: Travel the road: Travel New York: with some of the world's best journalists. In this course, we will read some of the world's best writing and journalism with a focus on writing and reporting that takes readers around the world and to New York. Students read some of the best reportage and nonfiction literature from historical times to the present, with emphasis on the literary roots of modern journalism. Surveys a wide range of journalists and genres, including travel and war reporting, profiles, essays, autobiography, and classic reportage.

This seminar introduces students to some of the best reportage and nonfiction literature of the last two centuries, with a particular focus on work produced in and about New York City. We will analyze the reporting, sources, background, structure, and language in a wide range of genres, including social/cultural criticism, travel writing, profiles, essays, and autobiography. We'll look for New York City in these works as a place, a character, an idea. Good writing deserves good readers; good reading, one of life's enduring pleasures, is the purpose and promise of this course.

"The Investigative Story: Triumphs and Tragedies" will be an inquiry into the best and worse cases of investigative reporting. By looking at contemporary case studies, the course will explore the crucial role of investigative reporting in American society, and, as a result, the imperative to do it with the highest level of integrity.

This course invites students to draw inspiration from the ways others have written about places and journeys that captivated them and to learn to write travel stories of their own. We follow Freya Stark and Tony Horwitz to the Middle East; Robert Kaplan to the Balkans; Mary Taylor Simeti to Sicily; Mary Morris to Mexico; and Neal Ascherson to the Black Sea. Students also develop stories from their own travel experiences, both in New York and further afield. Three stories of different styles, targeted to newspapers and magazines, are assigned. We look at how to choose compelling subjects and destinations; what to do once you arrive; writing techniques that make a story stand out; and how to pitch to editors. Several speakers--travel writers, editors, and potential sources for stories--will be invited to class.