2026 - Fall

The Beat: Neighborhood News (Print/Online track)

Course Number: JOUR-UA 201.002

Day & Time: Mon | 11:00 PM – 2:40 PM

Location: 20 Cooper Square, Room 657

Prerequisites: Journalistic Inquiry: The Written Word JOUR-UA 101

An example to make this course concrete: You are walking along the street in the East
Village, on the way to meet a friend for coffee, when you see a new bookstore. But it’s
no ordinary bookstore. There’s a witch’s cauldron in the window, an ad for an “alchemy
workshop,” and a sign for the shop’s resident tarot card reader. This, it turns out, is an
occult bookstore – and it might be a fine subject for a fascinating profile. In this course,
we will scout out similarly rich story possibilities in various New York neighborhoods
like the East Village– the Lower East Side, Soho, Chelsea, and more.

Students will not cover all these neighborhoods. Each student will become the one and only
correspondent for a single neighborhood – the Correspondent for the Flatiron District, for
example. This singular focus on one neighborhood will enable students to “deep dive” into a
community and really get to know it. And, just like correspondents in real-world journalism,
each student will be the expert in that place, steeping himself or herself in it, researching its
past, walking its streets, interviewing its inhabitants and then mining its nooks and crannies for
news, feature stories, profiles and trend pieces.

The model for this class was the New York Times City Section, which for 30 years reported
“neighborhood size” news. I was the Deputy Editor of the City Section.

This search for local-size stories won’t be hard. New York neighborhoods brim with endless
tales.. If your beat is the East Village, maybe you will report on the growing tensions within a
squat. If your beat is Stuyvesant Town, maybe you will write a day-in-the-life story of a 90-
year-old woman who has lived there for decades. If your beat is the Lower East Side, maybe
you will portray the unlikely friendship between the proprietor of a hip new boutique and the
aging shopkeeper next door. All topics are open, from sports to music to immigration.

Notes: Required for students pursuing the Print/Online track in the journalism major and the Minor in Print and Online Journalism. Counts as an elective for the Minor in Broadcast and Multimedia Journalism.

Questions? Email undergraduate.journalism@nyu.edu.