2026 - Fall

Pitch to Publish: What You Need to Know to Succeed in Journalism

Course Number: JOUR-UA 302.002

Day & Time: Tue 5:00PM - 8:40PM

Location: 20 Cooper Square, Room 700

Consider this class the step between school and the professional world.

To succeed as either a freelancer or staffer, journalists must have a whole host of skills beyond writing and reporting. They need to communicate their ideas, work with an editor and within an editorial team, understand editing, and how to strategize about the business aspects of journalism.

In this class, students will build on their Inquiry and Beat skills and put them into practice, taking a story from pitch to publication. This won’t be a baseline reporting class; this will be a chance for the students to apply the reporting skills they’ve learned during previous journalism courses in real-time for publications seeking their stories.

In this hands-on, project-based class, students will meet for a three-hour, 40-minute session weekly, where they will be pitching and working on stories with the goal of publication. We will partner with editors at a set of pre-established media outlets that are open to reviewing pitches, offering students a unique, real-time opportunity to leave the class with clips for their portfolio. Through this learning approach, and through the life of their stories, students will become comfortable with pitching and editing, and aware of how all aspects of a newsroom — fact-checking, social, and business — affect their stories. They will leave with the confidence they need to hit the ground running in a newsroom or in the freelancing world.

Pre-requisite: JOUR-UA-101 Inquiry: The Written Word