Investigative Reporting

Catalog description

It will teach you how to go beyond the day-to-day journalism done in newsrooms and how to bring context and meaning to all your stories. It will teach you how to improve your credibility and accuracy by using documents and databases, by interviewing more effectively, and by getting out into the field. You will use primary and secondary sources - people sources, paper sources, electronic documents and databases, both online and offline. You will read investigative journalism to see how the professionals craft their stories. You will learn how to organize your material and then write a compelling story that covers not only the who, what, when and where, but also the why, the how and the “so what?” If you work hard at this course, you should be capable of doing better journalism than most journalists do. This cours is intended to be extremely practical, while at the same time causing you to think deeply about the stories you do and why you do them.