Just as the Internet does today, the picture press of the last century defined global visual knowledge of the world. The pictures gracing the pages of magazines and newspapers were often heavily edited, presented in carefully devised sequences, and printed alongside text. The picture press was as expansive as it was appealing, as informative as it was propagandistic, regularly delivered to newsstands and doorsteps for the everyday consumer of news, goods, celebrity, and politics. Through firsthand visual analysis of the picture presses of both the U.S. and Russia, this course will consider the ongoing meaning and power of images.

This course immerses students in diverse forms of storytelling about climate change in a US context - from photojournalism and data visualization to podcasting, documentary film, and the longform essay. Informed by these models, students work in teams on a semester-long collaborative project to develop an original climate story focused on a specific place, person, or community. Teams are formed based on student interests and experience.

This seminar will explore the challenges and opportunities that today's rapidly evolving media landscape presents to freedom of the press, and to the democracy that the media serve. Discussion will focus on where news comes from and how citizens can best assess the credibility of individual news reports. Students will evaluate how successful traditional mass-media outlets and emerging digital media have been at accomplishing the lofty goals embodied in the First Amendment. They will craft strategies for determining their own personal media diet and work to develop new models for serious, sustainable news ventures.

This course is designed to inform and inspire students who are curious about reporting, and are drawn to literary reportage. We will explore and develop the necessary elements of writing and reporting the very best of creative nonfiction. Each student will develop a body of reporting elements, called a spine, from which they will craft a final work of literary reportage. Students will read deeply and critically into the work of some of the finest practitioners of the craft. Students will also participate in workshops during which we will practice the art and technique of constructive critique.

Writing People is a seminar focused on the many ways in which a journalist rooted in the disciplines of reporting and research, boosted by the techniques of creative nonfiction can convey the fleeting, inimitable virtues, quirks, and foibles of real people. By reading and dissecting examples of writing from a bevy of genres, including magazine profiles, arts reviews, and newspaper obituaries, students will learn how to use a mountain of facts to form a human shape.

This course will be an intensive examination of the new investigative techniques required to uncover corruption in the post-2016 era, where traditional tools have been supplanted by the necessity to trace obscure and hidden vectors of power. Students should be acquainted with the basic techniques of journalism and be willing to dive into primary sources, historical accounts, and modern journalism with a slightly obsessive zeal.

This course explores the complexities of reporting on race and identity in the U.S. media. Students will critically examine how news outlets have historically covered marginalized communities like the Black, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, LGBTQ+, and other diverse communities, analyzing both successes and failures. Through immersive reporting, social listening, and community engagement techniques, students will gain expertise on the challenges facing one or more of these communities to produce their own original, in-depth enterprise stories on an important but under-covered topic. The course emphasizes inclusive journalism.