Magazine Writing requires nine courses, for a total of 36 credits. All courses are four credits. A full-time load is three courses a semester for three semesters. Students typically take three courses per semester. You may, however, take courses during the summer, in which case it may be possible to take a lighter course load in your final semester. You may take one internship for credit after completing two semesters of study. You may take two relevant courses in other NYU departments.
Typical full-time course of study
Semester 1 (Fall)
- Writing, Research & Reporting I: (required)
- Ethics and/or Law Seminar
- Journalism Reading Seminar
Semester 2 (Spring)
- Writing, Research & Reporting for Magazines (required)
- Journalism Specialized Reporting Elective or Portfolio
- Journalism Seminar or Interdisciplinary Course
Semester 3 (Fall)
- Journalism Specialized Reporting Elective or Portfolio
- Journalism Seminar or Interdisciplinary Course
- Internship for credit
Required Courses:
Writing, Research and Reporting Workshops: I and II
Provides a foundation in the principles and practices of basic news reporting. Lectures on reporting principles and techniques, study of specialized areas of reporting and completion of increasingly challenging in-class assignments. Students use New York as a laboratory to report actual news events outside the classroom. During the second semester, students will write articles at feature and magazine length, learning how to generate ideas, write queries and structure longer pieces.
In addition to the above, students must take one of the following seminars:
The Law and Mass Communications
Subjects covered include prior restraint of the press, libel, invasion of privacy, obscenity, shield laws and protection of sources, and broadcast regulations.
Press Ethics
Explores the ethical questions facing working journalists. Focuses on specific cases, both real and hypothetical. Through readings, papers and class discussion, students analyze the ethical problems raised by these.
History of the News
How have people traditionally understood "news"? What assumptions are built into this form of communication? How do historical changes in the medium through which news is exchanged—from speech to writing to print to broadcasting—influence the content and perspective of the news
Students select their additional courses from these electives:
Media Past & Future
This course attempts to gain perspective on the way media evolve, particularly in their journalistic uses, by studying the history of forms of communication: from writing to television. It then challenges students to use this perspective and perhaps further the development of contemporary news media, by experimenting with journalism that employs new styles or techniques or tackles new subjects.
The Journalistic Tradition
Students read from the works of some of the best English and American journalists, including Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Margaret Fuller, Charles Dickens, Stephen Crane, H. L. Mencken, Ernest Hemingway, Edward R. Murrow. Lillian Ross, James Baldwin and Tom Wolfe.
Social Criticism
This is a course in reading and writing social criticism. First, it is a reading course in which you will work through some of the fundamental texts and issues in social criticism. Second, it is a writing course, in which you will use these critics to help you develop your own critical sensibility. Third, it is a thinking course, in which we will examine the role of the critic in society.
Minority Perspectives and Presence in the Media
With the Kerner Commission Report as a backdrop, this course examines the portrayals and perspectives of "minorities" in today's media, looking at issues of representation, access, and power.
Social Justice
A writing and reporting class in which students read the great works of muckraking and social justice. Students will write several journalism pieces, each longer and more difficult than the one before, that, based on facts, will express a point of view and, it would be hoped, illustrate a wrong or wrongs in America.
Specialized Reporting: Reporting New York City
Students will report and write about people, neighborhoods, and communities in New York City. The idea is to deal with the everyday life of New Yorkers: we will explore immigration, ethnicity, race, culture, income, work, and the like.
Specialized Reporting: The Journalism of Empathy
This course will survey the history and current practice of empathetic writing, with links to literature, psychology, neuroscience, and human rights. We will consider to which uses such writing is well-suited and to which it may not be; and finally, students will themselves experiment with various approaches to this compelling school of journalism.
Specialized Reporting: Arts
This course focuses on forms of arts journalism and issues in arts reporting through reading and research and on-the-ground investigation. Students select a cultural institution to investigate and report on.
Specialized Reporting: Investigative Journalism
This course will introduce students to basic investigative skills, tools and methods that go into writing major magazine and newspaper features. We will analyze the two main sources: documents and people. The best investigative features rely on both.
Specialized Reporting: Reporting Social Worlds
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.
International Reporting: The World Press
The class will read books by Paul Berman and other authors, together with magazines and newspapers from around the world, on the topic of Islamist terror and the post-9/11 wars. The goal will be to follow events, interpret them, and gauge the state of opinion in different regions.
Journalism Faces Faith
In an era of culture war, holy war, and technological revolution, religion, in the true, broad sense, permeates at least half the stories in the news. This course uses the insights of media criticism, combined with a study of a variety of approaches to magazine writing, to inform our own production of several short pieces and a long narrative essay.
Literary Journalism: The Fiction of Nonfiction
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. 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.
Literary Journalism: American Gods
Through close readings of narrative nonfiction as well as fiction, drama, documentary photography, and texts from a variety of scholarly disciplines, we'll investigate character, voice, motivation, and sequence, as well as archetypes, parables, allusion.
Literary Journalism: The Architectonics of Non-Fiction Narrative
Through careful reading, analysis of structure, a survey of critical literature and a look at books about books (Wayne Booth's Rhetoric of Fiction, for example) we will attempt to discover how fine non-fiction books are made.
Urban Reporting
With New York City as a backdrop, students taking this course familiarize themselves with the range of issues affecting urban America, including race relations, housing, education, mass transportation and the availability of city services. The workings of City Hall and municipal politics are also explored. Students interview government officials, cover press conferences and report on citywide elections.
Current Problems: Radical Media Criticism
This course is designed to equip students with the historical knowledge and intellectual tools necessary to transform themselves from passive consumers of the media to critical thinkers about it. By semester's end, students will be well-equipped to discern the social roles, cultural biases, corporate influences, and ideological agendas of the news media. In short, they will leave this class able to make up their own minds about an industry that, some say, is increasingly in the business of making up our minds for us.
Current Problems: New Media Ecosystems
This seminar will examine how information circulates in a networked, two-way culture where the line between producers and consumers has been blurred.
Current Problems: Covering Latin & Caribbean Stories in the U.S.
This feature writing course will focus on Latin American and Caribbean immigration to the United States and the stories that the immigration phenomenon generates.
