Journalism of Social Change

Professional journalism nowadays should communicate crucial data to inform the citizenship and continue more than ever to play a central role in sustaining a democratic culture. The consumption and production of media is now at the reach of everyone who owns a phone and has mobile connection. The challenge of journalism is to assure reliability of sources but also gain the flexibility of the new media and offer a prompt and deep response. Journalism should provide ethical, not biased information. If we believe that information is power, then those who can produce and provide information are also able to bring about social change that is freedom of expression and freedom to stand for just causes.

In this course we'll focus the role journalism has performed in the latest century, increasing civic engagement, public participation and the construction of critical perspectives. This course will also explore journalists' ethical choices and the values that guide those choices. We'll go through the existing codes of ethics that provide guidelines to journalists and try to assess how we may come to ethical decisions, as well as the reasoning and logic that we use to get there, and what it feels like to be in a position of making a difference. We'll consider a range of other institutions and practices that have contributed to the public awareness and social connectivity from mass media, newspaper, online and offline, tv news, comic journalism to new media, personal narration, digital storytelling, blogging and twitter. The course will introduce many aspects of multimedia journalism and teach the basic technical skills necessary to build competency in written, audio, and visual storytelling forms. Throughout the course the practice of reporting, researching, listening, writing, will sharpen observation skills and inter-personal communication.

**This course is cross-listed as COM331