The CUNY Graduate School of Journalism offers 15-week courses, and 5-week and 10-week modules across a range of interactive, data and multimedia Journalism disciplines. You have an opportunity to specialize in these critical areas of journalism. http://bit.ly/fall2016electives
Courses are 15-week, or semester long, 3-credit courses while modules are one-credit per 5-week session.
View all fall 2016 electives here. Or you can explore our Interactive offerings by topics and/or by type of offering (course or module):
Data Visualization
Coding for Interactivity
Information Design
15-week Courses
10-week Modules
5-week Modules
Note:
We recommend you take at least three 1-credit modules to add up to a complete course (3 credits)
Some modules are prerequisites for modules offered later in the semester or next fall. For example, to take the Javacript/jQuery module, you must have taken the HTML/CSS module.
Advanced Coding: Tapping JavaScript Libraries for Graphics, Data and Interactivity
Now that you have a foundation in JavaScript programming, you are ready to extend its power by using JavaScript libraries like D3 (Data-Driven Documents), Underscore.js and Jquery.
D3 and Underscore.js are ideally suited for visualizations and interactivity in journalism (their creators are journalist-developers who until recently worked for The New York Times).
Students will also learn to find and evaluate other libraries to determine if they could help streamline the development of an interactive or data-driven project .
Prerequisites:
Advanced interactive craft or HTML/CSS and JavaScript modules a must.
The CUNY Graduate School of Journalism offers 15-week courses and 5-week modules across a range of Interactive and Multimedia Journalism disciplines. You have an opportunity to specialize in these critical areas of journalism. http://bit.ly/electives2016
Courses are 15-week, or semester long, 3-credit courses while modules are are 5-week sessions that are a credit each.
View all spring 2016 electives here. Or you can explore our Interactive offerings by topics and/or by type of offering (course or module):
Data Visualization
Coding for Interactivity
Information Design
15-week Courses
5-week Modules
Note:
We recommend you take at least 3 modules to add up to a complete course (3 credits)
Some modules are prerequisites for modules offered later in the semester or next fall. For example, to take the Javacript/jQuery module, you must have taken the HTML/CSS module.
We swim in a world of data – from election results, budgets, and census reports, to Facebook updates and image uploads. Journalists need to know how to find stories in data and shape them in compelling ways. This hands-on course teaches you how to gather, analyze, and visualize interactive data-driven stories.
This rapidly expanding discipline touches on information and interactivity design, mapping, graphing, animation tools, and data analysis.
Participants are expected to pitch, report, and produce stories working alone and in teams.
You’ll learn to use online Web tools such as Google Fusion Tables, Refine, and Maps, and integrate them in a non code-intensive development environment. Familiarity with HTML/CSS is helpful, but not required. This is not a course in coding, but programmers of all skill levels are welcome.
Prerequisites: None
5-Week Module: Editorial User Experience & Interaction Design
via GIPHY
“UX is the speciality of design explicitly concerned with interaction—the back and forth between person and need… it’s something that’s relevant to everyone in the newsroom.”
- David Sleight, Design Director at ProPublica
Design is not just about how something looks – it’s about how it works. And that working (or not working) is what we refer to when we talk about user experience (UX), user interface (UI), and interaction design.
As media outlets now depend on these users and compete for their time, creating better experiences is crucial to telling effective and useful journalistic stories.
This class will build upon the foundations of design, layout and composition taught in Design & Presentation and allow students to explore more deeply the role of the user in their journalistic projects.
Instructor: Lena Groeger is a news applications developer at ProPublica, where she builds data-driven interactive web applications and graphics. [full bio].
Courses are 15-week, or semester long, 3-credit courses while modules are are 5-week sessions that are a credit each.
View all spring 2015 electives here. Or you can explore our Interactive offerings by topics and/or by type of offering (course or module):
Data Visualization
Coding for Interactivity
Information Design
Engagement
15-week Courses
5-week Modules
Note:
We recommend you take at least 3 modules to add up to a complete course (3 credits)
Some modules are prerequisites for modules offered later in the semester or next fall. For example, to take the Javacript/jQuery module, you must have taken the HTML/CSS module. And in order to take “News Games & Quizzes” in the fall, you must have taken all the coding modules during the spring.
Questions about sequences, courses and modules, contact Sandeep Junnarkar
Students learn to hack WordPress templates to create the exact look and functionality their project requires. Students use HTML and CSS to create derivatives of existing templates — child themes — or build themes from scratch with starter themes.
In the five in-class production sessions, students will edit and produce projects using material they bring with them to class.
WordPress has become such a common tool that employers now expect job seekers to already know it just as they expect people to know popular tools from Microsoft, Adobe and Google. Ironically, it's less of a big deal that you know WordPress than it is if you don't know it. It's fundamental now. Get it under your belt. Take this module.
Courses are 15-week, or semester long, 3-credit courses while modules are are 5-week sessions that are a credit each.
View all fall 2014 electives here. Or you can explore our Interactive offerings by topics and/or by type of offering (course or module):
Data Visualization
Coding for Interactivity
Information Design
Engagement
Mobile
15-week Courses
5-week Modules
Note:
We recommend you take at least 3 modules to add up to a complete course (3 credits)
Some modules are prerequisites for modules offered later in the semester or next fall. For example, to take Wordpress customization (Weeks 11-15) you must have taken HTML/CSS (Weeks 1-5). To take the Javacript/jQuery module, you have taken the HTML/CSS module. And in order to take “News Games & Quizzes” in the fall, you must have taken all the coding modules during the spring.
Questions about sequences, courses and modules, contact Sandeep Junnarkar
Special News Service Project Course: Hack the Mold
(Photo credit: Maria Villasenor)
Work closely with J-School faculty and journalists from the New York Daily News on a semester-long pioneering digital reporting effort to track the scourge of mold in New York City public housing developments.
The project, which recently received a $35,000 grant from the inaugural Challenge Fund for Innovation in Journalism Education, marks an opportunity to help produce cutting-edge journalism almost certain to attract national recognition. More importantly, it marks an opportunity to change the lives of some of the city’s most vulnerable citizens.
Many tenants have waited in vain, sometimes for years, for the New York City Housing Authority to answer requests to clean up toxic mold. The reporting project will employ digital engagement methods to track cleanup progress and help tenants tell their stories.
Students will experiment with new forms of crowdsourcing, while doing boots-on-the-ground reporting – gathering stories, media and data from NYCHA tenants. Some of the grant money will be used to test some apartments for mold, which can have serious health consequences for tenants, particularly children and senior citizens.
Students will work every step of the way with J-School faculty and The News, in news/information gathering and presentation. The product of the project will be represented in both The News’ print edition and website, as well as a J-School site spotlighting the ongoing effort.
This is not a classroom-driven course. The bulk of the work will be done in the field and in the newsrooms of the J-School and the Daily News, in keeping with grant’s call to explore the “teaching hospital” approach to journalism education – in short, teaming J-Schools with news outlets to produce hard-hitting, innovative digital journalism.
Go here to see the J-School’s grant application – one of only 12 winners recognized by the Online News Association, the Excellence and Ethics in Journalism Foundation, the Robert R. McCormick Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Democracy Fund.
If you have any questions at all, see or email Jere Hester ([email protected]) or Sandeep Junnarkar ([email protected]), who will lead the course with contributions from other faculty members.
Module: Advanced Social Media for Newsrooms: Working the Breaking Story
This advanced five-week elective will substantially expand your social media skills, testing them in the fires of a big developing deadline story with award-winning news partner and a leading crowdsourcing proponent - ProPublica.
Course Instructor: Assoc. Prof. A. Adam Glenn
Why should I take this course?
Because you want to compete in the job market by showing your facility with social media/engagement skills. News organizations ranging from big city outlets like The New York Times and WNYC to small-town papers like the Tuscaloosa News increasingly demand that their reporters use social media to gather, verify and share deadline news, whether same-day spot stories or major news unfolding over time. You must be able to do the same.
Didn’t I do this in the first semester?
If “practice makes perfect” doesn’t sell you, just know that this spring-only course aims to take you well beyond the basics gained in Interactive Fundamentals and Craft I. There you learned to use social media for smarter research and reporting, more effective distribution of their work, improved engagement with the pubic, and better brand-building. Now you’ll not only extend your mastery of the most common social media tools, and foster your exploration of the wide range of emerging social media platforms. You’ll also apply these techniques to a significant crowdsourcing project with a real news partner.
What’s the deal with the crowdsourcing project?
Working as a team on a single major news crowdsourcing campaign will let you put your increasingly sophisticated social media toolkit to the test. It means you’ll have to rapidly research, report, verify, publish and build engagement around stories produced on tight deadlines in a working newsroom environment. You’ll also learn how to assemble content from social media platforms into an online narrative multi-media story. Through this project, you will more fully grasp social media’s potential for deadline news purposes and grapple with the difficult choices social media journalism can entail, such as balancing speed and accuracy, or making ethical decisions on the fly about the use of social media content.
Specifically, what kinds of assignments are we talking about?
Assignments and newsroom labs, all working toward the major project with our partner, would likely include:
Using social media to research a major developing story - rapidly gathering story leads, sources and information via social media search
Using social media for reporting/crowdsourcing a big developing story - rapidly reporting a story using curation and user-generated information
Using social media for spot news research/reporting - quick turnaround on a same-day spot news story
Putting together a successful developing news project reported through social media - how to put the pieces together from project conception and story generation through reporting, distribution and engagement.
What will I get from the news partner?
With ProPublica as our partner, you’ll have a chance to work with one of journalism’s powerhouse newsrooms. In six years since its launch, this independent, non-profit investigative juggernaut has won two Pulitzers, a Peabody, top digital journalism accolades, and many other awards for its high-impact, public interest journalism (more).
You’ll get to rub shoulders with some of the industry’s top journalists, including senior engagement editor Amanda Zamora, who was previously national digital editor for The Washington Post, as well as its first social media and engagement editor.
And ProPublica is a recognized innovator in crowdsourcing, our focus. Take a look at some of its projects:
Share Your Six Words on Race and Education: Segregation Now/The Race Card Project
Share Your Story with Us: Has Your Loved One Lived In an Assisted Living Facility?
Crowdsourcing Campaign Spending: What We Learned From Free the Files.
Are You a U.S. Military Vet Who Can’t Obtain War Records?Tell Us Your Story
How do I find out more?
Watch for a short video, to be posted after the electives presentation. And sign up for a a Facebook group we’ll form for the class to help you keep up with news about our plans. Or get in touch directly with instructor Adam Glenn at [email protected].
Prerequisites
This course has no prerequisites, but assumes mastery of the social media rudiments taught in Fundamentals of Multimedia Storytelling-Interactive and Craft I. At the same time, the course will provide a deeper and more consistent exposure to the practice of social media journalism than is integrated into Craft II-Interactive. This course is also designed to complement the other Advanced Social Media module (Advanced Social Media: Winning Strategies for Enterprise Reporting).
Questions about this course? Contact Prof. Adam Glenn at [email protected]
Data-driven journalism is flourishing as more government agencies, nonprofits and research institutions and think tanks publish their data sets on the Internet. This data is most often available in a format that is easily downloaded and analyzed. The downside, however, is that nearly every journalist across the country has access to the same data.
To stand out, journalists need to find, gather and analyze interesting data that has not been neatly packaged. And there is a proliferation of such information tucked away on local, state and federal websites and on sites run by private companies.
This 10-week module will introduce you to the skills and programming needed to grab information like numbers, images, addresses, URLs, phone numbers and just about anything you can think of from the Internet and transfer that data into a structured format like a database or spreadsheet where it can be compared, analyzed.
Prerequisites: HTML/CSS & JavaScript/JQuery Modules OR Craft Advanced Interactive
Recommended Workshop: Introduction to Web Scraping with Minimal Coding
Instructor: TC McCarthy, director of interactive at Newsday
Most forms of Web journalism take long-existing news media formats like video, audio, photographs and transfer them to the Web. This course, however, offers our students an opportunity to break new ground by introducing audiences to news developments and complex policy stories by using games and quizzes as a form of Interactive storytelling.
A recent New York Times article underscored the importance of this form of storytelling pointing out that news games and quizzes draw the most traffic to news sites.
Courses are 15-week, or semester long, 3-credit courses while modules are are 5-week sessions that are a credit each.
View all spring 2014 electives here. Or you can explore our Interactive offerings by topics and/or by type of offering (course or module):
Visual Journalism
Data Visualization
Coding for Interactivity
Social Media
Mobile
15-week Courses
5-week Modules
Note:
We recommend you take at least 3 modules to add up to a complete course (3 credits)
Some modules are prerequisites for modules offered later in the semester or next fall. For example, to take Wordpress customization (Weeks 11-15) you must have taken HTML/CSS (Weeks 1-5) and Javascript/JQuery (Weeks 6-10). And in order to take "News Games & Quizzes" in the fall, you must have taken all the coding modules during the spring.
Some spring Interactive courses are prerequisites to fall courses. For example, in order to take Advanced Photojournalism with the New York Times Jim Estrin and CUNY's John Smock in the fall, you must have taken Introduction to Photojournalism in the spring.
Questions about sequences, courses and modules, contact Sandeep Junnarkar
Animation and motion graphics storytelling provides excellent opportunities to help news audiences understand complex stories in a dynamic and visual medium.
This 10-week module provides the foundation for storytelling with motion graphics and animation.
We’lll pull back the curtain on how motion graphics storytelling works: from pre production and storyboarding, to asset creation, to animation using industry standard tools (Adobe After Effects, Photoshop and Illustrator.)
Not only will we learn the tools, theory and discuss the medium in the specifics of a journalism context, but we will also create our own animated stories.
Examples include, animated infographics and data visualizations, kinetic typography, character animations, and visual animated explanations.
Following the session the students will have a firm grasp on the specific concerns of motion design and a roadmap for developing visual journalistic projects, as well as a finished project in hand.
Here are a few leading examples of motion graphics used by leading news organizations:
NYT: Bieber, Diplo, & Skrillex Make a Hit (The making of this NYTimes piece)
NYT: A Staggering Migration
NPR.org: A Campaign Map, Morphed By Money
NYTimes: Snow Fall
National Geographic: 7 Billion
Coal: A Love Story (Maybe You Have a Hard Time Seeing it)
A word from Graham Roberts, who could not be here for the presentations:
Journalism at its core is about telling compelling stories. That is what this class is going to be about. We will learn how to utilize visual language to derive clarity from complexity, and how to show with evidence, as opposed to telling, in order to communicate.
Prerequisites: None
Course Outline
Instructor:
Graham Roberts is a Graphics/Multimedia Editor at The New York Times. He creates work for both print and digital editions, along with a team of highly talented and creative individuals.
His work has been recognized by the Emmy's, the Society of News Design, Malofiej, the Online News Association, the Webby's, the Cooper Hewitt National Design Awards, the Peabody Awards, the Scripps Howard Awards and the Pulitzer Awards.
He studied in the Digital Media Design program at the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a Bachelors Degree in Science and Engineering
Courses are 15-week, or semester long, 3-credit courses while modules are are 5-week sessions that are a credit each.
Our newest addition: Motion Graphics Storytelling
You can explore our Interactive offerings by topics and/or by type of offering (course or module):
Visual Journalism
Data Visualization
Coding for Interactivity
Social Media
Mobile
15-week Courses
5-week Modules
Note:
We recommend you take at least 3 modules to add up to a complete course (3 credits)
Some modules are prerequisites for modules offered later in the semester or next fall. For example, to take Wordpress customization (Weeks 11-15) you must have taken HTML/CSS (Weeks 1-5) and Javascript/JQuery (Weeks 6-10). And in order to take "News Games & Quizzes" in the fall, you must have taken all the coding modules during the spring.
Some spring Interactive courses are prerequisites to fall courses. For example, in order to take Advanced Photojournalism with the New York Times Jim Estrin and CUNY's John Smock in the fall, you must have taken Introduction to Photojournalism in the spring.
If you are considering mixing and matching, here's the schedule for the module across the semester:
Questions about sequences, courses and modules, contact Sandeep Junnarkar
This five-week elective module will focus on building students’ interview skills by blending journalistic instruction with takeaways from other fields, to give students the confidence to adeptly interview in diverse situations.
As part of our exploration, students will be introduced to research and findings from other disciplines that also rely on interviewing: medicine, law, sociology, psychology, law enforcement, marketing, etc.
They will learn which interviewing techniques tend to produce the most substantive and accurate answers from sources, gleaned from research done by other fields. Through guest speakers, the reading of journalistic interviews and studies, fieldwork and workshopping, students will gain the knowledge to conduct the best interviews possible.
Prerequisite: None
Instructor: Sarah Kramer
Course Syllabus
Questions about this module? Contact Sandeep Junnarkar
