Curriculum - NYU Journalism

In this course we examine what makes journalism different now that it runs on a digital platform. Readings and discussion focus on making sense of the large shifts that accompany the move to digital production and distribution in professional journalism, including the “always on” web, the lower barriers to entry, the rise of social media, “the people formerly known as the audience,” the ease of production using digital tools, the “unbundling” of news packages that were well adapted to prior platforms, the loss of monopoly status among news organizations, and the re-voicing of journalism in a more interactive environment for news.

Project: “Online, the simplest way to add value is to save the user time.” That’s one of the first things that Studio 20 students learn. And it is the key principle behind the News Literacy project.

Each of Studio 20’s graduate students take an important trend or disruptive force that is changing journalism and study it until they know it cold. Then they reduce all that knowledge to a package of time-saving features: a brief 500 word overview, a list of “killer links” for further reading, the best people to follow for that topic, charts and graphs to illustrate trends, key quotes from big thinkers, and a “why is this important?” box. The cover image serves as both a summary of the project and a table of contents to send readers where they want to go. The site was designed and built by Studio 20 students in 2016, and is improved upon every year.

You can view previous projects here and here.

In Studio 2, students in the Studio 20 program tackle one large project in innovation. The project chosen will vary from term to term, but it will always be an adventure in digital journalism, and it will always have a media partner—typically a news organization or existing journalism site that wants to do something new or collaborate with Studio 20 on a creative extension of its current practice.

Students participate in all the phases of the project: background research, news ecosystem analysis, technology assessment, design and conception, prototyping, editorial workflow, content production, testing, launch, feedback and adjustment, de-bugging, iteration and evaluation. They collaborate actively and in person with the media partner. They learn to divide up tasks and coordinate the different parts of the project. They try to push the envelope and do something effective but also innovative in digital journalism that meets the partner’s goals and works for the users—the news-consuming public.

Here are the projects that Studio 20 students have worked on with media partners in the past.

Spring 2010: The New York Times

Working with editors at The New York Times, students and faculty designed and planned a hyperlocal news site for the East Village neighborhood in Manhattan. It launched in September, 2010: The Local East Village. The site was edited and produced at NYU, but ran on The Times’s website. Studio 20 students could publish there, and if they had ideas for improvements they could pitch them.

In the spring of 2013 that site evolved into Bedford + Bowery, which was co-published by NYU Journalism and New York Magazine. The editor, Daniel Maurer, explained at the time: “We’ll still be covering the East Village and Lower East Side but we’ll also be jumping on the L train to cover Williamsburg, Bushwick and Greenpoint — where, of course, the East Village already has a strong presence.” The change was covered here.

Spring 2011: ProPublica

Studio 20 experimented with the genre of “the explainer,” a form of journalism that provides essential background knowledge and brings clarity to complex issues in the news. Read more about it here and here. Don’t miss The Fracking Song, a video explainer came out of that project. Time magazine named it one of the most creative videos of 2011.

Spring 2012: The Guardian

Students worked with The Guardian to explore a different approach to election coverage. You can read about it here.

Spring 2013: The Wall Street Journal, ProPublica, Fast Company, Quartz and Pando Daily

Studio 20 students worked with five different media partners: The Wall Street Journal, ProPublica, Fast Company, Quartz and Mashable’s gaming beat, Pando. The partners explained the problems they had making more productive use of a networked approach to reporting, which we defined as: “When the many contribute to reporting that is completed by a few.” Students split up into groups and worked on solutions. The Pando project was featured here.

Spring 2014: The AP, Fast Company, The Guardian and ProPublica

Studio 20 students worked with The AP, Fast Company, The Guardian and ProPublica to research ways in which newsrooms can engage and use their audiences.

Spring 2015: The Guardian

The class partnered with The Guardian, to devise strategies to help them reach more millennials.

Spring 2016: Fusion (now Splinter)

Studio 20 and The New School’s Parsons MFA Design & Technology students partnered with Fusion, now Splinter. The class functioned as a “pop-up R&D lab” for the network, testing out new ways to cover a presidential election. You can read about it here.

Spring 2017: The Wall Street Journal

Studio 20 students collaborated with The Wall Street Journal to help them reach both younger readers as well as people who aren’t very familiar with finance. The class functioned like a user testing lab that designed prototypes, tested them on potential users and continually iterated based on feedback.

This Studio 20 version of Writing, Research and Reporting II is specifically geared towards mastering multimedia reporting and production techniques. In 14 weeks, students will develop the skills to expand their reporting abilities into the areas of basic photography, audio production and, most significantly, video production.

This course is not just an academic exercise. In fact, the class will function at times more like an actual newsroom. We will use New York City as our assignment area and produce real audiovisual content on a regular basis. As students will own their own media, they will have the option to place it on any news site or blog they wish.

While much of what we will learn in WRRII will be of a technical skills nature, for example practicing how to shoot sequences, learning basic effects in Final Cut Pro, our main priority will be to learn and practice the essential elements of visual storytelling. While the basics can be discussed in our classroom setting, and we will devote a certain amount of our time to watching examples of excellence in visual storytelling, this is a skill that is best learned by doing. So it will be a key component of our field work: focusing on how to best use the visual medium to tell our stories. We will also learn to exercise our judgment as to which media can be used to best tell which stories.

At the successful conclusion of the course, students will have learned how to develop, produce, edit and deliver multi-media stories. This includes demonstrated proficiency in:

• Shooting basic video and acquiring professional audio

• Editing video and audio; encoding projects for final delivery to a variety of outlets

• Use of basic video titling, manipulating and editing still photographs for use in video projects or creating audio slideshows

• Introductory audio and video effects

• Audio and video storytelling techniques: how to produce visual narratives.

This course represents a rare, exciting and meaningful opportunity for professional growth. These multi-media production abilities are the kinds of skills that will be required to be competitive for many jobs. Students will leave the course with not only new skills and knowledge, but with at least the start of a “clip reel”.

Past projects include: What is Home, a College Photographer of Year award winner, NYC Values, an ONA award winning project and Finding Sanctuary, a College Photographer of Year award winner.