J219 Kickstarting Your Career

“Kickstarting Your Career” is designed to give students the real-world skills necessary to thrive in the journalism industry that fall outside the scope of their academic coursework. The acquisition of these skills will help increase the likelihood that students will be equipped to make a smooth transition into the working world, prepared to endure the…

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J219 Open Source Investigative Reporting 1/29 – 3/19

This 8-week course will teach the methods of open source investigations with a focus on developing a story on improprieties in the microfinance world. Students will learn and employ the tools and techniques of open source investigations—including social media search and monitoring, verification, geolocation, visualization, resiliency, and ethics. The class will contribute to a publishable…

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J219 Frontline Associate Producer 1/29 – 3/19

This course will train students in the basic skills needed to work on a professional Frontline production for national broadcast. With Frontline’s high journalistic and production standards for documentaries, these would be skills that students could take into any newsroom or independent producing project. Class will consist of quick turnaround assignments, paired with real world…

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J298 Writing with Power

This course aims to develop and sharpen your writing in a small seminar environment. We’ll spend the first classes discussing voice and tone, clarity and brevity, pace and precision, dialogue and detail, with a novelist’s eye. Then we’ll turn the lens on your own work, using pieces you’re working on for your other classes –…

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J298 Police Reporting and Media Narratives

Police Reporting and Media Narratives: To better understand the tensions between law enforcement and communities of color, the course would examine cops, courts and incarceration. It would acquaint students with the enigma of declining rates of violent crime when prison populations have risen. It would also look at police killings of unarmed suspects.

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J298 San Quentin Editing

The San Quentin News Editing Project gives student journalists hands-on experience inside a prison newsroom to help publish the award-winning San Quentin News, the only newspaper of its kind in the country. Now entering its seventh year of existence, the editing class has not only sharpened the editing and writing skills of many Berkeley students,…

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J298 – Race & Journalism

Race is an element in most stories, whether you’re covering #blacklivesmatter protests, presidential elections or city council meetings. You can’t accurately report on anything, let alone race, without understanding this country’s history and how white supremacy permeates everything. (“When we use the term white supremacy it doesn’t just evoke white people, it evokes a political…

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J298 – Developing your Blockbuster Investigative Story

Your Blockbuster Investigation This is an intense year-long seminar that aims to help students conceive, execute and publish ambitious investigative journalism with the full support of the Investigative Reporting Program. Students are challenged to identify an investigative project they are passionate about and then they are given the editing, mentoring and financial support to do…

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J298 Advanced Narrative Writing

News is news: “US, Canada Go To War; Naval Battles in Great Lakes” or “J-School Lecturer Nabbed in Bank Heist.” A reader will read to the end of such a story no matter how badly it’s written. But how do you attract the attention of a busy, distracted reader to a story that doesn’t contain…

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