Spring 2027
Visual Electives

This introductory course is open to all students who choose to take it as a 6-credit elective, even if they don't go on to take TV News 2 in the fall. The course will consist of an intense workload of how to report on camera as a video journalist, how to write on deadline several forms of anchor voice overs with and without sound bites for local television, digital and streaming news programs. Students will brush up on the video and editing skills they learned in the first semester fundamentals course with a goal of shooting and editing in the style of local television news.

Students will learn how to put together a local news reporter package in the latter part of the semester. They will partner with fellow students to pitch, shoot, write and edit a reporter package all in one day on deadline, providing students with ample material to create an on-camera demo reel. Students will learn how to read from a teleprompter in the broadcast studio. They will start to build confidence in front of the camera by learning how to anchor a newscast from the studio and how to write and execute a reporter standup in the field.

This course is for anyone interested in learning the highly marketable skills needed to work in television news, both in front of the camera as a reporter and anchor, and behind the camera as a videographer, editor and story producer. This course meets the advanced reporting requirements. Students interested in taking TV News 2 in the fall must take TV News 1 first.

This course is your opportunity to perfect the video production techniques you learned in the first semester. You will improve your shooting, writing and editing skills so that you can produce professional level video features for any platform, from digital sites like Vox and Vice to streaming news channels like CNN and CBS, to the websites of newspapers and magazines, like The Washington Post and The New Yorker.

In this class, you will learn to shoot with the C-100, a professional video camera widely used in the industry. You'll capture good clear audio and learn simple lighting techniques to enhance your shots. Using thoughtful storytelling approaches, you will produce 2 – 3 stories of your choice, either reporter-driven (i.e. narrated) or non-narrated (told by the subject.)

Video is everywhere. Well-told video features will make your resumé stand-out.

The rise of social media has brought with it an enormous amount of user-generated multimedia content that reporters often use as evidence in news stories and videos. It is crucial for journalism students navigating the digital age to be equipped with the skills necessary to discover and verify photos and videos on social media and convincingly present visual evidence to an audience to effectively neutralize misinformation.

And in the last few years, AI-generated photos and videos have flooded the internet with increasingly realistic, yet entirely fake images designed to deceive audiences at a massive scale.

This 10-week course in visual investigations teaches students to build open-source investigations from the ground up using an array of forensic techniques and digital research tools. By the end of the course, students will have learned the basics of the technical skillset required to pitch, design, and execute their own visual investigations and more effectively neutralize misinformation.

Video accounts for more than 50% of mobile traffic and will increasingly dominate the social media channels you frequent: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube and Tik Tok. Each of these channels speaks with a different grammar. Now's the time to develop fluency in these new visual languages.

In this hands-on class, we'll look at the tools, techniques and visual language unique to each platform and create work in each session. Classes will use smartphone kits as a primary visual reporting and editing tool to produce explainers, animations, streaming coverage, text on video. We will also work with archival and found footage. In addition to individual projects produced to complement work in other courses and capstone projects, students will produce a group project with a partner media organization.