March 27, 2008

The CUNY Graduate School of Journalism will offer a new concentration in international reporting beginning in the Spring 2009 semester. This will be the fifth area of expertise students can choose to pursue at the school. The others are arts and culture, business and economics, health and medicine, and urban affairs.

"International issues loom large in our lives—everything from war and terrorism to trade and immigration," says Dean Stephen B. Shepard. "Journalists need special training to cover these issues and so we’re delighted to add a special concentration in international reporting."

The new program will be headed up by Associate Professor Lonnie Isabel, a former deputy managing editor of the New York newspaper, Newsday. Isabel recently returned from a 17-day trip to Jordan to teach and mentor working journalists there.

The school will draw upon New York City’s wealth of resources, including the United Nations, dozens of editors and reporters of foreign news, and diverse immigrant populations, to prepare students for the rigors of international reporting. A board of advisers made up of locally-based journalists will help keep the program current.

To complete the requirements for this concentration, students must take three courses and secure a summer internship at the U.N. or at a news organization in Washington or overseas. The three courses will be:

INTRODUCTION TO INTERNATIONAL REPORTING

An overview of the basic tenets of international reporting, this course will have students covering the United Nations, U.S. foreign policy, diplomacy, and global economic and health issues. They will also learn to report international issues from the bottom up, through coverage of immigrants and refugees in New York. The course will review war coverage, press censorship and repression worldwide, and the emergence of the Web in international coverage.

CROSS-CULTURAL REPORTING

This course will provide in-depth training in reporting across cultural lines. Students will immerse themselves in one or more of the many ethnic and national groups concentrated in New York. Learning customs, communication styles, political attitudes, family life, and history, the students will cover these communities from the vantage point of international correspondents. Analysis of accounts from reporters overseas will also feature prominently in the course.

TOPICS IN INTERNATIONAL REPORTING

This comprehensive, project-oriented course will target one or more newsy regions overseas for coverage, either through a class project or individual assignments. Students will be required to do extensive research and reporting to produce work that could constitute a capstone project.