This course is designed to offer a framework for understanding the processes involved in news production and its impact on public opinion. We will examine various social forces that shape news content, including individual, political, economic, and institutional factors. We will also examine research and theory on the implications of today's new media environment, with a focus on its relationship with citizens' engagement in public life.

Students will learn basic concepts and techniques of studio television production, with a focus on directing live programs in a full-scale studio facility on the UMASS campus. The course includes lecture presentations, production exercises, script-writing projects, and studio production projects. Finally, each student will write, produce, and direct a live studio production.

This course examines policies, laws and regulations affecting legacy and digital media, including media ownership, universal service, intellectual property, advertising, online privacy, free speech, media diversity and digital content creation. Students are introduced to practices of public interest advocacy and media technology policy-making in the U.S.

This course looks at advertising from the viewpoint of social theory (that is, of how we can understand advertising's broad political, economic, social, and cultural role in modern society).

This course is a graded introduction to the Communication major, designed to welcome advanced transfer students into the program and address some of their specific needs. This course builds on prior college experiences and introduces students to resources for upper-level UMass Communication majors.

This graduate seminar is designed as a research workshop, in which students not only learn about the principles behind quantitative content analysis methodology but will also design, carry out, and write up a collaborative content analysis research project. We will read about the method, critique published studies that use the method, and devote much of our class time to advance our own co-authored content analysis project(s).

Audiences for mass media are notoriously difficult to define, find, and study because they are dispersed, shifting, and interact with media in complex ways. This course will look at how both the academy and media industries come to claim knowledge and understanding of audiences, in terms of their theoretical and methodological approaches. Topics will include debates about audience power and activity, audience segmentation, how audiences have changed over time, rhetorical uses of ?the audience,? and the distinction between audiences and markets.

Citizenships and belongings are unstable, dynamic, ongoing sites of struggle that animate one another. This course looks at citizenships and belongings as communication practices that include and produce multiple and competing discourses, relations, and lived experiences. Using critical women of color, feminist, queer and performance theories, the course begins and centers questions on citizenships and belongings from and through their systemic exclusions, namely those whose subjectivities, bodies, identities and relations place them outside the bounds of the norm.

A hands-on workshop in the production of documentary films. Students will learn about the art and craft of non-fiction filmmaking and create two to three short documentaries using high definition video and Adobe Premiere editing suites.

Not available at this time