3. Course Description

From the Catalog:

Study of the roles of the journalist in society, the types of journalism, the newsgathering process, and journalism history.

Whether you want to work as a journalist, you see your future as working with words but not necessarily as a news reporter, or you are preparing to be an English teacher, this course will give you a foundation for writing quick, lean, and accurate prose.

As practiced and understood by journalists in the early 21st century, news writing can be seen as the highly-developed craft of non-fiction storytelling. Ideally, journalism is a public-service information-generating profession that generates and distributes timely information and expert opinion through balanced, accurate and thorough reporting.

But journalism can also be described as a personality-driven entertainment industry that stokes the public's fears and feeds its appetite for gossip and scandal, via aggressive, hyped, ego-driven or money-driven reporting. Journalism is a business, which means that journalists must deliver a product that generates income; news organizations are thus tied to corporate interests that influence the representation of news. Journalists face constant pressure to simplify complex information (particularly in science and medicine) so that a channel-surfing and page-scanning public will rely upon on friendly, familiar TV news anchors to interpret the world for them.

In the past few years, a do-it-yourself, non-commercial cultural activity known as citizen journalism or grass-roots journalism (most recently typified in weblogs) has changed the news from a lecture to a discussion. The change has tremendous implications for the traditional providers of news, as well as the general public.