Journalism Career Workshop

Our Journalism Program will be taught by Darren Sands, an award-winning reporter from News Day, with guest speakers from the New York Times, InStyle, the NBC Nightly News, the Associated Press, and other distinguished publications.

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The class of 20-25 students, a roving newsroom, will be expected to be ready to report stories and cover spot news – news that happens unexpectedly – and produce high-quality pieces fit for publication. The program will be part-classroom, part-newsroom with an experienced reporter as the facilitator of classroom sessions, and the managing and assigning editor. The class will publish an online newspaper that reports on a range of issues relevant to high school students in the local area and across the globe.

Students will be asked to think critically about why truth telling and accuracy are important. This workshop will begin with a strong emphasis on journalism ethics. We will examine carefully the New York Times, and seek to establish a working knowledge of how the world’s best newsgathering operation works. What does, “All the news that’s fit to print” mean? We will do a 20-minute examination of the front page of the paper each day; 10 minutes each with both the nytimes.com and the print edition. What new media techniques are the most effective? Will we live in a world without newspapers? What does the perfect marriage between a solid journalistic foundation and the 24-hour news cycle look like in the current state of the industry? Students will be encouraged to design and implement their own ideas about how to deliver news in this environment. Students will examine how bloggers and reporters use hyper-local search sites like EveryBlock and Craigslist, as well as social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter to break news, share content and stay abreast of the day’s events.

Program Objectives

Speaker's Bureau

Syllabus Excerpt

Day 7

A. Morning news meeting.

B. Today we'll discuss beat reporting through the prism of sports. We'll have Katie Strang, who covers the New York Islanders for Newsday. She’ll discuss what it's like to cover the same subject and the same people over an elongated period of time. How do you avoid repetitiveness? How do you get fresh information from the people you're competing with?

**DRILL** Choose two pieces of reporting from the day's newspapers or from the web on the same beat. Identify what the reporters in the story did differently. Are the quotes the same? Draw from your notes/comments in the morning news meeting to identify which stories you might use.

LUNCH

Tour of CNN!

Day 8

I. Morning news meeting.

Good, knowledgeable sources can be the most important tool a journalist can have to be successful at producing effective, noteworthy pieces. Bob Woodard and Carl Bernstein didn’t break stories by sitting at their desk and making calls all day. They broke the Watergate story by working the phones, yes, but also by hitting the pavement and figuring out who was who and who knew what.

What goes into creating good sources in one’s portfolio? How do you avoid getting trapped in a source’s agenda? And when should anonymous sources be used?