This course explores career development as students start to prepare for life beyond UMass. Topics include career options for journalism majors; resumes, cover letters and networking; job search techniques and preparation. This course provides a structure and supportive environment for helping students define and pursue their career goals.

This class is designed to help you understand the principles of broadcast presentation, including procedures and methods to use the voice, face and body as tools for communicating. There will be an emphasis on performing journalism on television, radio and online media. Through in-class exercises, drills and homework assignments, students will develop and practice skills for narration and on camera news delivery, including field reporting and in-studio anchoring. Upon completion of this class, students should be comfortable performing on-mic and on-camera.

This course aims to provide students with a framework for critically examining the intersections between media messages, the digital revolution and the wider sociocultural environment. That journalism has been profoundly impacted by the development of Web 2.0 applications is nowadays axiomatic. However, the precise ways in which such ?new media? phenomena as Facebook & Twitter, the personal blog and the smart phone have transformed news gathering, packaging and dissemination still need to be researched and understood.

This course continues the work begun in Community Journalism Project, an intermediate reporting class that sends students to ghettos, barrios and poor white and working class communities in the region. Includes intensive fieldwork, substantial newswriting and devotion the reading.

In this class, students will become explorers, arbiters and communicators of culture. That includes a wide variety of journalistic beats, such as music, food, film, television, art, travel and fashion. By developing cultural journalism skills, students will learn how to assess and diagnose what art is worth consuming and what is not, what audiences need to know and what they do not and how best to communicate all of the above. And they will learn how to cover culture in a variety of ways, including reporting, criticism and first-person essay writing.

This course will develop an understanding of the ethical questions raised by media coverage in a democratic society at a time of focus on profit over news values and on entertainment over substance. Issues discussed will include: accuracy and fairness, diversity, conflicts of interest, privacy, deception, relationships with sources and photojournalism. We will also learn to identify news values--or lack of them--both as professionals and as consumers. Satisfies the Integrative Experience requirement for BA-Journ majors.

This course will develop an understanding of the ethical questions raised by media coverage in a democratic society at a time of focus on profit over news values and on entertainment over substance. Issues discussed will include: accuracy and fairness, diversity, conflicts of interest, privacy, deception, relationships with sources and photojournalism. We will also learn to identify news values--or lack of them--both as professionals and as consumers. Satisfies the Integrative Experience requirement for BA-Journ majors.

Students will become familiar with legal concepts underlying freedom of the press: censorship, obscenity, libel, privacy, free press/fair trial, contempt, access and other legal problems affecting the mass media. The case study approach generally is used, but emphasis is on the principles and philosophy underlying various aspects of communication law as these affect the daily work of journalists.

This class is where documentary filmmaking and traditional journalism meet. People often look at news for the headlines and see little bits of the news. Here, we give them more depth, alternate perspectives, ask deeper questions and look to the future with long form storytelling. David Wilson, a co-founder of the True/False Film Festival calls this a "new era of journalism" and says, "We are getting away from the 'voice of God' narration.

Successful online storytelling requires more than just a good story. In this course, students will learn basic web design and development skills to better pursue their journalism goals online. Topics covered include basic design principles, HTML, CSS, working with images, logo design, typography and how to incorporate external plugins and modules.