Students in this advanced multimedia reporting course make a difference in the South Bronx. Taking on beats ranging from housing, food insecurity and health to transportation, education and the arts, you’ll gain hands-on experience in a real-world newsroom.
You’ll make use of engagement journalism and community-listening techniques to inform your work in neighborhoods where stories affecting under-covered communities abound. You’ll deliver news and essential community information for the Mott Haven Herald and Hunts Point Express news sites, their social platforms and the South Bronx Update newsletter. Content will be produced in text, audio, video and interactive formats, in English and Spanish.
All students will take a turn in the editor’s chair, supervised by Editor Joe Hirsch, to practice responding to news quickly and working with a content management system. It’s a great opportunity to bolster your portfolio across media with published work—and get the invigorating experience of working for a vital local news outlet.
Students in this course will:
- Utilize advanced reporting and engagement techniques to produce in-depth work
- Learn a variety of new formats for telling stories in the digital age
- Sharpen skills at reporting and revising stories quickly, for timely distribution
- See the impact of their reporting on real people and policy and in capturing audience attention
- Understand the critical role community news sites play in restoring trust in journalism
- Highlight voices and concerns of individuals and communities routinely ill-served by media
- Build upon data and research skills to bolster their reporting
- Work as a team to produce a special report about an important local issue selected by the class
Requirement: Students in both the MA-Journalism and the MA-Engagement Journalism are required to publish at least one piece of work each semester in Craft 1 and Advanced Reporting courses (MAJ) and Reporting for Engagement J and Advanced Reporting for Engagement J (MA-EJ). Students can fulfill this requirement with work from any first or second-semester class.