Syllabus

Dr. Christopher Anderson                    Tuesday, 6:30 –9:50
Office: 1P / Room 232A                    1P / Room 222
Office Hours:    Tuesday, 5:00 – 6:15, Wednesday, 2:00 – 3:15

Required Texts

• Andrew Boyd. Broadcast Journalism: Techniques for Radio and Television News. (make sure you get the paperback 6th edition).
• Online course reader of collected texts.

Course Learning Objectives

• To become proficient in the basics of writing and reporting for the broadcast media.
• To understand the current industry issues and legal debates surrounding the future of broadcast journalism.
• To understand the transition from a “one-to-many” to a “many to many” media system.
• To become a more intelligent consumer and producer of media content.

Course Description

What is broadcast journalism? How can we learn to be journalists operating in the fields of radio and television, especially when both these mediums are being radically transformed by the internet? What is the history of broadcasting, as a cultural, political, and journalistic force?  How has broadcast news been praised, or vilified? And what the heck is up with John Stewart? Is he a journalist? An activist? A comedian? What’s the difference?

This class will prepare you both for a journalistic career, and also will allow you to take your place as a media literate member of society. You’ll see that the title of the class is “From Broadcast to Narrowcast.” This should prepare you for the fact that many of the techniques we will be exploring here are ancient history, and that most of you will have to chart a new journalistic way forward on the world wide web.

Course Requirements

This is the grading breakdown for the course. To receive a passing grade for the class, students must meet all requirements. Missed assignments will automatically result in a failing grade.

Because this is both an upper-level college class and a practically oriented classes designed to train students in the latest techniques and skills of broadcast journalism, you will have both practically oriented assignments and scholarly readings. If you are confused by any of the readings, or are having trouble keeping up, please be certain to come see me in my office hours right away. This is also not a studio class, meaning that you will do more written script and reporting work than video production.

Participation (15%)
In Class Drill Assignments (20%)
Quizzes (15%)
Midterm Paper  (15%)
Group Project (15%)
Final  (20%)

General Class Structure

If you look ahead to your schedule of classes, you’ll see that this class consists of four basic elements: readings, lectures, drills, and discussion, and class screenings:

Readings: You will be expected to complete a number of readings over the course of the semester, and your knowledge of these readings will be tested on the midterm paper and on the final. Many of the readings will be found in this Broadcast Journalism: Techniques for Radio and Television News, by Andrew Boyd. The rest of your readings can be found online as part of your online course packet. You many want to print these readings out, so make sure you have access to a good printer when you download them.

Lectures: At least the early part of some classes will consist of a lecture and some general discussion of the topic at hand.  These lectures are not a substitute for the readings, but rather compliment and expand upon them.

Drills and Discussion: On many weeks, you will be given either an in-class work assignment that you will complete, or will be given a longer assignment as homework and then discuss in small groups. Usually, these discussions will occur in the second half of class, after the lectures. Sometimes, the entire assignment will be completed in class; other times, there will some limited homework given the week before class in the case of longer assignments.

Class Screenings: During other weeks, the lectures will be followed by an in-class screening. These screenings will directly relate to the subject mater at hand, and will often be followed by class discussion and conversation. It’s important to treat these media screenings as seriously as you would any other lecture or reading. They will be rigorously tested, as well.

Media Consumption: You will expected to watch, on a regularly basis: New York 1 (for 30 minutes a day), the NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams, and the Daily Show, with John Stewart. Most of these programs are available online, so if you can’t watch them everyday, you can catch up with them on the internet. This is not an optional assignment; the best way to learn how to do journalism is to consume journalism, and you will be tested on this material.

MidTerm Paper

Instead of a mid-term, you will be assigned a mid-term writing assignment in early November that will count 15% of your final grade. The topic of the paper will relate to the New York Mayoral election.

Group Project

You will have a group project due on December 8th that will be worth 15% of your final grade. The details of the project will be announced at a later date.

Final

The final will count for 30% of your grade, and will be given on a date TBA.  The final exam will be cumulative; you will need to know all of the material we have covered in class.

Quizzes

Students will be given randomly assigned quizzes during the course of the semester. These quizzes will count for 15% of your final grade

Attendance

Students are expected to attend every session of “Broadcast Journalism: From Broadcast to Narrowcast.” According to college policy, unexcused absences exceeding 15% of course hours can result in a WU grade. 15% of the classes in this class would be two sessions or more. Bottom line: don’t miss class.

In the event that a student must miss a class due to religious observance or family emergency, students must provide advance notice, in writing, of days missed. In the event of class missed due to illness, students must provide the instructor with a doctors’ note. No exceptions.

Plagiarism

Plagiarism is a major—perhaps the major—academic offense a student can commit as an undergraduate, graduate student, or as a scholar. Plagiarism is defined as either (1) failure to acknowledge the source of ideas not one’s own or (2) failure to indicate verbatim expressions not one’s own through quotation marks and footnotes. Plagiarism is a growing problem on college campuses across the nation, largely due to growing technological ease in accessing already composed papers and sources of information. For this reason, I personally will be relentlessly unforgiving regarding any suspected cases of plagiarism this semester—and I will check. There will probably not be a second chance in this regard, and I will recommend the strict enforce university policy for all cases of plagiarism. Bottom line: don’t do it. If you have any questions, please talk to me before you write rather than afterward. For more information, see the CUNY Policy on Academic Integrity: . For a guide on how to cite your sources well, see this article from the CSI library.

In order to ensure a respectful and attentive classroom environment, electronic devices (mobile phones, PDAs, digital music players, etc.) must be turned off and stored during class. Use of such devices during class time is prohibited without permission granted by the professor, in cases of real emergency. Unapproved use of such devices (web-surfing, text-messaging, etc.) in class will count as unexcused lateness.

That said, there will be times when we use the internet for in-class assignments, so you should make sure you are prepared.

Schedule of Classes

September 1 Class Introduction.

September 8 READING DUE: “Look Ma, No Wires,” from online; “Radio,” and “The Great Radio Controversy,” from Tesla: Man Out of Time (Cheney); “The Zen of Listening,” and “Exploratory Listening in the 1920s” from Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination (Douglas); “The Enormous Radio,” (Cheever)
LECTURE:  The Early Days of Radio and the “Zen of Listening”

September 15 READING DUE: Broadcast Journalism, pg. 1-39
LECTURE: Journalism: The Basics & What You Need to Know
DRILL: Lede excercise

September 22 READING DUE:, “The Press-Radio War: A Battle in Three Stages,” from Media at War: Radio’s Challenge to the Newspapers, 1924-1939 (Jackaway); Selections from This Is Berlin: Reporting from Nazi Germany, 1938-40 (Shirer); “The Blitz,” and “Buchenwald,” from Edward R, Murrow and the Birth  of Broadcast Journalism (Edwards)
LECTURE: The Invention of Broadcast Journalism
IN-CLASS SCREENING: excerpts from Goodnight and Good Luck
TAKE HOME DRILL: Murrow, Objectivity, and TV

September 29 *** NO CLASS ***  (Classes on Tuesday follow a Monday schedule)

October 6 READING DUE: Broadcast Journalism, pg. 40-105
LECTURE: Fact gathering and the nuances of broadcast
DRILL: Fact gathering and interviewing

October 13 READING DUE: “The War on Television,” and “The Uncensored War,” from The Uncensored War: The Media and Vietnam (Hallin)
LECTURE: The Power of Television News
IN-CLASS SCREENING: excerpts from Control Room

October 20 READING DUE: Broadcast Journalism, pg. 107-194
LECTURE: From facts gathering to presentation
DRILL: Scripting a news segment

October 27 DRILL and REVIEW: Scripting a News Segment (homework assignment from previous week)

November 3 READING DUE: Selections from Amusing Ourselves to Death (Postman); “A Propaganda Model,” from Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Media (Hermann and Chomsky).
LECTURE: Critiques of Television and Television News
IN-CLASS SCREENING: excerpts from A Perfect Candidate

November 10 *** MIDTERM paper due (in class)***
LECTURE: Discussion and presentation of papers

November 17 READING DUE: Broadcast Journalism, pg. 245-308
READING DUE: Selections from Make No Law: The Sullivan
Case and the First Amendment (Lewis); “Red Lion vs FCC”; “Pacifica vs FCC,”; “The AP of Oz: Associated Press Prohibits Reporters from Peeking Behind its False DRM Curtain,” from the Citizen Media Law Project
LECTURE: Legal Controversies and Court Rulings
*** GROUP PROJECTS ASSIGNED***

November 24 READING DUE: Broadcast Journalism, pg. 245-308
LECTURE:  The Basics of Televisual Journalism
DRILL: Broadcast (Televisual)

December 1 READING DUE: “Local TV Stations Face a Fuzzy Future,” from the Wall Street Journal;“The Daily Show: Discursive Integration and the Reinvention of Political Journalism,” from Political Communication (Baym); “Broadcast Yourself on YouTube: Really?” (Kruitbosch and Nack)
LECTURE: Industry crisis, Narrowcasting, and the  “John Stewart” Phenomenon

December 8 READING: Broadcast Journalism, pg. 308-354
IN-CLASS SCREENING: (Group Project Screenings)

Final Exam: Time and date TBA