2023 – Spring

The Beat: Neighborhood News (Print/Online track)

Course Number: JOUR-UA 201, section 5

Day & Time: Mon | 11:00 AM – 2:40 PM

Location: 20 Cooper Square, room 652

Prerequisites: Journalistic Inquiry: The Written Word JOUR-UA 101

They say all politics is local, and the same can be said of journalism. People are endlessly curious about local events. They are interested not merely in the little stories (The police chief bought snazzy new uniforms and the mayor is furious), but also the local wrinkles on the big stories (All the Covid-19 masks got flooded in the hospital basement).

In this course, students will serve as correspondents for their hometown, reporting on a stream of local stories in pandemic-safe ways. Home may be anywhere — suburban Montclair, N.J., beachfront Venice, Calif., the hip East Village in New York City, or the Trastavere quarter of Rome.

Professor Flaherty, a former columnist and editor at The New York Times, has modeled this course after The Times’s City Section, for which he was the Deputy Editor. In that section, Times reporters served as correspondents for particular New York City neighborhoods; their “beat” might be Greenwich Village, or Williamsburg, or Tribeca.
The course will also examine the fundamentals of journalism, hone students’ reporting skills, scrutinize the craft of writing and include one-on-one editing sessions with Professor Flaherty.

Notes: Required for students pursuing the print/online track in the journalism major and the minor in print and online journalism. Counts as an elective for the minor in broadcast and multimedia journalism.

Questions? Email undergraduate.journalism@nyu.edu.