2026 - Fall

Specialized Reporting: Reporting Culture

Course Number: JOUR-GA 1182.024

Day & Time: Wed | 8:30am-12:00pm

Location: 20 Cooper Square, Room 700

Instructor: Staff

How should journalists approach coverage of the arts and social customs, particularly in an online age? This course will focus on rapidly changing forms: both in subject matter and ways it is being documented. We will look at magazines and newspapers in their 20th century heyday and what writing conventions developed around weekly and monthly deadlines and the constraints of print; then trace how blogs, social media and other internet platforms upended not only these conventions but the very nature of creativity and celebrity. We will examine the dissolution of the supposed monoculture: when there is no longer a water-cooler conversation as there was in the 1990s, but many individual bottles, how do you gather an audience? (And earn a living?) And what of the popular but much-maligned “trend piece”? Practically, we will address interview/research techniques; narrative strategies, the avoidance of puffery, and how audio-visual supplementation can complement prose work. Students should be prepared to pitch and write several original articles of varying lengths.