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Message from Nancy Day, Chairperson

We will help you become the best reporter, producer, editor, writer, publisher, and entrepreneur you can be for the 21^st century, in whatever medium or media you choose.

Our approach is informal, our experience broad, our standards high. We have faculty members who have reported all over the world and in urban and rural areas of the United States. We are trained and experienced as dispassionate observers, but we are passionate about the disparities in coverage in our own backyard: Chicago, our premier reporting laboratory. We want to educate future journalists from disadvantaged communities and those who grew up in more privileged surroundings, widening worldviews and covering communities no one else is.

We emphasize ethics across the curriculum. The Journalism Department offers concentrations in News Reporting and Writing, Magazine Writing and Editing, Broadcast Journalism (radio and television), and Science Journalism and cooperates with other departments to produce individually tailored interdisciplinary majors. Our Travel Writing course has taken students to London, Paris, Peru, Honduras, Cost Rica, and Mexico. Once a year, we offer an intensive five-week program for outstanding upper-level students focusing on in-depth coverage of the entertainment industries, based at our campus on the Raleigh lot in Los Angeles. We regularly update upper-level courses in such specializations as business, international, sports, mobile, and online journalism. Students produce the full-cover magazine ECHO each semester and the Columbia Chronicle, a weekly newspaper, both of which have won major national awards overall and for individual student achievement. Broadcast majors can choose between Metro Minutes and News Beat for the capstone experiences. Students over the past two years have won national awards for investigative reporting from the Society of Professional Journalists and the Investigative Reporters and Editors organization.

The essential building blocks for excellent journalism—generating ideas; figuring out how to report, research, and verify information; and telling stories in an intriguing way—will remain the foundation of our curriculum, as we teach students to think critically, creatively, and independently, becoming more sophisticated news consumers. This approach prepares students for the challenges of technologies not yet imagined.

Our full-time faculty members have degrees from many fine institutions of higher learning. Even more important to our students are their instructors’ professional backgrounds and continued involvement in the industry. Three faculty members are Fulbright Scholars. Two were Nieman Fellows at Harvard University, one is a Pulitzer Prize winner, another has won numerous Emmys and a Peabody award; several are book authors.

We have the contacts and track records to help our students get excellent internships in Chicago and across the country. A full-time staff Member concentrates exclusively on internship development and placement. Recent graduates have been hired by Tribune Interactive, Harpo Productions, Esquier.com, and newspapers, television and radio stations, and Web enterprises across the country.

Our alumni are prominent and plentiful in professional news media and public affairs positions, from CN to National Public Radio to the Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times.

Please visit our department’s Web pages to find out more about our faculty, students, alumni, special events, courses, and curricula: http://www.colum.edu/academics/journalism.

Nancy Day
Chairperson, Journalism

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