Journalism Course Descriptions

This is a writing workshop designed to teach specific skills-reporting, interviewing, editing, hard news, and feature writing. The instructor will critique, edit, and evaluate students' work intensively.

This course helps students become more discriminating consumers of news and gives them the tools to determine which news sources are reliable and the difference between fact and fiction.

This course introduces students to the skills of reporting and writing stories for multiple media. The goal is to advance the students' abilities as journalists' research, reporting, analysis of official documents and budgets, interviewing techniques, beat reporting, and feature writing. Students also learn broadcast scriptwriting and audio production and produce stories for print and podcasts.

This course provides a basic constitutional law background for journalism students. In addition to a study of fundamental free speech issues, the course covers defamation, privacy, fair trial/free press, reporter's privilege, commercial speech, and pornography. Students are expected to read and to analyze major Supreme Court decisions.

The Internet has changed journalism radically, both from the perspective of the newsgatherer and the news consumer. This class examines ways in which technology is changing the journalism landscape, from the twenty-four-hour news cycle to ethics, to digital content acquisition and distribution. Students produce web content with an eye toward the impact of convergence on the business of journalism.

An introduction to the history and contemporary issues of South Africa designed to prepare students for their summer internship in Cape Town.

This course helps students learn how to make ethical decisions about accuracy and fairness, conflict of interest, deception, source/reporter relationships, privacy, and other journalistic issues. These problems are studied in the context of journalism history and the development of the modern press.

Fall, spring. Various issues of importance to journalism practitioners including such topics as journalism law, science journalism, or new media.

Fall, spring. Credit, eight hours. Students may focus on an honors thesis involving independent scholarly research or a print, broadcast, or online news project.

Fall, spring. Credit, eight hours. Students may focus on an honors thesis involving independent scholarly research or a print, broadcast, or online news project.

Fall, spring. Credit, eight hours. Students may focus on an honors thesis involving independent scholarly research or a print, broadcast, or online news project.

Students report and write for a newspaper, magazine, broadcast outlet or online news site for the equivalent of ten weeks (for credit of four semester hours). The requirement may be met by several shorter internships totaling ten weeks.