Online Courses, Spring 2019

Journalism 300 introduces students to basic reporting and newswriting skills, including interviewing, researching public records, fact-checking and much more. This class includes numerous reporting and writing assignments.

Prerequisite for matriculated UMass Amherst students: EngWrit 112. If you are not a regular UMass Amherst student and you would like to enroll in Journ 300, please contact the UMass CPE Records & Registration Office (413-545-3653 or regoff@cpe.umass.edu) as soon as possible. 

This is a required course to earn the Certificate of Journalism.

This course explores the challenges and issues facing journalists covering global affairs. Students will learn about intercultural communication, overcoming biases in reporting, and the use of social media as a platform for news reporting. They will also examine the work of foreign correspondents from a critical perspective. Through a mixture of readings and news writing, the course will broaden students' understanding of current affairs on the global stage.

In Introduction to Visual Storytelling, students will become better producers and consumers of visual media. Students will develop a deeper visual literacy by studying topics like visual ethics, aesthetics, agency, and the currents of the modern visual journalism ecosystem. By reporting their own video, photography and data visualization projects, students will learn how to control exposure with a DSLR camera, how to capture quality video and how to use different editing and production software.

This course addresses the principles and practices of public relations and strategic communication in the public, private, for-profit and no-profit arenas. Course includes lectures, readings, multimedia viewings and student-engaged, collaborative and classroom and online learning methods. 

The roles and responsibilities of today's PR practitioners are expanding. PR Professionals must understand and embrace how to integrate social media communications with overall business communications, learn different ways to engage with customers and other stakeholders and navigate a changing media landscape with new technology that drives consumer news consumption. This course examines the role of today's communicators who are developing new strategic approaches to the practice of PR.  Students will learn how to research and evaluate various types of 2.0 collaborative technologies, monitor conversations for reputation and crisis management, develop social media objectives and strategies for integrated communications programs, create and manage the social media communications process, identify opportunities to engage via different networks, develop content for deeper interactions with stakeholders, and use different types of measurement to gauge communications success.  The class will focus on how to align strategic PR and social media programs with higher level business goals and objectives.

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 class will help you learn what makes magazine journalism different from newspaper journalism. Unlike newspaper writing, magazines often demand that a journalist bring both authority and a point of view to the work. We workshop each student's paper, so each student is expected to think as an editor as well as a writer. There is substantial reading required from magazine anthologies, plus your fellow students' work. We will learn how to do the type of research necessary to produce a magazine article, and work hard to improve writing and analytical skills. Weekly writing and reporting assignments, plus one 3000-4000 word magazine feature that will require extensive field work and interviewing.