Stabile Investigative Curriculum (Full-Time Students) 2020-21*
* If you're a part-time Stabile student please consult the schedule for that program (below).
FIRST SEMESTER			BREAK	SECOND SEMESTER
Reporting Module		The Written Word	Investigative Master’s Project	15-Week Investigative Class
Investigative Techniques				15-Week Seminar/Production Class #2
		Image & Sound		Stabile Investigative Seminar
	Law & Ethics			History & Business of Journalism
	Investigative Master’s Project			Master’s Project

Stabile Investigative Curriculum (Part-Time Students) Year 1
FIRST SEMESTER		BREAK	SECOND SEMESTER:
Reporting Module	The Written Word	Break	Stabile Investigative Techniques
Stabile Investigative Seminar			Image & Sound

Stabile Investigative Curriculum (Part-Time Students) Year 2
SUMMER 2021	FALL 2021	BREAK	SPRING 2022
Investigative Master’s Project	15-Week Seminar/Production Class	Break	15-Week Investigative Class
Journalism, the Law & Society	Critical Issues

REPORTING

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.

THE WRITTEN WORD

Journalism is changing rapidly, but the written word remains as important to journalists today as it was a century ago. It’s still a storytelling medium in and of itself, of course. But even if you don’t plan to work in print, you need to know how to write clearly and accurately in order to supplement or explain video and photos, to put together engaging audio and video scripts, and to pitch ideas to editors. You're required to take a 7-week writing module in the fall semester; this year, it will be taught as an extension of the reporting module.

Deadline Writing: Do you want to be a foreign correspondent? Cover the courts? Write magazine features? No matter what your aspirations, the ability to put together an accurate, clearly-written story on deadline is essential to achieving your goals. Working on deadline is equal parts mindset and technique. Both can be acquired with practice, and you’ll get lots of it in this class. You’ll write at least one story a week and will get detailed guidance and feedback throughout the process. Assignments will replicate the sorts of deadline stories you would be likely to cover for a mainstream media organization — live events, second-day stories and short features. You will have the opportunity to cover stories from your Reporting class beats, thus building on the sources you developed in the first half of the semester. In class, we will brainstorm story ideas and angles and discuss strategies for reporting and writing when the clock is ticking. You’ll learn to turn deadline anxiety into adrenaline, to produce standout stories — and to have fun in the process.

Off the News: Story ideas can spring straight from the brows of editors, but the best ones tend to emerge from two faithful sources—a well-covered beat, or from the news itself. This course is about that latter category—reporting off the news, on deadline. In this class, we will organize our reporting to advance the story as quickly as we can, and publish the edited results on The Brooklyn Ink website (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site..What kind of things? They might be big or small, expected or unexpected, global or local. Maybe a gang shooting in Brooklyn—who are these people and what is the backdrop? Maybe a presidential election in Pakistan—what questions does this raise in our Pakistani neighborhoods? Maybe the consumer confidence number takes a jump: How can we localize that? Maybe a school closes or a restaurant gets a C from the health department or another hurricane is approaching or a politician unexpectedly endorses the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policy. Or… Much of this class will be about brainstorming—sometimes together, sometimes individually—around two issues: What news of the day raises the kind of questions that The Brooklyn Ink wants to address? And, once we have our story ideas, how do we go about adding context and new facts via our own original reporting, plus Web and library research? We will work on small group projects and individual stories, with rigorous editing. We will hear from a couple of guests who are good at this kind of reporting, too.

Art of the Profile: There’s a reason one of the most successful magazines launched in the past 40 years is called People. Readers like profiles. Editors do, too. In this course, you’ll learn and practice the specialized interviewing, reporting and writing skills used to portray individuals. We’ll read and discuss some of the best contemporary and classic profiles, of subjects from Ty Cobb to a sex-toys saleswoman. We’ll talk a lot about structure. I’ll take a machete (at first) or a scalpel (later on) to every sentence you write. Some gifted practitioners will come tell us how they do it. We’ll discover how to leverage readers’ intrinsic interest in other people to inform them about things they think they don’t want to know.

Feature Writing: Feature writing is a balancing act between information and narrative, reporting and the writer’s voice, news and what catches your eye. Walk in the door with an overheated curiosity, and we’ll turn that into diverse and surprising stories. You’ll learn how to think like a feature writer — to find local stories on your block, or to give a large, unwieldy issue a human face and focus. You’ll expand your interview skills, and discover how to improve and refine your writer’s voice. You’ll write one or two features, depending on length, read each other’s work, and learn the fine art of revision. We’ll examine the digital component of features as well, and discuss how best to use these tools to enhance a story. We’ll work through the steps that lead from idea to final draft; you’ll learn to conceptualize, pitch, and develop a compelling and well-reported story. On a practical level, this is the logical place to figure out how to apply your reporting skills to your masters project.

Narrative News Features: This course will explore a versatile, durable, lively and evolving approach to news writing. Using writing exercises and story assignments, students will develop skills in the elements of narrative writing —imagery, theme, characters and dialogue even with tight word counts. The news feature gives journalists a vehicle for examining a topic or event through firsthand accounts, background facts and context. It is widely used in publications and online. Assignments will range in length from 500 words to 1,200. The objective is to produce sparkling news features that are sharply and tightly written, and fit these characteristics outlined a few years ago by Roy Peter Clark: “You can read it, if you want to, in a single sitting on the day the story was published. You can read a short one in five minutes and a long one in 15 minutes. It is not a news story but can be inspired by the news. It has, at its heart, human interest. It illuminates lives lived in our times.”

Writing for the Ear: Whether we are listening to them or reading them, stories told for the ear engage us, hold our attention and make us "see" the story. Driven by strong, clear narrative writing, these stories capture our imagination. They are intimate and compelling. The writing is conversational and active. The scenes are vivid and memorable. From Edward R. Murrow’s account of entering Buchenwald in 1945, to Sarah Koenig’s 2014 Serial podcast, journalists who write for the ear have always been among our most powerful storytellers.This class explores the qualities of the best audio storytelling and the ways it differs from, and is similar to, writing for print, online or video. For some assignments, students will record interviews and use them in producing audio scripts. These assignments complement, but do not duplicate, audio courses in the Image and Sound module. The level of technical skills required are no more than what all students have learned in the August digital skills training — recording and mixing a basic story with written narration and actuality from interviews. Storytelling for the Ear is not a prerequisite for any course, though the writing style taught in this class will make all of your writing stronger. it will be especially useful for students planning careers in broadcast journalism, whether radio, television or documentary.

800 Words: Newspapers may be shrinking, but the most versatile, durable, readable literary form they gave us — the column — is flourishing, although it has migrated beyond the traditional beyond the traditional borders of print, and often travels under different names now. The column — 800 words of story, voice, idea and opinion, in varying proportions according to the occasion — has always been the three-minute pop song of our business, the marquee form of journalism, and it has become an essential building block of the Web: the blog, the posting, the musing, the reflection, the anecdote, the kind of brief essay that requires minimal scrolling. So how can we get better at this form, this length, regardless of the medium through which it reaches readers? What can we learn from the great columnists, past and present, that will bring more authority and poetry to our work, whether on the Web or in print? How can we bring more reporting, more substance, to a form that in its latest incarnation often strays too far from the ethics and practices of its roots in print? How can we shape a narrative arc in a narrow space? In a world that has come to value voice so highly, how can we make our voices more rigorous, fluent, persuasive and concise? In this class, you’ll read a wide range of work, from the earliest newspaper columnists to the latest bloggers, and you’ll write, and then rewrite, four columns of your own — four 800-word stories of varying subject, tone and purpose.

Journalism of Death & Dying:

Just about every journalist has to cover death, whether a fireman’s funeral, a fatal car crash, a memorial service or a simple obituary of a community leader. This seven-week course will equip students to cover end-of-life issues, including terminal illness, murders, suicides and fatal accidents in both the personal and public spheres. With the help of experts on trauma, students will discuss best practices about interviewing the bereaved and survivors. The reading list will include some of the great journalism on death and dying, including classic obituaries and accounts of disasters such as 9/11, Katrina, and the Indian Ocean tsunami. The class will also look at some of the digital media outlets that are increasingly being used to memorialize the dead. Finally, the class will explore the cross-cultural and cross-theological practices surrounding death. Over the course of the semester, each student will visit a public memorial and a funeral home and write a story from each venue. There will be weekly research, writing and re-writing assignments with the goal of producing three 1,200-word articles.

Underbelly: Narratives of the Invisible City: There are eight million stories in the naked city.” That phrase — coined in 1948 film noir —has never been truer. But you wouldn’t know it from our society’s ever-narrowing cast of headline-makers: celebrity athletes and entertainers, politicians and CEOs. Forget that fame parade. The lifeblood of New York runs in the margins. It’s apparent in the struggles of outsiders: newcomers, eccentrics, idealists, workers, dreamers and strivers of all kinds. It flows through networks of subcultures, tiny worlds beneath the city’s surface. In this course, we’ll use narrative storytelling techniques to illuminate the city’s edges. We’ll explore how literary tools – scenes, narrative tension, dialogue, character-building — can make fact more absorbing than fiction, while demanding a rigorous attention to detail in reporting. And we’ll talk about how, no matter where you are in your journalism career, you can pick up lessons from your favorite writers by reverse-engineering their stories. Along the way, we’ll study a spectrum of work from literary journalists covering under-reported populations, from Francis X. Clines and Joseph Mitchell to David Grann, Katherine Boo and Jennifer Gonnerman. Emulating this sort of “connective” journalism – the kind that brings separate worlds into dialogue — each student will produce a feature-length story of publishable quality, developing it through three drafts and contributing to in-class workshops.

Narrative Writing:

All of the best stories in journalism, whether as short as a column or as long as a book, share the same basic narrative principles, and the aim of this course is to master those principles, to study them in the work of others, and to apply them to your own. The first few sessions are spent in an overview of the narrative form, discussing how to recognize, report, structure and write stories that move confidently through time, place and character. The remaining weeks proceed through a series of more specific technical issues such as using dialogue, choosing and depicting characters, compressing and expanding time, managing transitions, providing historical context, establishing a voice.

The Rise & Fall Narrative The rise-and-fall story is a durably popular genre of narrative magazine and newspaper writing, as well as magazine broadcast journalism and documentary filmmaking. This course will teach you how to identify, report and write with verve such a time-honored narrative. The genre’s typical story arc is as old as Greek and Elizabethan tragedy. It involves, usually, a woman or man in public life who enjoys success, succumbs to hubris, and is laid low. In modern times, such a reader-friendly story might evolve out of a murder trial, an insider trading indictment, a high-flying Silicon Valley bankruptcy, or the firing of the first female editor of the New York Times. We will break down and diagram magazine-length examples of the genre such as Jim Stewart’s recent New Yorker epic on the collapse of one of the world’s largest law firms. We will learn how to map out a story’s chronology; how to choose a lead and then drive toward a narrative climax; and how to interview and report from multiple sources so as to serve writing that is brisk, well-ordered, accessible, character-driven, and enlivened by specific scenes and dialogue. Each student will pitch a rise-and-fall story of 2,500-3,000 words that can be reported in the time available and will draft and redraft as we learn and discuss the form.

Writing About International Issues: In this class, students will select international topics that are freshly or very recently 'breaking' and take them beyond the first day headlines. This involves resourcefulness and enterprise in their reporting, and also teaches them the vital skill in the web age of how to write the proverbial second day story (and beyond). This goes beyond fresh reporting and analysis and helps students achieve the right kind of voice and perspective for follow up news and feature writing.

Business Writing Business journalism is relentlessly focused on timeliness and accuracy. Markets react within nanoseconds to breaking news, whether it’s a company’s earnings or a central bank’s decision on interest rates. But the fastest response in the world is worthless if it isn’t right. This class will give you some of the tools to handle deadline coverage of live business news. We will cover some basics of how companies, markets and economies work, working toward the goal of learning how to write quickly and authoritatively about an unemployment report, a company’s press release, or the firing of a prominent CEO. This course will focus largely on deadline assignments – both in and out of the classroom -- so students can become more confident in working at a news organization that prizes speed and concision. This is, at its core, a writing class. Students who already have significant expertise in business and finance, or who hope to get it, may be better off waiting until the second semester when they can take a relevant seminar.

Writing About the Arts

Description: The arts in their innumerable forms are central to 21st-century life. This class prepares journalists to report and write on the arts with rigor, depth, clarity, and a due quality of artfulness. Students will study how the arts function as a reflection of culture, an economic engine, and an influence on politics. Assignments include arts news, feature writing, and criticism.

HISTORY OF JOURNALISM AND 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.

JOURNALISM ETHICS & LAW

You will take one of these modules in the first half of the fall 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.

SECOND-SEMESTER INVESTIGATIVE CLASSES

As a Stabile student, you're required to take a 15-week investigative seminar/production class in the spring semester. We offer a variety of these each year. Examples of the six investigative options offered in last year can be found in the general spring lineup here, and are marked as satisfying the Stabile requirement.

SECOND-SEMESTER CLASSES

We offer a wide range of seminar and production classes in the second semester, some of them focusing on subject area, others on medium. Click here to see descriptions of the second-semester courses we have offered in years past. We anticipate that many of them will be offered again in the upcoming school year -- though we reserve the right to cancel a class at any time. We also will offer a limited number of Seminar & Production classes in Fall 2022 for part-time students who need to take the class then.

Arts Criticism:The course takes as axiomatic that no matter its form, good criticism is based on considered judgment and elegant argument: passionate as it may be, it is not a blurt of opinion. Though we won’t ignore the role some criticism plays as consumer guide, we will not be spending time on simple thumbs-up/thumbs-down ratings nor even be enormously concerned with how much we like one work or another. Rather, we will work on developing engaging and persuasive essays of various shapes and sizes, from the 250-word blog post to the 1,500-word think-piece.

Book Writing: This application-only seminar teaches students to prepare a book proposal, including an overview essay and a sample chapter, both at least 4,000 words long. Each student must enter the class with sufficient material from elsewhere or an idea that can be researched in the New York area. Students will not be permitted to use their Master’s Project for this seminar. Coursework ranges from intensive study of literary nonfiction and journalistic fiction, with related writing assignments on a weekly basis, to instruction in the techniques of reporting and writing extended narrative, and of producing a book proposal. Guest speakers from the publishing industry appear frequently. Enrollment limited, with approval of instructor.

Business & Economic Reporting: A basic understanding of business can help students in any line of journalism, from sports to fashion, politics to investigations that follow the money trail. This seminar examines the economy and financial markets and gives students the tools to better understand them. We will look at the stock and bond markets, learn how to read annual reports and financial statements and get a better understanding of financial regulations. By the end of the semester, students should be comfortable when faced with numbers and learn how stories can be strengthened when a financial angle is pursued. Students will read current and historic business stories, with an eye towards seeing what makes them stand out. Several class sessions will include guest speakers from major business and general-interest news organizations.

City Newsroom: In City Newsroom, you'll cover all of New York City. You’ll operate, manage, edit, and contribute to a live news site. The course is set up to give you hands-on experience running a news site, and to hone your skills in reporting and producing ambitious stories in all formats. You'll cover breaking news, develop features, dig into deeper stories, and shoot and edit videos. A team of instructors will be skilled in video storytelling, digital, and print. If you love covering news, want to improve your storytelling skills in multiple formats, and welcome the challenge of reporting on this city in depth, this is the class for you.

CJR: Transformation of a Magazine: The students in this class will be part of this reimagining of the oldest, and most respected, journalism journal in the country. The class will work side by side with the instructor, who is also CJR’s editor and publisher, in making the new iteration of CJR a reality. We’ll think about and experiment with new ways of storytelling that a digital publication brings; we’ll study and use social media as a way of extending the brand, while preserving CJR’s reputation as a thoughtful and careful arbiter; we’ll assess how to balance CJR’s media criticism with the reporting of breaking news and analysis, and student work will be published on CJR.org.

Computational Journalism: This course unpacks the ways in which data, code and algorithms are reshaping systems of power in the world, training students to be better reporters and to hold the people and institutions behind these systems accountable. This critical view is made possible through rigorous training in data and computing, preparing students to use these tools in an expanded reporting practice that finds and tells new kinds of stories. Our main programming language for the class will be Python. Each week, students will read and analyze examples of data and computing in service of journalism, and each week we will dig deeper into the technical skills behind such stories with small coding assignments that mix story and technology. The course will end with a final project, an "act of journalism," that might be a story, a data visualization, or a new data set or algorithm.

Covering Conflict: Covering conflict poses unique challenges to reporters and is arguably the trickiest from an ethical point of view. Your reporting could get someone killed – including yourself. This course will examine all areas of coverage from moral minefields to logistics. The aim is to prepare you to work responsibly when faced with a barrage of propaganda and bullets. These crisis skills are also applicable to volatile situations outside war, such as protests, earthquakes, hurricanes and Ebola outbreaks. Although there will be a practical component to the course, we will focus on how to deepen reportage with context and robust questioning: Do you intervene to save a life? Can you favor one side in reporting? How to overcome implicit bias? Guest speakers will include prominent correspondents and editors, who will share tips on surviving the story and writing it well.

Covering Race: This course is an examination of one of the most salient themes in American life and the ways in which it informs our contemporary realities as well as its implications for media and reporting. Thus a grounding in race is a key perspective for the journalist writing in or about the United States. Objective: The student will gain greater insight into the central debates and formative influence of race in American society and its implications for reportage and media discussion of the subject.

Covering Religion: This application-only class aims at preparing students to write about religion with depth, sensitivity and sophistication. This year, the seminar will focus on the diversity of religious faiths found in India. Thanks to a generous grant from the Scripps Howard Foundation, the course will include a weeklong study-tour of northern India at no cost to students. The study-tour will take place over spring break. While a major focus of the semester will be on India’s large Hindu and Muslim populations, the class will also look at the country’s minority faiths, including Christianity, Judaism, Sikhism and Buddhism. While still in New York, students will select and begin to report on the stories that they want to cover while abroad. Upon the return from India, students will write and produce the stories that they worked on while traveling.

Covering Science: Medical and public health stories shape the way people view health and disease, impact their relationships with physicians, and influence their decisions about medical treatments. In this course, students learn to identify, report and write medical news stories and features. To do this well, students must develop a keen sense of audience as they translate complicated science, explain the ramifications of the scientific findings and incorporate historical context when appropriate. As part of the course, students will learn basic biostatistics, enough to be able to evaluate the significance of a scientific article. They will also critique medical and public health pieces for style, gleaning pearls of wisdom and spotting pitfalls. Most classes will include a guest—a scientific expert, patient, or medical journalist.

Digital Longform: This is a writing class, but it is also a class where students are expected to identify and connect with an audience – readers who so value their work that they pay for it. First to the writing: The Memory Project – in which each student takes a memory (his, hers or someone else’s) then goes back to report what, in fact, happened. We will offer the tools and the guidance to help you envision storytelling and publishing in an altogether new way. Then to the publishing: where once longform writers needed a publication to provide a home for their work, writers can now bring their work directly to readers through such platforms as Medium. But who are those readers and how can find and so engage them that they will become followers and patrons? That is as much a core challenge as producing memorable work.

Food Writing: The food beat is a diverse one that includes stories about culture and family, public policy, health and science, immigration, business – or about food as food, from Hudson Valley apples to food-truck cuisine. This course introduces you to the myriad ways you can report on what we eat, whether it’s a story on the sudden influx of decent tortillas in a neighborhood full of recent immigrants, or a feature on a farmer who’s growing what she hopes will be the next kale – a trendy vegetable that helps her to sustain her business.

Gender & Migration: Today, our world is witnessing a global refugee crisis on a scale unprecedented since World War II – one that stretches from the Middle East to the Americas, involving more women and girls than ever before. We’re also experiencing, in less volatile settings, an unprecedented “feminization of migration,” defined by hundreds of thousands of women and girls crossing borders in search of opportunity – better jobs, for instance, or improved educations. Together, we’ll have an invaluable opportunity to explore these trends, and to break new ground in covering them – dignifying individual migration stories, while exposing systemic forces at work in tales of sexual exploitation, profiteering, human trafficking, and more.

Human Rights Reporting: Human rights stories develop on a massive stage, often with millions caught in the sweep of war, natural catastrophe, starvation, sectarianism and intractable conflict. And what constitutes the rights of all humans and what is a violation have been in virulent debate since the advent of civilization and diplomacy. But human rights abuses, regardless of their prevalence worldwide, happen to one person, one family at a time, tragically altering lives and perhaps history itself. In this course, we will look closely at some of the best current and past human rights reporting. We will study the apparatus of human rights enforcement internationally, and through case studies look at how the process of intervention and investigation works or doesn’t. We will do our own stories, some with the UN as a base and others on human rights challenges domestically.

International Newsroom: Reporting Refugees: There are more than 65 million forcibly displaced people in the world today -- the largest number since such record-keeping began -- and people continue to flee war and oppression in unprecedented numbers. Not all are considered refugees, a term that has legal definitions and implications. For example, the 41 million people who have left their homes but not their homelands are defined as IDPs -- internally displaced persons -- not refugees. Estimates of migrants in the world also may include asylum seekers or those who have left home for economic reasons. These refugees and their stories have global repercussions. We’ll look at the political, economic, and cultural impact they have had on the countries hosting them. We’ll look at the multiple challenges they pose for journalists who report on them. And we will do some of our own reporting and data visualization work to develop new ways of looking at these refugees and telling their stories.

Investigating Healthcare: Exploding prescription drug prices. A mental health system in crisis. Consumers struggling to afford their health insurance premiums. These are among the issues that make taking this course in the spring semester such a great opportunity. You will learn how to navigate one of journalism's most complicated beats, all with an investigative reporter's eye. Individual classes will focus on hospitals, health professionals, our aging society, controversies in medicine, insurance companies, health reform and the pharmaceutical industry. We also will dissect the implementation of the Affordable Care Act and look at Donald Trump’s plan to repeal it. The course will explore many issues beyond health care, including politics, consumer affairs, finances, the law, ethics and demographics. Along the way, students will become skilled in using public records, understanding bureaucratic agencies and querying databases that can be put to use on practically any beat. Class assignments will require use of investigative skills, interviewing techniques and interaction with bureaucracies. You’ll work hard in this class but may leave with clips published in major U.S. media outlets.

Investigating the Failures of the Mental Health System: Mental illness is all around us. One in five Americans struggle with some form of it. We spend more than $300 billion a year on psychiatric care in this country. Still, these diseases are widely misunderstood and rarely discussed in non-judgmental, clear-headed ways. Care for people is often poorly managed and unavailable for those who need it most. We tend to blame the victims, shove them out of sight, into prisons and onto the streets. Increasingly, we are seeing the results of these flawed policies played out to tragic ends. This investigative reporting class will examine the failures of the system and their consequences for all of us. Students will produce stories about what is broken and consider what can be fixed. We will learn how to build an investigation of a mental health system by interviewing people with mental illness and hearing about their struggles and success. We’ll go to where they live, talk to those who care for them, question policy makers and advocates. We’ll mine for data, explore trends, analyze social policy and spending priorities. In short, we’ll give light to what has been a very dark corner.

Investigating State Lotteries: In this class, you will learn to collect, analyze and present data in an immersive, hands-on and team-oriented course. A portion of class will be devoted to hands-on activities, emphasizing the skills newsrooms want. How can a map illustrate the challenges in developing gun policy? Why is data cleaning required to uncover the influence of money in visits to the White House? More than ever, these new ways of telling stories require data skills. Fluency with data and the ability to ask and answer questions from structured information sources can help any journalist, whether she’s a radio producer, magazine writer or digital producer. While the course’s main goal is journalistic, not technical, you will acquire a variety of new skills in data visualization, data analysis, and digital production. In the process, you will learn how to use data to strengthen and improve your reporting process.

The Investigative Project: In this class, we will explore the mission, methods and history of investigative reporting, as seen through a semester-long project examining a single subject. Our goal will be to build the foundation for a publishable investigative article based on original research, not recycled government reports. You will learn how to find topics worthy of investigating, how to prove or disprove your investigative hypothesis through interviews and public records, and how to present your findings in narrative form.

Journalism of Ideas: In the first semester students learn to report and write news stories, which are generally focused on what happened, on the Who, What, When, Where – the first four of journalism's five W’s. In the Journalism of Ideas we are going to be more concerned with the Why of stories. Usually events are driven by deeper forces under the surface of things, the slow, subtle shifts of history or society that move like the tectonic plates under the earth’s surface. Almost all news stories have potential beyond what actually happened that is often left unexplored in most coverage. A simple metro story about a man jumping on the subway tracks to save a stranger who has had a seizure can become a story about altruism – is it an innate instinct? Under what circumstances do people act altruistically? How can it be explained evolutionarily? The Journalism of Ideas will try to help create stories of conceptual depth and focus. It will be a hybrid course that will combine writing print stories as well as learning to tell ideas stories in audio form as radio or podcast pieces.

Journalist as Historian: A good work of history reads like a novel in which all the details are facts. In this course, students will learn to frame a piece of history as a story, uncover sources, and transform evidence into an accurate narrative that casts the past and present in a new light. We will develop skills for finding and using archives, and we will look at how to use sources including memoirs, court records, newspaper reports, and popular culture. To build a repertoire of techniques for long-form writing, we will take a close look at fine historical writing, and will look at ways to uncover a plot line and character development in actual events. In their own work, students will define the subject for a book-length work of history and write a working outline. They will then find sources and write one extended episode of the story, describing a particular moment, incident, character or development. Finally, they will rewrite the segment and fill out their initial outline in response to new sources and intensive workshop discussion of their writing. By the end of the course, each student should have the materials for a book proposal, along with the skills for enriching magazine writing with reporting on the past.

Literary Journalism: This workshop combines writing and immersive reporting with the study of excellent stylists, both nonfiction writers whose work is as compelling and graceful as that of the best novelists (such as Katherine Boo, Susan Orlean, Ryszard Kapuscinski, David Foster Wallace, James Baldwin, Joan Didion, George Orwell), and novelists whose style is inspiring. (Leo Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf, Charles Dickens, even a touch of Nabokov). Students read and analyze these writers, and write a few short writing exercises and one long article attempting to emulate the best stylists in literary journalism, past and present. Along with critiques of each other's work and discussion of the above authors, students will practice the long-form style of journalism used in books and magazines, such as Granta, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, The Believer, and literary journals, online and off.

Magazine Workshop: Trumplandia: This class has a twofold purpose. One is to make two online issues of a magazine about life under the new presidential administration, and in the process to learn how to conceive of, write for, and, not least, edit a magazine. The second is to read and think about what a Trump administration means for people living in New York City, with a particular focus on those who are most vulnerable: immigrants, minorities, Muslims, and those who depend on government programs to survive. In our reading, we will try to look at past periods when vulnerable populations were endangered: in Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and fascist Italy, as well as more proximate historical periods like Reagan’s America and Giuliani’s New York. We will also look at some contemporary writing about marginalized people to talk about how it can best be done. Given the nature of the reporting we’ll be doing, Spanish, Chinese, and Arabic speakers are especially encouraged to take the class and contribute to the magazine. Every student will have a double role: as a writer for the magazine and as an editor. You will be expected to pitch, report, and finish, for publication, at least two articles. But you will also be expected to assign, edit, give comments, participate in discussions of the editorial direction of the magazine, and in general think about the magazine we’re creating as a unified whole.

Magazine Writing: Magazine journalism presents an opportunity to break out of the conventions of newspaperese and find one’s voice. But writing for magazines also involves rules and challenges—not the least of which is figuring out how to position yourself in an uncertain field. In this course, we’ll discuss different forms of magazine writing, and focus especially on substantive general-interest publications like The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, New York, and The New York Times Magazine—as well as their websites. We’ll examine the types of proposals that appeal to editors, ways of getting in the door, and some useful frameworks for structuring longer magazine pieces. We’ll work on developing or refining a more natural and conversational writing style, by reading articles by accomplished writers and workshopping student pieces. We will cover descriptive writing for profiles and scenes, as well as criticism and essays. In addition to weekly readings of recent and classic magazine stories, students will practice pitching and writing short pieces. At the end of the course, each student will have produced a suitable magazine article of 2,500 to 3,000 words.

Managing the 21st-Century News Organization: The news business is going through a period of fundamental and irrevocable change. Journalists must understand both the core values of our industry as well as essential digital skills. But news managers – or journalists who aspire to management – must know even more. They need to deal with core business principles that have long governed the media world, along with newer concepts like audience-building and technology adaptation. This class is for those students -- that is, those of you who want to run the show, rather than be run by someone else. Our goal is to help you understand media firms – those we know of and those that don’t yet exist, or those that you may create – and to appreciate how business imperatives affect the kind of journalism you and your colleagues can expect to do. Our class will also give you background to do better journalism about business, including essentials like how to read balance sheets and income statements, or interview executives and employees.

Multimedia Storytelling: Covering Education: This course will provide students with two distinct yet complementary areas of training that will give them the skills and habits of mind they need to tell stories about education and other complex topics in engaging and creative ways. Students will have the opportunity to embed for the semester in a New York City public high school, middle school or elementary school, cultivating sources, knowledge, and story ideas. In seminar, we will discuss tools specific to the education beat, including the art and ethics of interviewing children, in the context of public school history and key issues rocking the world of education today. Students will develop a familiarity with the important components of education stories and with their recurring themes and pitfalls. Students also will learn both short- and longer-format video storytelling techniques. There is a strong emphasis on best practices in field production and post production. Some pieces in this class will be produced in print, and others in video.

Multiplatform Design & Storytelling: Readers get their news from multiple platforms, and today’s journalists must therefore learn to tell stories for and across these platforms. Design, especially in the digital space, allows us to add new kinds of texture and dimension to our reporting. This class will deal with the many formats that stories can take and how those formats play out across different devices, as opposed to analysis of mobile apps or platforms on which those stories appear. We will touch on the economics of digital storytelling, as well. We will learn to blend editorial design essentials (grids, color, type, story structures, motion, user experience) with modern tools for building digital stories (wireframes, front-end development, version control, DNS/hosting, deployment).

Narrative Writing: All of the best stories in journalism, whether as short as a column or as long as a book, share the same basic narrative principles, and the aim of this course is to master those principles -- to study them in the work of others, and apply them to your own. The first class sessions are spent in an overview of the narrative form, discussing how to recognize, report, structure and write stories that move confidently through time, place, character and event. The remaining weeks proceed through a series of more specific narrative strategies and tactics: using dialogue, choosing and depicting characters, compressing and expanding time, managing transitions, providing historical context, establishing a voice. Beyond the regular readings, the main requirement is to find one good story idea and then write it and rewrite it, as a short narrative first (800 words) and then as longer one (2,500-3,000), gradually working your way deeper into the narrative form as the semester progresses.

Radio Workshop: Radio Workshop provides opportunities for students to master key skills needed to work in a high-quality audio news organization and to develop foundational skills for longer-form audio storytelling. The class functions as a working newsroom. Students will develop advanced audio writing and production techniques by producing a weekly audio news program, Uptown Radio. Uptown Radio is offered as a live webcast every Friday at 4pm, an on-demand podcast, and, when possible, a terrestrial broadcast on WBAI FM in NYC. Students develop a full range of techniques of reporting and writing, including developing feature stories, creative commentaries, longer narrative pieces using documentary methods, as well as fundamental newsroom skills such as writing newscasts, producing day stories, and writing spot news. Students will produce four enterprise stories of increasing complexity, a personal commentary, at least two day stories, two newscasts, and two host interviews. On the production side, students will rotate through roles such as executive producer, managing editor, senior producer and various technical positions to ensure a timely broadcast that offers high value to its listeners. The weekly broadcast is entirely managed by students. Each week, the new leadership team makes the key editorial decisions with support from the instructors as needed.

Sports Reporting: Sports occupies a special place in American society. Television props up its financial investment by giving sporting events–professional, college and high school–staggering blocks of time every day; many newspapers keep readers by devoting huge percentages of their daily news holes to local, national and international coverage. Sports talk radio and countless websites dissect every play, every individual and every move, often adding to the stifling pressure on athletes, coaches, owners and administrators. Sport has evolved into a complex part of American life that requires thinking, well-trained, well-read and fundamentally sound journalists. A sports journalist must be able to quickly and clearly tell readers and viewers what is happening on the field, on the court or on the track, and the modern sports journalist must have a solid background on issues as diverse as labor, medicine, performance enhancing drugs, stadium financing, race, Title IX, gender, masculinity, youth sports–and the daily police blotter. A sports journalist must understand the fascinating history of this world as well as social media and emerging trends and must continue the tradition of adding to some of the best writing, reporting and commentary in journalism. This course will address all of these matters and assign you to cover professional and college games; feature pieces; columns, as well as longer, issue-oriented takeouts and investigative stories dictated by the news.

Strategy & Editing for Social Platforms: This course is designed for students who are interested in gaining in-depth about how to set and implement social media strategies for newsrooms. Whilst all students should have learned the basics of news gathering, reporting and publishing using social platforms and tools, this course is designed for those advanced students who wish to develop strategic and management skills in relation to the new tools and platforms. The course will teach a mixture of both practical skills which build on those students have already acquired as part of their reporting training, and a theoretical framework which teaches how the interaction of social creation and distribution channels and journalism are changing the broader ecosystem of news and information.

Telling Stories in Sound: The goal of this course is to teach the skills of long-form audio journalism, and the techniques of nonfiction storytelling used in established public radio programs like This American Life, Radiolab, or Snap Judgment, as well as newer podcasts like Reply All, Invisibilia, or Embedded. The style of storytelling used in the public radio style podcasts is a combination of in-depth reporting and long-form storytelling. This course will prepare students to tell complex stories using strong character-driven narrative. The workshop will be run as a newsroom. We’ll have pitch meetings, where each student will have workshop edits (modeled on This American Life) and welcome guests from significant team members at WNYC Studios, Gimlet, This American Life, Radiolab, as well as NPR shows like Code Switch, Planet Money and Radio Ambulante. We’ll experiment with the Radiolab style “Brain Dump”, where in lieu of a script, the reporter comes into the studio and tells the story to another producer. This recording then becomes the basis of the script. More broadly, we’ll stay up to date on the changing landscape of audio journalism – the impact of podcasts on legacy media like NPR, emerging for-profit business models, and responses to shifting audience demographics – with readings and criticism. As our final project, we will produce a live show, exploring how multimedia elements can complement audio storytelling, and how the presence of audience can inform the creation of compelling narrative journalism.

Using Data to Investigate Across Borders: Exponential amounts of information about the world are being produced daily, and journalists everywhere need to have a global mindset if they are to write about organized crime, corruption, human trafficking, global trade, and threats to the environment. We live in an increasingly borderless world. Goods, money, people and ideas flow freely across borders, thanks to technology and the liberalization of customs and money controls. We all benefit from globalization and the free flow of commerce that it makes possible. But there’s a dark side: A borderless world also makes it easier for crooks and criminals to do their work. This course will prepare students to find global data, process and analyze it, and to report on it from New York while working with sources and possibly other journalists overseas. Students will learn skills like doing background checks on people and companies, mining the social web, tracking offshore entities, and finding assets and cargo. They will be divided into reporting teams, and by the end of the semester, will be able to find, scrape, consolidate, analyze and visualize data in the context of a big global story.

Video Newsroom for Broadcast: This class will teach students how to report, produce and write stories for television and the web. Students will have opportunities to cover breaking news, general news and feature stories and will be able to publish their work, when approved by professors, on a class website and through social media. Working under deadline will be a major focus of this class, which reflects the real world of television newsgathering and reporting. In the first part of the semester, students will build their skills by reporting, shooting, writing and editing stories each week, either in teams or alone. Students will be expected to pitch ideas for coverage. Most work will be done in video, but students will also have the option (and will be encouraged) to pitch and work on print stories, an essential skill even in a TV newsroom. Students will produce between 10 and 15 reports or stories, demonstrating a variety of approaches to show prospective employers. During the second part of the semester, students will leverage these skills as they produce, report and anchor newscasts. They will rotate through a variety of jobs during the show weeks. Some students will go into the field and report on live events while others will anchor in the studio. Everyone will have opportunities for each assignment and the chance to learn how a newscast and newsroom work, from the control room to the field.

Video Newsroom: Web & Documentary: This course covers advanced concepts in video production and storytelling. Building on the fundamentals learned in Video 1, students will be taught the skills required to produce thoughtful, engaging, and well-reported short documentaries intended for multiplatform audiences. Students will produce four short films centered around the issues of Poverty, Education, Social Justice, and Health. Along with practical technical training (camera work and editing), the course will train students on how to juggle the many responsibilities of a professional video journalist: researching, pitching, reporting, producing, and publishing multiple stories simultaneously. This course should be taken by those students interested in video work produced by publications such as the New York Times, Fusion, Frontline, Vice, and other digital-centric organizations.

Short Doc Storytelling: This workshop is for students with advanced shooting and editing experience who want to hone their storytelling skills, experiment with new styles and explore the expanding landscape of video. You will produce three video stories over the course of the semester. In addition, we will be offering a one-day After Effects training session. Our emphasis is on substantive reporting and compelling storytelling of all kinds. We will encourage and support first-person, on-camera, non-narration or text-based approaches. The goal is to produce videos suitable for broadcast, cable and online platforms (and, of course, viewing at the Career Fair.) In the workshop, we will focus on story structure, interview techniques, lighting, editing, graphics and pitching your stories and yourself to media outlets. We often collaborate with at least one professional outlet; students in previous classes have produced assignments that have been posted on The New York Times, Channel Thirteen, The Daily Beast, Slate and Frontline.

Visual Storytelling: This course will focus on issue-driven photojournalism in the social documentary tradition with students producing one major photography driven project focusing on a human rights or social justice concern. Students will see examples of work that made an impact, critique the aesthetic strategies employed, and learn about NGO and foundation collaborations. Students will also learn the business and practice of photo editing across platforms, from long form magazine editing to creating subject oriented instagram feeds. Lectures will be supplemented with visits from editors at National Geographic, Time, Getty and the Magnum Foundation.

THE INVESTIGATIVE MASTER'S PROJECT

Description: As a student in the Stabile program, you are required to complete an investigative report for your master's project — typically a magazine-length print piece, sometimes with data or multimedia elements, produced under the guidance of an adviser who is an experienced investigative journalist. The Stabile Fellowship Fund provides support for reporting expenses, including travel and research costs incurred during the school year. If you produce a project worthy of publication, you can avail yourself of support from the Stabile Center after graduation. As a Stabile fellow, you’ll will retain your official connection to Columbia University for the summer or the fall following your graduation, during which you will complete investigative projects with the help of the Stabile Director. The Stabile Center will help you to get these projects published or aired. The director of the Stabile Program, Sheila Coronel, will match you with an advisor with expertise in your area of interest.

INVESTIGATIVE TECHNIQUES Description: No one is born an investigative reporter. While muckraking reporters are set apart by their persistence and patience for detail, investigative journalism is more than just a matter of personality type. It’s also a question of skill, discipline and technique. This class is a crash course on the techniques of investigative reporting. Through lectures and exercises — as well as actually starting reporting on your master’s project — the course will teach you how to develop story ideas, find the investigative edge in your stories, conduct research and dig for information. Together, we will walk through the investigative process — from the time a story is conceived to the formulation of an investigative hypothesis to the actual reporting and writing. Throughout the course, we will stress the importance of documents and data as evidence and help you access and analyze both public and private as well as paper and digital records. A significant part of the course will deal with investigative interviewing. More specifically, you will learn how to: Develop and pursue ideas for investigative stories 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 Interview difficult and reluctant sources

THE IMAGE & SOUND MODULE

Journalists today tell stories in many ways: with words, of course, but also with video, photos, data and sound. In this module, you’ll pick one of those mediums, learn its tools and explore its storytelling potential.

If you're having trouble choosing between mediums, don’t worry — though you’ll take only one Image & Sound module during your time at the Jschool, you’ll be able to to explore other mediums in other classes

AUDIO

Format: The audio module will meet online.

Description: In the audio module, you'll learn fundamental and advanced techniques of field reporting and writing in audio/radio media. Emphasis is on writing clearly and conversationally, with integration of recorded voices and natural sound. You’ll pitch, report, write and produce compelling, public-radio style pieces, including newscasts, news stories, features and interviews. You’ll be trained in state-of-the-industry recording equipment and editing software. You’ll receive detailed, one-on-one editing and will publish your work in on-demand digital audio formats. Writing and technical skills of this course are intended to serve you well in any medium. This class is recommended, but not required for students who want to take Radio Workshop in the spring semester.

DATA

Format: The data module will meet online.

Description: In this class, you'll learn how to evaluate and analyze data for appropriateness, context and meaning. You'll leave the class knowing how to apply basic statistical methods to numerical data sets, and interpret the results of these methods using appropriate measures of spread and central tendency. You'll will know how to build a histogram, recognize normal and skewed distributions, calculate the mean/standard deviation/normal score and median/quartiles where appropriate, and understand how these can (and cannot) be used to infer meaning about particular readings within a given data set. Visualization in this course will be used primarily for data analysis and story formation; graphics for publication will be addressed in the spring.

Note: If you have prior data experience, please describe it in the comments section of the ballot.

PHOTO

If you want to use our cameras for this class, you'll pay a $50 equipment fee, which allows you to check out a dSLR from our equipment room. The money is used for ongoing maintenance and repairs to cameras. If you use your own camera, you will not pay this fee. All students may check out lighting kits and tripods at no charge.

Format: The photo class will meet in person, public health permitting.

Description: This class covers the basics of photojournalism, such as DSLR camera operation, workflow, post production, captioning and keywording using Adobe software. You'll have weekly assignments photographing and editing news, portrait and multi-picture feature stories. In class, we'll discuss contemporary examples of photojournalism and the ethical and legal issues of visual reporting. You'll leave the class able to identify visual opportunities in the field, and equipped to shoot single images and multi-picture slideshows for print and internet publications.

Note: If you have prior experience in photojournalism or DSLR use, please describe it in the comments section of the ballot.

VIDEO

This class is a pre-requisite for some, but not all, second-semester video classes.

There is a $175 equipment fee associated with this class. The fee allows you to check out of a video camera and accessories from our equipment room, and is used for ongoing maintenance and repairs to cameras.

Format: The video class will meet in person, public health permitting.

Description: In this course, you’ll learn the basics of video journalism: gathering sound and picture simultaneously; the fundamentals of exposure and composition; the grammar of video, writing to picture, selecting sound bites, the basic concepts of non-linear editing. By the end of the course, you should have a foundational understanding of the basic skills involved in video storytelling and the ability to produce short-form video pieces.

Note: If you have prior video experience, please describe it in the comments section of the ballot.

AUDIO In the audio module, you'll learn fundamental and advanced techniques of field reporting and writing in audio/radio media. Emphasis is on writing clearly and conversationally, with integration of recorded voices and natural sound. You’ll pitch, report, write and produce compelling, public-radio style pieces, including newscasts, news stories, features and interviews. You’ll will be trained in state-of-the-industry recording equipment and editing software. You’ll receive detailed, one-on-one editing and will publish your work in on-demand digital audio formats. Writing and technical skills of this course are intended to serve you well in any medium. This class is recommended, but not required for students who want to take Radio Workshop in the spring semester.

Radio Workshop provides opportunities for students to master key skills needed to work in a high-quality audio news organization and to develop foundational skills for longer-form audio storytelling. The class functions as a working newsroom. Students will develop advanced audio writing and production techniques by producing a weekly audio news program, Uptown Radio. Uptown Radio is offered as a live webcast every Friday at 4pm, an on-demand podcast, and, when possible, a terrestrial broadcast on WBAI FM in NYC. Students develop a full range of techniques of reporting and writing, including developing feature stories, creative commentaries, longer narrative pieces using documentary methods, as well as fundamental newsroom skills such as writing newscasts, producing day stories, and writing spot news. Students will produce four enterprise stories of increasing complexity, a personal commentary, at least two day stories, two newscasts, and two host interviews.

DATA

Class time/week: Two three-hour classes per week, plus additional time to complete assignments.

Description: We offer the following two levels of data.

Data 1: In this class, you'll learn how to evaluate and analyze data for appropriateness, context and meaning. You'll leave the class knowing how to apply basic statistical methods to numerical data sets, and interpret the results of these methods using appropriate measures of spread and central tendency. You'll will know how to build a histogram, recognize normal and skewed distributions, calculate the mean/standard deviation/normal score and median/quartiles where appropriate, and understand how these can (and cannot) be used to infer meaning about particular readings within a given data set. Visualization in this course will be used primarily for data analysis and story formation; graphics for publication will be addressed in the spring.
Data 2: If you've taken and passed (and hopefully enjoyed) an introductory course on statistics, this module will give you a more advanced treatment of the process of storytelling with data. This includes: Frameworks and tools for finding, accessing, manipulating and publishing data (APIs, various databases, and some techniques for data "cleaning"); simulation-based approaches to statistical inference when data have special designs (surveys, A/B testing); "models" for data and the stories they tell (regression, trees); and advanced tools for visualization (to explore both data, the effects of data processing, and models). Throughout we will emphasize best practices for documenting your code and analysis ("showing your work").

PHOTO

If you want to use our cameras for this class, you'll pay a $50 equipment fee, which allows you a 7-day checkout of a dSLR, renewable on a weekly basis for the duration of the class. The money is used for ongoing maintenance and repairs to cameras. If you use your own camera, you will not pay this fee. All students may check out lighting kits and tripods at no charge.

Class time: Three hours per week, plus at least one additional day to complete assignments for the class.

Description: We offer the following two levels of photo.

Photo 1: This class covers the basics of photojournalism, such as DSLR camera operation, workflow, post production, captioning and keywording using Adobe software. You'll have weekly assignments photographing and editing news, portrait and multi-picture feature stories. In class, we'll discuss contemporary examples of photojournalism and the ethical and legal issues of visual reporting. You'll leave the class able to identify visual opportunities in the field, and equipped to shoot single images and multi-picture slideshows for print and internet publications.
Photo 2: This class assumes basic knowledge of DSLR camera operation and Adobe photo processing software. You'll learn how to make multi-image photo essays incorporating techniques of reportage, still-life and portrait photography. In class, we'll discuss contemporary examples of photojournalism and the ethical and legal issues of visual reporting. You'll learn best archiving practices, advanced Adobe software, and business and pricing standards, and will leave the class able to identify visual opportunities in the field, and equipped to produce single image and multi picture slideshows for print and internet publications.

VIDEO

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There is a $175 equipment fee associated with this class.The fee allows you a 48-hour checkout of a video camera, in most cases renewable (you must renew in person) for the duration of the class. The money is used for ongoing maintenance and repairs to cameras.

Class time per week: One full day of class time, plus at least one additional day during the week to complete assignments for the class. In addition, all fall video students should plan to set aside three weekends in September/October for camera and software training. Dates will be announced later.

Description: We offer the following three video classes.

Video 1/Web & Documentary: This class is for students interested in producing short-form videos, of the type that appear on web sites such as Vice.com or NYTimes.com. In this course, you’ll learn the basics of video journalism: gathering sound and picture simultaneously; the fundamentals of exposure and composition; the grammar of video, writing to picture, selecting sound bites, the basic concepts of non-linear editing. By the end of the course, you should have a foundational understanding of the basic skills involved in video storytelling and the ability to produce short-form video pieces.
Video 1/Broadcast: This class is for students interested in broadcast news. In this course, you’ll learn the basics of video journalism as it is practiced in broadcast newsrooms: gathering sound and picture simultaneously, the fundamentals of exposure and composition, the grammar of video, writing to picture, selecting sound bites and the basic concepts of non-linear editing. By the end of the course students should have a foundational understanding of the basic skills involved in video news gathering and the ability to produce short-form video news pieces.
Video 2: (Fall semester only) If you already have a solid foundation in video, you may request admission to this module, which will give you the chance to develop a more sophisticated understanding of, and approach to, the medium. We’ll delve into the elements necessary for producing compelling stories; teach you how to light and shoot sequences and well-framed interviews; discuss the practical ethical and legal considerations of working in video; and help you develop rapport with subjects. You may request this module during balloting, but when you get to campus, you’ll be required to demonstrate the ability to shoot video interviews and action scenes; identify and use sound bites; and edit a short story using pictures and sound. Those not qualified will be placed in Video 1. For more information, contact Prof. Duy Linh Tu.

Memoir Writing

Instructor: Jonathan Weiner

Day/time: Wednesday, 9 a.m.-noon, beginning Oct. 25

Description: All great memoirs share the same secret. Their authors have learned the power of basic narrative principles. The aim of this course is to master those principles, to study them in the work of others, and to apply them to your own. The first few sessions are spent in an overview of the memoir form, discussing how to recognize, report, structure and write stories that move confidently through time, place and character. The remaining weeks proceed through a series of more specific technical issues using dialogue, choosing and depicting characters (including your own), compressing and expanding time, managing transitions, providing context, maintaining the highest standards of accuracy, establishing a voice. Beyond the regular readings, the main requirement is to find one good personal story idea and then develop it in a series of short sketches, gradually working your way deeper into the narrative form as the semester progresses.

Narrative Journalism of Social Fault Lines

Instructor: Dale Maharidge

Day/Time: Thursday, 1-4 p.m., beginning Oct. 26

Description: This class is about the art of the written word--storytelling rooted in deeply reported journalism about myriad social-political-cultural issues facing the world today. It’s journalism that is literary and "documentary" in the manner of the great nonfiction writing produced during the 1930s by James Agee, Edmund Wilson, Louis Adamic, and others. Practitioners today include Joan Didion, Kate Boo, Ted Conover, and William T. Vollmann. The course is aimed at those who want to write narrative long-form journalism that could appear in the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Harper's; quarterlies such as VQRor the Oxford American; quality alternative weeklies; or online sites such as the Atavist and Narratively. These stories have news hooks that speak to larger issues. All involve vigorous shoe leather journalism and meet rigorous reporting standards. If your piece is five times longer than a hard news story on a topic, it should have five times as much reporting.

The Secret Structure of Narrative Nonfiction

Instructor: Keith Gessen

Day/Time: TBA

Description: You've done the reporting, transcribed the interviews, and typed up your notes in a handsome 12-point font. Now what? This class confronts the monster known as structure, with the goal of taming it. Students are expected to come to class with some reporting already in hand, and from there we will read pieces from both classic practitioners and more recent masters, as well as some short story writers, and take them apart. We will discuss the standard scene-background-story structure, the here-is-what-happened structure, the elevator structure, the mirror structure, and the classic heist (or Magnificent Seven) structure. We will also discuss the perennial importance, to storytelling, of time. By the end of the class each student will have produced a compelling and well-structured narrative of between 2,000 and 3,000 words.

STABILE INVESTIGATIVE SEMINAR

Description: Investigative reporting is being transformed right before our eyes. The narrative forms and the reporting techniques are changing in response to technological innovation and the globalization of information flows. The information ecosystem is undergoing profound changes as well, as audiences migrate to social platforms and consume information on smartphones. As a result, news organizations no longer have a monopoly of their audience’s attention. The news media’s prestige and credibility are on the decline globally. Such a decline comes at a time when the business models that have traditionally supported investigations in print and broadcast are collapsing, investigative staffs are being cut and the resources devoted to in-depth reporting, reduced. For sure, new funding models are emerging. Today there are close to 100 investigative nonprofits in the US, most of them set up in just the last few years. Worldwide there are over 100 nonprofit investigative groups. Citizens are also becoming involved in the investigative process, sometimes in collaboration with professional journalists, but also as individuals and advocacy groups embarking on investigations or releasing information on their own. The shape of the investigative journalism of the future is still emerging. Watchdog reporting will be more collaborative, involving both “amateurs” and professionals, sometimes working across borders and across publishing platforms. It will also involve greater use of data as well as new tools for analyzing large quantities of information. New ways of telling the story will also emerge. New audiences for investigations are also emerging. As we will discuss in our first class, investigative reporters in the age of diminishing news revenues will have to do more with less. But unlike journalists of the previous era, they are in a better position to harness the power of computers, of collaboration, and of crowds. But to do so effectively, they need to be more technologically adept, more entrepreneurial and also more global in their outlook. While crime, political corruption, regulatory failure and scams on consumers remain the staple of investigations, other areas, including the environment, terrorism, natural disasters and global trade have become rich ground for journalistic probing. Cross-border issues – such as immigration, human and commodities smuggling, transnational organized crime and the global supply chain – are also emerging as important topics for investigation. This seminar will examine the tectonic shifts that are taking place in the media and challenge students to think about how they can produce, pitch and fund investigative stories in such a dynamic environment. It will also familiarize them with the investigative tradition and the traditional investigative narrative forms. An examination of the classics of the genre will be linked to a critical appreciation of how the genre has evolved in response to changes in technology, the audience and more broadly, society. The seminar will focus on changing techniques and narrative forms of journalistic investigation and the continued innovation on those techniques.

JOURNALISM, THE LAW & SOCIETY

Description: 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.

Registration: We register you for this class.

CRITICAL ISSUES

Description: 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.

Registration: We register you for this class.