Curriculum
In Business Reporting: Courses Faculty Careers Events
Business Reporting Courses
The following Business Reporting courses are being offered for the Fall 2009 semester:
J200: Reporting the News - Gorney/Platoni
This course, an intensive 15-week workshop, provides the foundation for the rest of the curriculum and will take up the majority of your time during the first semester. J200 stresses hard news reporting, writing, and editing. Faculty members with extensive experience in newspaper reporting run their classes much like newsrooms. The aim is to produce publishable newspaper stories and many class assignments do end up in print, often in local dailies, weeklies, and regional newspapers. This course is considered the most important of your J-School career. Plan on about 20 hours of outside reporting time each week.
J200: Reporting the News - Chavez/Chakarova
This course, an intensive 15-week workshop, provides the foundation for the rest of the curriculum and will take up the majority of your time during the first semester. J200 stresses hard news reporting, writing, and editing. Faculty members with extensive experience in newspaper reporting run their classes much like newsrooms. The aim is to produce publishable newspaper stories and many class assignments do end up in print, often in local dailies, weeklies, and regional newspapers. This course is considered the most important of your J-School career. Plan on about 20 hours of outside reporting time each week.
J211: Reporting the news-lab--Chavez/Chakarova
Lab Component for J200.
J200: Reporting the News - Drummond/Snow/Griffin
This course, an intensive 15-week workshop, provides the foundation for the rest of the curriculum and will take up the majority of your time during the first semester. J200 stresses hard news reporting, writing, and editing. Faculty members with extensive experience in newspaper reporting run their classes much like newsrooms. The aim is to produce publishable newspaper stories and many class assignments do end up in print, often in local dailies, weeklies, and regional newspapers. This course is considered the most important of your J-School career. Plan on about 20 hours of outside reporting time each week.
J211: Reporting the news-lab--Drummond/Snow/Griffin
Lab Component for J200.
J211: Reporting the news-lab--Gorney
Lab Component for J200.
J230: Covering the Biotech Revolution (or Genes for Generalists)
Biology is big business. In the 21st century, medicines aren't just chemicals cooked up in test tubes. Today's treatments emerge from living cells that are engineered to correct the basic causes of illness: glitches in our genes, faulty cells and proteins, or immune defenses gone haywire.
Probing the human cell to find the roots of disease is enabling scientists to design compounds that fix these problems with human proteins or curb rogue cells that turn cancerous. Such designer compounds, sometimes called smart drugs or targeted treatments, now fight disorders from anemia to arthritis, cystic fibrosis to cancer, and diabetes to heart disease.
The new industry spawned by this revolution is known as biotechnology. Born in the Bay Area, the industry's products help patients live longer, better lives. Companies in the industry employ thousands of workers, sell billions of dollars in products, and market shares to public stockholders with a taste for high-risk, high-reward investments. Biotech companies invest billions to search for cures and preventive vaccines against malaria, HIV/AIDS and pandemic influenza. One pioneering company "“ Genentech Inc. of South San Francisco "“ rocketed from its birth as a public company in 1980 to become the country's largest seller of cancer treatments and a takeover target of Swiss drug giant Roche, ending in a $95-a-share or $47 billion buyout in March 2009. The trade group, BIO, counts over 1,200 member companies in 30 countries.
Reporting the business of biotechnology is a big part of covering the future of healthcare "“ something that touches everyone. You don't have to be a scientist or an economist to cover this business. Students can develop skills to separate the substance from marketing hype, and write about issues such as: management challenges, who's winning the race to market blockbuster products, who's making and losing money, who's got the edge in research and development of new products, marketing and pricing controversies, drug side effects, and risks and benefits of new-generation medicines.
The class will help graduate students cover the business in a smart and skeptical way. We'll discuss, report and write about: the founding of companies from venture capital seed money to initial public offering; making of new medicines from lab bench to bedside; proving benefits in clinical trials and why that's important; how to read a scientific study and ask the right questions; regulation of biologic drugs and the role of the Food and Drug Administration in approving products for patients, pricing of new drugs that can top $100,000 a year and how budget-busting products are helping push the debate for healthcare reform.
Being in the Bay Area will give our class opportunities to interview the scientists, drug developers, investors and corporate managers at the heart of the biotechnology business. I'll assemble panel discussions to let students interview key industry players. Visiting companies that create drugs from living cells will give them a concrete sense of the sights, sounds and smells that make biotech uniquely fascinating. We can visit a stem cell laboratory at UCSF's Mission Bay complex. Talking with corporate public information officers will bring students into contact with the PR machines they'll deal with as working journalists. Visiting with physicians and patient activists and advocates will round out their views of the industry and the people it serves. Tapping my source list built over more than 20 years covering biotechnology and health sciences will give students a multidimensional view of not just the buying and selling of stock, but the fundamentals of the business.
We can delve into bioethics issues surrounding stem cells by visiting laboratories where basic science is done, and by looking into companies like Geron, now preparing clinical trials that will test the versatile cells as a treatment for spinal cord injury like that suffered by cinema's "Superman," Christopher Reeve.
Using biotechnology as a canvas, we'll hone fundamental newsgathering, writing and peer editing skills, in class and out.
Among the skills students can develop and adapt to any business beat will be: how to read (and find the news in) corporate websites, annual reports and Securities and Exchange filings; how to cover developments like corporate earnings reports, new product launches, and mergers and acquisitions. They'll be using and understanding securities analysts' reports and teleconferences. They'll be refining research and interviewing techniques, including how to engage aggressively and professionally with public relations professionals who write -- and spin -- corporate news. They'll develop analytic rigor, and find the human drama at the heart of the best business reporting.
By the course's end, students will produce spot news stories of 250-400 words on deadline in class; mid-length news stories of 500-800-words; and long form features of 1,000-1,200 words as a final project.
Students will learn "“ paraphrasing Genentech founder Bob Swanson "“ to tell "the sizzle from the steak." As an instructor, I'll work to convey my conviction that their readers and listeners will include investors, physicians and patients whose lives and fortunes depend on their stories.
J255: Law and Ethics
An introduction to the legal and ethical conflicts faced by working reporters. Half of the semester will concentrate on First Amendment and media law, including libel and slander, privacy, free press/fair trial conflicts, and civil lawsuits arising from controversial reporting methods. The remainder of the semester will focus on ethical dilemmas faced by reporters and editors. Using case studies, in-class argument, readings and guest lecturers, the course examines some of the murkier conflicts that don?t necessarily make it to court but nevertheless force difficult newsroom decision-making.
J294: Master's Project Seminar
J294 is a 2 semester course (1 unit/Fall, 1 unit/Spring). You must register for both semesters and it must be taken for a grade.
J298: Key Issues with Faculty and Campus Experts
Class Begins September 18th.
The difference between an adequate journalist and a good one is knowing enough to find the powerful stories and knowing how to anchor those stories with more than just quotes from the usual suspects. KEY ISSUES will give you an overview of subjects you'll be covering in one way or another for the rest of your career. With support from the Carnegie Foundation, we've brought together JSchool faculty members, other UC professors and professionals to give you the background you need on local state and federal budgets, economics, health care policy, immigration issues and foreign policy.
Each segment will have a set of reading materials and/or videos to view. Those will be posted on the Key Issues website that you'll all have access to in the next week or handed out as readings by the GSR's attached to each J200 section. Attendance is mandatory; students will be asked to sign in for each class.
The first class begins September 18, and don't forget that we meet in Room 3108 Etcheverry Hall, the building across the street.
Here is a list of lecture topics and speakers. Please contact Lydia Chavez or Susan Rasky if you have any questions.
Friday, September the 18 The first session: Nexis Searching, Rob Gunnison, Tom Peele
Friday, September25 State and local Budget Basics - Jean Ross, California Budget Project, John Decker, CA State Treasurer's Office.
October 2 – Ellen Weiss from NPR - location to be determined
October 9 The economy Part 1 Dr, Martha Olney, Econ Dept lecturer, UCB
October 16 The economy Part 2 Martha Olney
October 23 Heath Care Reform Policy— Prof. Steve Shortell, dean UC Berkeley School of Public Health
October 30 Health Care Reform Politics - Measuring and Manipulating Public Opinion - MollyAnn Brodie, Dir. Surveys and Public Opinion Research Kaiser Family Foundation
November 6 Immigration Overview - Tyche Hendricks
November 13 Foreign policy - Latin America - Spkr tbd
November 20 Foreign Policy Pakistan and Afghanistan: Spkr tbd
November 27 Thanksgiving NO CLASS
December 4: TBD