2025 - Spring

The Beat: The Sporting Life (Print/Online track)

Course Number: JOUR-UA 201.005

Day & Time: Mon 11:00am-2:40pm

Location: 20 Cooper Square, Room 659

Albert Class Number: 2398

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 news. The focus of this six-week online course is one of the richest areas of local news: sports.

In this course, students will serve as “sports correspondents” for their hometown — whether it be suburban Montclair, N.J., beachfront Venice, Calif., Mexico City, Seoul, the hip East Village in New York City, or the Trastavere quarter of Rome.

Students can write about all sorts of sports in this course, from bowling to tennis to cricket to swimming to cycling, whether they are professional or amateur events, or even simple pick-up games at the local playground. Because summer is peak season for sports, students will have a wealth of sports and sports-related topics to choose from. A student might write a profile of a popular local surfboard maker, or an account of a group of enthusiastic fans who attend every local softball game in outlandish costumes. There are the creative street games that kids invent, bowling leagues for senior citizens, ultramarathons, catfish tournaments, and traditional games, from petanque in France to jai alai in Portugal, that give a revealing glimpse of local cultures.

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 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.