Are you interested in gaining the professional training to become a magazine writer? Or a newspaper reporter? Or a book author? Or a podcast storyteller? Or a documentary filmmaker? Or a broadcast journalist? Or a magazine editor? Or an investigative reporter? Or a business journalist? Or an international correspondent? Or a photojournalist? Or an arts critic? Or a data journalist? Or a radio reporter? Or maybe a science journalist? As a student in Columbia Journalism School's
Master of Science Program, you will enjoy a flexible curriculum that provides a world-class education in the areas of journalism that matter to you, all while you receive essential training in reporting, storytelling, and ethics.
With our 2022-23
application for admission now open, we are excited today to spotlight the
Master of Science Program's
Written Journalism opportunities. Whether you want to write books or magazine stories, produce web videos or work in front of the camera, our faculty will help you polish your prose, develop your voice and use words effectively to engage your audience.
All Master of Science Program students will take a seven-week writing module called the
Written Word in the fall semester. In a small-group seminar setting, the
Written Word module will help students develop and refine their writing skills through workshopping and intensive feedback from our expert faculty. Students will have the opportunity to select a particular
Written Word module that has a format and subject that interests them - options have included "Narrative Writing," "The Rise and Fall Story," "Opinion Writing," "Writing Social Justice with Style," "Explanatory Writing," "Writing About International Issues," "Feature Writing," "Storytelling for the Ear," "Writing About the Environment," and "Narratives of the Invisible City."
In the spring semester, students who want to pursue writing careers may choose to take writing-intensive, 15-week Seminar and Production classes that have included:
- Literary Journalism, a workshop that combines writing and reporting with the study of excellent stylists, both nonfiction writers who have reached beyond conventional news style to render their writing as compelling and graceful as that of the best novelists (such as Katherine Boo, Ryszard Kapuscinski, John McPhee, James Baldwin, Joan Didion and George Orwell) and novelists whose style is inspiring (Leo Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf, Charles Dickens, among others). Students will read and analyze these writers, then do a few short writing exercises and one long article attempting to emulate the best stylists in the field. The idea is to practice the long-form style of journalism used in books and magazines such as
Granta, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone,
The Atlantic Monthly,
Harper's,
The Believer and literary journals, online and off.
- Book Writing, which is a legendary Columbia Journalism School seminar that teaches students to prepare a book proposal, including an overview essay and a sample chapter, both at least 4,000 words long. Each student must enter the class with sufficient material from elsewhere or an idea that can be researched in the New York area. Coursework ranges from intensive study of literary nonfiction and journalistic fiction, with related writing assignments on a weekly basis, to instruction in the techniques of reporting, writing extended narrative and producing a book proposal. Guest speakers from the publishing industry appear frequently. Enrollment is limited with the approval of the instructor.
- Narrative Social Issues, which is a class about the art of the written word — storytelling rooted in deeply reported journalism about myriad social-political-cultural issues facing the world today. It’s journalism that is literary and "documentary" in the manner of the great nonfiction writing produced during the 1930s by James Agee, Edmund Wilson, Louis Adamic, and others. Practitioners today include Joan Didion, Kate Boo, Ted Conover and William T. Vollmann. The course is aimed at those who want to write narrative long-form journalism that could appear in the
New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Harper's; quarterlies such as
VQR or the
Oxford American; quality alternative weeklies; or online sites such as the
Atavist and
Narratively. - Magazine Writing, in which students will discuss different forms of magazine writing and focus especially on substantive general-interest publications like
The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and
The New York Times Magazine – as well as their websites. The class will examine the types of proposals that appeal to editors, ways of getting in the door and some useful frameworks for structuring longer magazine pieces. Students will work on developing or refining a more natural and conversational writing style by reading articles by accomplished writers and workshopping student pieces. In addition to weekly assignments involving the study of individual magazines, students will practice pitching and writing short pieces.
- Reporting and Writing Profiles, which explores why one of the most successful magazines launched in the past 40 years is called
People. In this class, you'll learn and practice the specialized interviewing, reporting and writing skills used to portray individuals. Students will read and discuss some of the best classic and contemporary profiles, of subjects from Ty Cobb to a sex-toys saleswoman. You'll talk a lot about structure. The professor will take a machete (at first) or a scalpel (later on) to every sentence you write. Some gifted current practitioners will tell us how they do it. The professor will schedule two to three individual conferences with each student to review your stories. Together, the class will discover how to leverage readers’ intrinsic interest in other people to inform them about things they think they don’t want to know.
- The Memory Project, which is a storytelling class — both written and spoken. But it is also a class where students are expected to identify and connect with an audience — readers, and listeners who so value their work that they will want to share and, yes, even pay for it. First to the story telling: The Memory Project – in which each student begins by taking a memory inspired by a photograph (his, hers or someone else's) then goes back to report and write about what, in fact, happened. Or, to quote William Faulkner: Memory believes before knowing remembers.
- The Journalism of Ideas, which is a geared toward students interested in exploring the "ideas" beat created by newspapers and magazines in recent years, in which they try to look beyond the news and identify trends in the changing ways we think about the world.
The New Yorker's Malcolm Gladwell ("The Tipping Point") and James Surowiecki ("The Wisdom of Crowds"), or Farhad Manjoo, first at
Slate and now at
The New York Times, have deftly combined social science research and journalism into a highly successful mix while the economist Steven Levitt, with "Freakonomics" has begun a major trend of social scientists eager to reach mass audiences. Traditional newspapers such as
The New York Times,
The Boston Globe and
The Los Angeles Times have all experimented with ways of building ideas coverage into their papers on a regular basis and much analysis on major news websites from
Salon,
Slate and the
Huffington Post fall into this category. Columnists like David Brooks and Nicholas Kristof routinely rummage through the world of social science to animate and give substance to their work.
- The Journalist as Historian, in which students will learn to frame a piece of history as a story, uncover sources, and transform evidence into an accurate narrative that casts the past and present in a new light. We will develop skills for finding and using archives, and for using sources including memoirs, newspapers, and popular culture to strengthen a story. With a focus on long-form writing, the class will work on how to uncover the plot line in actual events and develop characters. To build a repertoire of techniques, the class will look at fine historical writing, especially by journalists. Examining work on American race relations and the Israeli-Arab conflict, we will look at the relationship between facts, accepted narratives, and the writer's personal perspective — and at the impact of new writing on "what everyone knows." In short, the class will see how a writer can change history. In your own work, you will define a subject for a book-length work of history. You will then find sources and write one extended episode of the story. Finally, you will create a chapter outline and rewrite your episode in response to new sources and intensive workshop discussion of your writing. By the end of the course, each student should have the materials for a book proposal, along with the skills for enriching magazine writing with reporting on the past.
During their time at Columbia Journalism School, Master of Science Program students will also develop, report, and write a Master's Project. Working under the guidance of individual advisors, students will conduct an in-depth exploration of a topic as a journalist would pursue it. Most students choose to develop their Master's Project as a long-form written story. And, although Master’s Projects can take a variety of forms, some of them incorporating elements from more than one medium (such as print, photo, audio, video, data), all of them will involve developing and demonstrating excellent writing skills.
To learn more about writing opportunities in Columbia's M.S. Program, please watch our 2020 webinar with Professors Jessica Bruder, Alexis Clark, and Dale Maharidge.