2024 - Summer

The Beat: Reporting Your Neighborhood’s News (Print/Online track) (Session 1) (ONLINE)

Course Number: SS1: JOUR-UA 201.001

Day & Time: Tue/Thu 11:00am-3:00pm

Location: Online

Syllabus: Download

Albert Class Number: 2377

Prerequisite: Journalistic Inquiry: The Written Word (JOUR-UA 101). If you are a visiting student and are interested in taking this course, please email journalism.summer@nyu.edu to find out whether this prerequisite can be waived. You will be asked to provide information about your previous journalism experience or courses.

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 six-week online 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. This course will be taught on Zoom, however, so that each student will be the unique correspondent for wherever they live. In that role, they will write profiles of local celebrities, uncover feature stories, explore trends, and chronicle local angles on major developments.

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 NYU students pursuing the print/online track in the journalism major. Also required for the minor in print and online journalism. Counts as an elective for the minor in broadcast and multimedia journalism.