Curriculum
In Magazine: Courses Faculty Careers Events
Magazine Courses
The following Magazine 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.
J226: Following the Food Chain
It might be hard to see what transpire between a child and Big Mac as an ecological event, but of course that's exactly what it is. Like every other creature, we are a species connected to other species, as well as to the earth and the sun, by a food chain-albeit a very special sort of food chain, one that's been shaped by political and economic decisions as much as by biology. This course aims to develop the intellectual context in which to understand, and connect, the many food stories now finding their way to the front page: GMOs, the obesity epidemic, factory farming, animal rights and welfare, antibiotic resistance, agricultural pollution, agricultural subsidies, third world hunger, and the rise of alternatives to the industrial food system, such as organic agriculture and "slow food." Expect to do lots of reading (from Upton Sinclair and Rachel Carson to Wendell Berry and Eric Schlosser) and writing.
J226: Narrative Science Journalism
The focus of the course will be on making the transition from writing for newspapers to magazines, with particular attention to scientific subjects. What's the difference between a subject and a story? When is the first-person appropriate? What is the role of the editor and publication in shaping your story? The arc of the course will trace the process of writing a single long piece involving science reporting: finding and pitching story ideas; reporting in depth and at length; outlining and structuring your story; choosing a narrative voice and strategy, crafting leads and "overtures," and making transitions between your story and its larger contexts. As a group, we'll also work as editors on one another's ideas and pieces. And since reading good prose is the best way to learn to write it, we'll be closely reading a substantial piece of science journalism each week. This workshop is designed especially for second years embarking on a written master's project; students will be expected to complete a first draft of a magazine-length piece by the end of the term.
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.
J243: Tackling the Long Form Story
This advanced reporting course for second-years is aimed at the master's project, but welcomes anyone interested in learning to conceive and report newspaper and magazine stories intended to run at 3000 to 8000 words. If you've ever taken on projects like this, you know that the challenge of the sustained piece is not just in the writing; it begins long before that, when you have to figure out your broader story, your immediate story, your structural possibilities, your narrative lines, your target home for the piece you have in mind--and, because of all that, the nature of the reporting itself.
There are two ways to take this class -- TLF, and for a few extra people an abridged version called TLF/Reading.
1. TLF (3 units, maximum 10) is the class I've taught for some years now: one 3-hour class per week. Readings, which are heavy, include profiles, book excerpts, Pulitzer-winning newspaper features, magazine pieces from a variety of outlets. Lots of close examination of technique; I like to take stories apart and study things like transitional devices, narrative power, the elements of a strong opening, challenges in handling time, and funneling material in and out (you'll see what that means).
While you are in this class, expect to be spending a lot of concentrated time reporting your story. (See below, Restrictions & Prerequisites, for specifics.) Don't plan to take any other courses this semester involving heavy reporting. Writing assignments start in early September: reporting memos, story pitches, character studies, narrative scenes, experimental leads and closings, etc. Your intensive reporting time is September and the first three weeks of October; first draft due in early November.
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CCN 48234 1 units J219 Section 006
2. TLF/Reading (2 unit, 9 weeks, pass/no pass only) will be offered for a maximum of five more students who are interested in the reading & technical dissections but plan to be doing their own reporting & writing in other classes (including doc, radio, new media, etc.) These extra students will join the weekly class for the first 90 minutes, as we talk about the reading material, and only until late October. There are no prerequisites for this version, but if you sign up, I'll count on you to read everything carefully and speak your mind in class.
If you're sure you want Reading Only, you do NOT need to answer the questions below--just send me an email explaining you want Reading Only; register for TLF; and if there are too many of you Reading Only folks I'll draw straws. The system will tell you you're signing up for 3 units, but we'll figure out how to fix that.
J243: Renegades, Underdogs, Madmen: The Magazine Profile
Profiles are a remarkably versatile form. They can anchor the exploration of a novel world (the kingpin behind the spam email business), illuminate the dark side of human behavior (the prison psychologist who devised the Army's torture guidelines), or act as a gateway into an epic drama (the drug war in Mexico framed through the life of a professional hostage negotiator). They're also marketable "“ magazine editors love them "“ and unusually fun. At its purest, a good profile often becomes a kind of detective story: the investigation of another person's hidden, and potentially contradictory, internal world.
Reporting from this world can be an adventure, with challenges that vary depending on whether the subject is a celebrity (movie star, athlete, politician) or a "regular" person. Because profiles don't always have an obvious plot, they also require a different strategy in order to build interest and sustain momentum. We'll take a close look at how to do this, starting with the critical choice of who to write about. (As Ira Glass once observed, "It's true that everybody has a story to tell. But most of those stories aren't very interesting.") Connecting to, but remaining independent from, the person you're writing about can also be tricky, both personally and ethically "“ an issue we'll discuss as it relates to your own pieces.
Expectations: Readings will be wide-ranging, eccentric, and sometimes funny. All will shed light on how to represent another person with insight and nuance: a skill central to most any long-form story. Writing assignments will begin with a 500-word "test" profile, and finish with a 3000-word story, the subject of which will be vetted through a written and oral pitch to the class. We'll edit this pitch over the semester as the story sharpens, with an eye to magazine submission. We'll also host various guests "“ including writers and editors from the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and the New York Times Magazine "“ to get the dish on game-changing profiles from the people who wrote them.
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.
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
J254: Opinion Writing: The Reported Column
So you know how to write a news lead, a sassy blog, and maybe even the not-half-bad-top of a feature. Now you need to think about writing with perspective and authority, about how to go one level deeper in a voice very different from the neutral (or snarky) one you've developed so far. This is an advanced reporting course designed to help students sharpen their writing and analytical skills in a format that demands clarity of thought and economy of words. We will begin where all good writing begins, with solid, efficient reporting on a range of social and cultural topics. We'll experiment with voice and style to see how pithy, insightful and profound we can be - about big issues and small ones - in about 400 (for broadcast commentary) to 850 polished words each week. Columnists, editorial writers and OP-Ed page editors and a radio producer will be popping in to critique our offerings. The idea is to develop both a body of work and a base of outlets who like what we have to say. The first assignment is a reported RANT, so come to class all worked up about something.
J219: Tackling the Long Form Story--Reading Section Only
See Tackling the Long Form Story course description for details and registration.
J24: Opinion Writing
This is a class to help students with journalistic interests sharpen their writing and analytical skills in a format that demands clarity of thought and economy of words. We will begin where all good writing begins, with solid, efficient reporting on a range of social and cultural topics. We'll experiment with voice and style to see how pithy, insightful and profound we can be-about big issues and small ones-in about 400 (for broadcast commentary) to 850 polished words every week or two. Weekly readings and finished opinion pieces will be posted to a student website. Students will be required to submit one 800 word piece to the Berkeley Political Review. Enrollment is limited to twelve freshmen. Students with journalistic interest or background are encouraged to enroll.
J298: Journalism in a time of disruptive change
With the long-standing economic foundation for much of journalism under assault, students planning media careers must understand the business of the businesses that support journalism. Further, they need to learn the new roles and innovative skills that will equip them to contribute to the future vitality and viability of a strong and independent press. This course will acquaint students with the economic fundamentals of the media business and then concentrate on providing them with a deep and practical understanding of the three factors that define the success for any media venture: Audience building, content development and revenue generation.
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.