Community Journalism emphasizes the local aspects of news, and teaches students how to identify “community” beyond a region and a neighborhood. A co-taught course with Photojournalism faculty in the College of Art and Design, Community Journalism sharpens students’ reporting skills, and guides them in constructing a reporting project as a complete journalistic package, with visual, artistic and written storytelling components in concert with each other. The final project will be a reported (written) piece with corresponding photographs and multimedia.

This course will serve as an introduction to visual story telling as it relates to professional photojournalism. It will provide relevant practice in basic technical, compositional, and interpersonal skills necessary in all aspects of modern photography. Students will be exposed to photojournalism - documentary, editorial, narrative, and editing - as well as explorations of current career possibilities. Lectures, critiques, demonstrations, and assignments will provide participants the opportunity to explore the still, audio, and multimedia strategies used for storytelling. In this course students are expected to meet real-world project deadlines and participate in class discussions and critiques.

As mainstream newsrooms shrink, fewer stories about issues relevant to local communities are written and photographed. This course introduces students to the principles and practices of community journalism. Community journalism focuses on hyper-local issues and is increasingly becoming an important source for local news and information. Students will learn about the importance of community journalism and will practice writing and photographing stories about community leaders and organizations, neighborhood stability factors, meetings, sports, crime, and changes in a small community near Rochester. The course will be structured around class discussions, workshops, and live reporting from the community.

This course focuses on image selection, usage and design. Using images from a variety of sources, we discuss picture selection relative to context and desired impact in print and online. Effective use of images for a variety of story applications are discussed. Design techniques that maximize impact and storytelling are investigated, including scaling, proportion, sequencing, visual variety and sizing. Students will design a number of assignments from single pages to multi-page essays of varying length. Students will design a number of single pages to multi-page essays for various publishing and storytelling platforms that include print, online, and mobile delivery.