Students learn information-gathering skills that stress accuracy, fairness, and balance; they learn how to place news in a context that helps readers, listeners, and viewers make sense of the world. Good writing is paramount, and students are taught how to tell engaging stories that stand out in today’s complex media environment.
 

The Journalism program provides practical, hands-on experience in reporting, writing, editing, and publishing in state-of-the-art newsrooms for students seeking careers in newspapers, magazines, newsletters, television, radio, and online media. The curriculum is structured around a core of six courses, which includes the history and role of mass media in America, and introductory courses in writing and reporting, media ethics and law, and copyediting. These fundamental courses prepare students for advanced work in the major’s four concentrations: News Reporting and Writing (news or sports emphasis); Magazine Writing and Editing; Broadcast Journalism (television or radio emphasis); and Science Journalism: Reporting on Health, Science, and the Environment.
 

Chicago is a great place to learn journalism; it is a world-class city and one of the nation’s premier media marketplaces. Journalism students cover stories alongside professional reporters as news breaks in government, politics, sports, crime, courts, entertainment, sports, and more. And because of the College’s prime urban location, students have access to extensive local internship opportunities. Our students are also competitive for national and international internships. The new Semester in LA program allows talented undergraduates to achieve a specialty in entertainment reporting across media platforms. We have a cooperative program with the Dublin Institute of Technology and many other international opportunities. Students produce the prize-winning Columbia Chronicle and its cutting edge web site in a spacious newsroom. Broadcast Journalism students, in collaboration with the Television Department, produce Newsbeat, a live TV newscast, and Metro Minutes, a TV newsmagazine. Broadcast Journalism students, in collaboration with the Radio Department, write and produce news for College radio station WCRX. Magazine majors write, edit, and design Echo, an award-winning, four-color magazine. Students also can get their work published on award-winning ChicagoTalks and AustinTalks, online publications that cover the neighborhoods of the nation’s third-largest city. The web sites, started by faculty members with the help of grants from one of the media industry’s most-respected foundations, also offer the Department’s top students an opportunity to publish investigative projects.
 

Students learn from adjuncts working for or contributing to Chicago magazine, Time, Ebony, Jet, the Washington Post, CLTV, CBS-2, NBC-5, ABC-7, the American Bar Association, and American Medical Association publications, as well as many trade magazines, online news sites, and other major media organizations.
 

The Journalism Department also offers a Second Bachelor’s degree program.
 

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