2024 - Summer

4-Week Toolkit: Search and Social Media Skills for Journalists (2-credit) (6/3 – 6/26)

Course Number: SS0: JOUR-UA 25.001

Day & Time: Mon/Wed 6:20-9:20 pm

Location: 20 Cooper Sq.

Instructor: Kenneth Paulsen

Syllabus: Download

Albert Class Number: 2487

Search and social media have transformed how readers get their news — and how reporters manage every aspect of their jobs. This course aims to build the specialized skills needed to connect with those readers, who trend younger and can account for large portions and often majorities of news sites’ audience. Course examples:

  • Understanding SEO basics: How a single word in your headline, and the placement of it, can make the difference between success or failure of a post. Deciphering the strategy behind crafting three different headlines for a single story. Why the night of the NCAA championship you should be writing about next year’s Final Four. Understanding Google Trends and Google Discover — the platform that serves the content you didn’t know you were looking for.
  • Reporting with social media: How journalists use social media to find ideas, track down sources, research and verify information, promote their work, and directly report it to readers.
  • Assignments: Instagram storytelling, through photos, video, on-camera reporting and interviewing; developing a search strategy to meet audience curiosity around major trends and events; crafting fact, data and quote cards, to creatively engage users; creating useful TikTok videos that will have evergreen appeal to readers seeking to learn more about a topic or place;
  • Speakers: Past speakers in the social media-focused class include decision-makers and influential voices: NY1 education reporter with large Twitter presence; Food Network personality; the voice behind the “Decoding Fox News” Twitter account; CNN social producer; Denver Broncos social media specialist; author of “The Inside Story of Instagram.” Speakers lined up for 2024 include a Las Vegas tourism reporter with millions of social followers, and the executive director of NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics.