The Reporting & Writing courses at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY prepare students to produce powerful journalism amid the ever-shifting media landscape.

The required first-semester Craft of Journalism course, which provides foundational instruction centered on detailed coverage of neighborhoods across the city, introduces students to vital tenets of ethics, storytelling and research that apply in all media formats. This is where your journey as a reporter for the nationally honored NYCity News Service begins.

Students who later join the Advanced Reporting for the South Bronx class take on beats ranging from housing, food insecurity and health to transportation, education and the arts for the J-School’s Mott Haven Herald and Hunts Point Express news sites, their social platforms and the South Bronx Update newsletter.

Feature Writing and Narrative Writing electives stress in-depth reporting and delve into analyses of great writing. Students meet top journalists as guests. These courses also put a premium on packaging, pitching and selling your work.

The burgeoning field of Solutions Journalism is explored in an advanced class that employs rigorous reporting to examine how individuals and communities are addressing chronic and acute social problems in ways that can be replicated around the city and across the country.

Investigative Reporting, an intensive capstone course, utilizes the advanced reporting, writing, organizational, analytical and critical-reasoning skills that are the basis of investigative journalism. Using New York City as a laboratory, each student is assigned an investigative story with the goal of producing a substantial multimedia project and pitching it for publication.

In National Political Reporting, students learn to produce well-reported, sophisticated and nuanced accounts of the maneuverings that shape lives. In Opinion Writing, students write pieces aimed at opening or changing minds about the most-contentious local, state, national and international issues.

Students in Editing the News do hands-on work across the wide range of techniques employed in the modern newsroom, exploring ethical decision-making and leadership in the design and production of text, images, video and data for news sites and social platforms.

Special-topics courses include offerings such as Reporting on Race, in which students produce a main reporting assignment and also build a collaborative manual for covering race and identity that reflects historical context, sensitivity to stereotypes and awareness of the damage wrought by racism.