AUG.-OCT.	OCT.-DEC.	JAN.	JAN.-MAY	MAY	MAY-AUG
Reporting I	Foundations of Computing	Break	Writing with Data	Break	Storytelling with Data
Reporting II			Data, Computation & Innovation I		Data, Computation & Innovation II
	Data & Databases		Data Studio		Journalism History & Business of Journalism
Law & Ethics			15-week Seminar/ Production Class		Master's Project

Foundations of Computing:

The course will be an introduction to the ins and outs of programming through the Python programming language, with which students will build a foundation for future coding-intensive classes and journalistic work. Through a series of projects, students move from exploratory sessions, to writing small programs, to sharing code with others in class. Dirty, real-world data sets will be cleaned, parsed and processed while recreating modern journalistic projects. The course will also touch upon basic visualization and mapping, and how to use public resources for story development. The goal is to familiarize yourself with the data-driven landscape using Python, basic statistical analysis, OpenRefine, CartoDB, pandas, HTML, CSVs, algorithmic story generation, narrative workflow, csvkit, git/GitHub, StackOverflow, data cleaning, command line tools, and other introductory skills and tools.

Data and Databases:

Students will become familiar with a variety of data formats and methods for storing, accessing and processing information. Topics covered include comma-separated documents, interaction with web site APIs and JSON, raw-text document dumps, regular expressions, text mining, SQL databases, and more. Students will also tackle less accessible data by building web scrapers and converting difficult-to-use PDFs into useable information. This course considers the scientific and social implications of counting, turning the world into bits. Students learn human protocols (census/survey, interview, crowdsourcing, and experiments) and computer- or computer-assisted strategies and tools for collecting data. Students will become familiar with a variety of data formats and methods for storing, accessing and processing information. Topics covered include comma-separated documents, interaction with web site APIs and JSON, raw-text document dumps, regular expressions, text mining, SQL databases, and more. Students will also tackle less accessible data by building web scrapers and converting difficult-to-use PDFs into useable information. These efforts are project-driven, using and building modern data services with a scripting language, and underscoring the reality that data are plentiful and circulate and interact in an informational ecosystem. The main focus is to find and work with data using skills and tools including SQL, APIs, CSVs, regular expressions, text mining, PDF processing, pandas, Python, HTML, BeautifulSoup, and IPython Notebooks.

Algorithms: Machine learning and data science are integral to processing and understanding large data sets. Whether you're clustering schools or crime data, analyzing relationships between people or businesses, or searching for a needle in a haystack of documents, algorithms can help. Students will generate leads, create insights, and evaluate how to best focus their efforts with large data sets. A critical eye toward applications of algorithms will also be developed, uncovering the pitfalls and biases to look for in student and professional work. Classes will be anchored around several algorithms developed for or by computational journalists. Examples may include aspects of natural language processing, computer vision, or statistical/machine learning. Students will learn a process of questioning computation and its artifacts, of examining an algorithm and assessing its capabilities and its biases: How does it function? What are its implicit assumptions? How should we test its operation? What does it leave out? In the process, students will learn best practices for writing, documenting and publishing algorithms and code. The main focus is to analyze your data using linear regression, clustering, text mining, natural language processing, decision trees, machine learning, scikit-learn, Python, among other skills, tools, and methods.

Writing With Data

Data journalism isn't just about extracting, visualizing or producing data. It also requires the same news judgment, deadline reporting, accuracy, and writing skills used in beat, project, and science writing. This class will build upon the introductory reporting class and focus on honing the use of data and computation to find and tell stories. Each week will focus on a different element of writing about data, such as accuracy, news judgment, or understanding your audience. We'll generally have three sections to each class: 1) a drill with a dataset provided to you, in which you will have 1/2 hour to digest a dataset and write a lede; 2) discussion of data journalism sites and writing you find on your own; 3) review of stories you write during the week of about 400 words. You will have one project in which you choose among data sets suggested or approved by your instructor, and write a fully reported story on it.

Data Master's Project:

Instructor: You will be matched with an advisor with expertise in your area of interest

The data master’s project is an ambitious, serious, sustained, data-driven work of journalism. You will design, undertake and complete the project independently or in pairs, working with individual advisors. To meet these requirements, your project needs to include a data component that shows mastery of obtaining, analyzing and presenting data to a broad audience. The final product should include text, visualization or any multimedia elements mounted in a standalone website, and must include a separated detailed description of the methodology followed during the research process (nerd box) as well as the code documentation.

Journalism, The Law & Society:

This course is designed to acquaint students with the basic protections and restrictions of the law as they apply to the media. First Amendment rights and legal responsibilities and limitations will be examined and discussed. The course will look at these questions from three viewpoints: from (i) the practical view of a journalist doing his job and (ii) from a legal prospective, all the while (iii) considering the rules in a public policy context: are they fair and appropriate in our society? Significant court cases and fundamental legal rules will be explored in the context of political and historical realities, and in terms of journalistic standards and practices; contemporary media law issues will also be focused on. Among the basic First Amendment issues which will be examined are libel, invasion of privacy, prior restraints, newsgathering and newsgathering torts, copyright and the reporter's privilege.

Critical Issues

This course is an exercise in discussing philosophical and ethical choices -- quandaries, at times -- in the covering of news, the construing of news, judging the newsworthiness of news. Among the subjects explored during the class are the responsibilities of journalists; the ideal of objectivity, the impacts of new technology, use of anonymous sources, and using experts.

History of Journalism: Drawing on historical examples of the best work of print and broadcast journalists — from the reformer to the war correspondent, from the photojournalist to the New Journalist, from the muckraker to the blogger — we explore the development of the values, practices, ethical standards and social roles that cluster around the institution of journalism, with particular emphasis on the evolution of the role and work of the American reporter.

Reporting I

In this module, you'll explore the methods journalists use to gather and evaluate information. You'll learn how to think and behave as a journalist, how to conceive of journalistic story assignments, and how to report them quickly and accurately on deadline. You’ll learn how to gather original information first-hand and to combine it with contextual information that can be found online and elsewhere. You will be taught how to ensure that a story is true, both in the sense of getting the facts right and also by stating the implications fairly. You’ll also get some basic training in digital technologies such as photo, mobile video and audio that are essential parts of a modern journalist’s toolkit, and you’ll begin using them in the service of journalism, while thinking about ways to use social media to engage an audience for your work.

Reporting II: Investigative Techniques

Deep, compelling stories are built on a foundation of solid research and reporting. The goal of this course is to inspire you to dig deep, to find multiple sources of information and to explore different ways of gathering, verifying and evaluating facts and putting them in context. This class also will challenge you to think critically about the questions that drive your work and introduce you to a wide range of research and verification tools. More specifically, you will learn how to:

Use advanced internet search techniques
Obtain and analyze public records and data, including how to compose thorough FOIA requests
Get information about individuals and groups using a variety of sources
Work with, and incorporate, data and numbers in your reporting and writing
Use social media for reporting and verification
Evaluate scholarly literature

This course also will help you to sharpen your ability to critically assess the information you have obtained so you can create unique and accurate works of journalism. You will consider tactics for overcoming common obstacles, such as verifying information from interviews, being aware of cognitive bias and navigating informational roadblocks.

Data, Computation, and Innovation Workshop I

The Data, Computation and Innovation workshop is designed to be an open forum for students to explore cutting edge computational and data-oriented forms of storytelling. Through in-class workshops, students will refine the data and computational storytelling skills they have developed over the summer and develop journalistic stories. The workshop will also act as a space for students to discuss and further develop their final Master’s projects. Students in this workshop will take on problems that involve more complex data, deeper analysis or interviews, or more elaborate visualizations. Students will also learn to collect their own data for stories and work in teams to produce complete data stories. This course will include regular, detailed critiques of published work.

Data, Computation, and Innovation Workshop II: This course builds on the material from the fall semester workshop and will proceed in similar fashion, with a focus on developing your skill at telling journalistic stories with data, computation, and new technologies. Throughout the course you will be encouraged to hone fundamental skills such as data analysis and visualization, but most weeks we will explore the potential for emerging tools like sensors, drones, and virtual/augmented reality through workshops and guest lectures. This semester will be paced and organized differently from the fall workshop, which was largely focused on developing one substantial project. This semester, you will be expected to produce work at a faster pace, but no less rigorous and polished. Each subsequent project this semester will come with a shorter deadline, meaning that you will either need to work ahead or develop the capacity to finish projects more quickly over the course of the term. To help offset this demanding structure, your only homework will be to propose, produce, and present these projects.

We offer a wide range of seminar and production classes in the second semester, some of them focusing on subject area, others on medium. Descriptions of the second-semester courses we have offered in years past can be found here. While not all of these classes will be duplicated in spring and summer semesters, classes in each of the categories represented -- longform, international, audio, video, investigative -- in both of those terms. You'll ballot in the first semester for your second-semester classes. We can’t promise you will get your first choice, but we do promise to do our best.

Storytelling with Data

This class will prepare students for a job in the data team of a news organization or as a data reporter in an investigative team. By dissecting pieces ranging from prize-winning to their own work, students will be trained in the standard of work that an editor will expect when pitching and executing a data story. Students will leverage their advanced technical skills in pursuit of asking the right questions of data sets and communicating about data findings in an accurate but accessible manner, while avoiding pitfalls common to data-driven pieces. We will be interrogating data in the same manner that a good reporter asks questions of a source.

Preliminaries:

Meets: Fridays, 10:30-12:30, June 15-July 13

In this class, which will meet a couple of hours a week, we'll lay the groundwork for the reporting module, discussing basic concepts and upcoming assignments so you can begin thinking about them and hit the ground running when the module begins in July.

Data Studio

In this project-driven course, you'll refine your creative workflow on personal work, from obtaining and cleaning data to final presentation. Data is explored not only as the basis for visualization, but also as a lead-generating foundation, requiring further investigative or research-oriented work. Regular critiques from instructors and visiting professionals are a critical piece of the course.

JOURNALISM ETHICS & LAW

You'll take one of these modules in the first half of the semester and one in the second.

Journalism Ethics explores the ethical issues that often arise in the practice of journalism, including verification of information, the relationship between personal values and journalistic decisions, issues driven by competition, and the impact of relentless deadline pressure.
Journalism Law is designed to acquaint you with the basic protections and restrictions of the law as they apply to the practice of journalism in this global era. You’ll also explore significant court cases and fundamental legal rules in the context of political and historical realities, and journalistic standards and practices, both in the United States and internationally.

JOURNALISM HISTORY & THE BUSINESS OF JOURNALISM

You will take one of these modules in the first half of the semester, and the other in the second half.

Journalism History explores the historical development of the values, practices and social roles that cluster around the institution of journalism. In this class, you'll also consider how the press has itself been a significant actor (for better or worse) in politics, war, reform, social movements and other events. The Business of Journalism will help you to understand the challenges and vicissitudes of this period of historic flux in the journalism industry — not just for your own career development, but because we want you to be partners and innovators in determining new ways to secure the future of journalism.