Course overview
Journalists do more than report news or relay the world around them; they shape our perceptions of it and influence how we as readers and viewers think about current events and each other. Nowhere is this influence more prominent or potentially more powerful or damaging than in how journalists report from and write about communities with which they have little in common or ones that have been marginalized for social or political reasons.
This course introduces students to best practices in deep reporting on under-represented communities while also acting as a self-contained introduction to feature writing and long-form narrative. It combines the practicalities and ethics of socially responsible journalism with the craft of writing more nuanced and complex stories.
The classroom experience in this course is a dynamic one with active learning placed front and centre. You’ll learn as much from doing as you will from listening to me and participating in the class.Weekly readings will be analyzed in this course through a number of ways: groups discussions, online discussions and short individual reflection papers.
By the end of this course, you should be able to:
- Develop strategies for reporting from and writing about a range of communities and cultures
- Adopt best practices in reporting on under-represented communities into your writing
- Incorporate some tenets of trauma-informed reporting
- Develop, pitch, report, research, write and self-edit a midsize (1500 to 2000 words) feature story
- Take your reporting into deeper, more nuanced character-based, magazine-style storytelling
- Gain some grounding in the art of creative nonfiction and long-form reporting in general