BROADCAST WORKSHOP: THE NEWSCAST- G54.1070
(Open to all graduate journalism students)
Students learn broadcast writing skills in a real time situation by producing a live broadcast that goes out over the NYU cable to the dorms and public buildings. The emphasis of the class is on developing news judgment under tight deadline pressures. The students in the class perform all the editorial and technical roles on the newscast. The executive producer decides which stories the writers will "cover." The senior producer draws up the show’s run-down (the order of stories). We have national and international video footage from the CNN Pathfire news service and we have the AP ENPS news system that provides wires and software for formatting the newscast. Interview skills are developed during the newscast with in-depth newsmaker interviews. Reporter packages from TV Reporting II and the newscast class 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.

GRADUATE TV REPORTING I - Elemental Storytelling - G54.1040
Prerequisite: G54.1070 (required)
This beginning course introduces students to all aspects of short form storytelling including shooting, editing and writing. The course begins with visual storytelling and then expands to different storytelling techniques for different kinds of topics, from traditional news reporting to the cinema verite style. By covering neighborhoods in New York, students learn to develop story ideas, conduct interviews and structure a story. Detailed script analysis is combined with in-depth discussions of student work. This course also includes viewing assignments based on understanding the historical development of the form. Students work in teams of 2 using DV cameras and AVID editing systems.

GRADUATE TV REPORTING II - G54.1172
Prerequisite: G54.1040 (required)
This intermediate second semester course builds on the storytelling skills learned the first semester by doing a combination of magazine, short investigative and enterprise stories pieces as well as assignments aimed at preparing them for long form documentary work. Students also learn how to write a proposal and treatment for their half-hour documentary project.

RADIO REPORTING - G54.1171
(Open to all graduate journalism students)
People have predicted the death of radio for 50 years. It survived the threat of television by continuing to reach into a person's innermost being and achieving an intimacy like no other medium. Now, traditional radio must now compete with satellite and the Internet for listeners' ears. It is still unclear how what we used to call "radio reporting" will fit into the multimedia landscape that includes these new delivery systems and others yet to come.

This class will help invent the sound-driven journalism of the future. By experimenting with new forms of storytelling in sound, we will try to address the following challenges:

  • The Web, in particular, presents problems because it is inherently visual. How do we meet this demand for images in a way that is true to our medium — in other words, how do we preserve what we value about radio? We resist the addition of photos or video, since the beauty of working in sound is that it requires the listener to supply the pictures. If we wanted to do our audiences' seeing for them, we'd have become filmmakers.
  • Can we take advantage of the Internet to compensate for radio's main weakness, which is that it is a terrible medium for communicating information? Without distracting the listener, is it possible to offload some overly specific information onto the screen, as text, thus freeing the audio storytelling from encumbrances? How many senses (and which ones) can we stimulate before overloading the audience?
  • Is it possible to serve two masters by producing enhanced audio reporting that also satisfies audiences who want only to listen and not look at a screen—i.e., create work that is self-sufficient as sound but that offers added value when viewed?

This course will serve both as production house and research laboratory. Students will draw on studies of human perception to guide our experiments.

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.

GRADUATE ADVANCED TV REPORTING - G54.1175
Prerequisite: G54.1040 and G54.1172 (required)
This class is unique to our news and documentary curriculum. The focus of the course is on developing an interesting in-depth story that will have a complex story structure and style. The emphasis is on understanding process, from research skills to the final edit of a documentary length story. Students work on advanced interviewing techniques and more complex methods of gathering audio and video, effective writing to pictures. The goal is that students understand how style can enhance the meaning of the story. Research and primary shooting occurs over the summer with the equipment support from the department.

The professor works closely with the students in and out of class with attention to every detail of the production process. This means the student learns how to pitch a story and present it during the various stages of production. Students shoot their stories themselves with our advanced DV field cameras. Students edit their pieces on Avid media composer. This one on one contact is an essential part of the learning process and distinct to our program.

JOURNALISTIC TRADITION: DOCUMENTARY TRADITION – G54.1023 (required)
This is a class for news and documentary 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 the summer.

We also offer electives on editing and visual thinking. The students' work has won many awards from the Academy of TV Arts and Science Student Awards, the Christopher Awards and American Women in Radio and Television and appeared in many prestigious film festivals. They have also received travel grants from the National Television Academy Foundation and the Student Academy Awards.

SAMPLE COURSE OF STUDY

Required courses: Writing, Reporting Workshop I; The Journalistic Tradition; Broadcast Writing Workshop; Television Reporting I; Television Reporting II, and Advanced TV Reporting, plus one of the following seminars: Press Ethics, The Law and Mass Communications, or History of the News and one specialized reporting class.

A typical (full-time) schedule:

Semester 1: 12 points

  • Writing Workshop I
  • Television Reporting I
  • Media Ethics

Semester 2: 12 points

  • Television Reporting II
  • Newscast Workshop
  • Documentary Tradition

Semester 3: 12 points

  • Advanced TV Reporting
  • Internship
  • One elective

Optional Summer Courses: Internship, TV News Magazine Editing, Radio Reporting, Global Journalism course.