Getting off to a Fast Start at the CUNY J-School

Posted on June 16, 2011 by Judith Watson

So you want to hit the ground running when classes start in August at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism? Here’s how: Become a regular user of the 2012 FastStart blog, the online summer program designed to strengthen some core skills you’ll need beginning with your first assignment. Every week, we will post new material on the FastStart blog, corresponding to one of the items below. Many will link to suggested assignments or exercises – we urge you to try them out. You’ll be glad you did.

1. Know the news

Sounds basic, doesn’t it? But news awareness was the area in which the Class of 2012 scored lowest on the admissions test. You’ll be tested regularly on the news once you get here, so you need to get in the habit of consuming news critically. You will learn how a journalist reads the news – this will give you a foundation for your Craft class, in which you will cover a community district or a beat within a community district.

Starting next week, you will get 3-4 emails a week with a story to read that also will be posted on the class Facebook page. We encourage you to comment on what the stories mean and how well they were done. During orientation, we’ll give you a news quiz to see how well this material “stuck” – prizes will be awarded for best scores. Happy reading!

2. Know New York

New York is an amazing city for news but it can be daunting – even for longtime reporters and residents.

You’ll be assigned a neighborhood beat early in the first semester and can save a lot of time if you hit the ground knowing a little about how the city works.

We’ll offer tips and resources to help you get off to a fast start – including a link to NYC.gov, which will quickly become your virtual second home.

3. Know and understand grammar, usage and style

This may sound elementary but it’s not. We see lots of grammar problems in student writing, everything from subject-verb agreement to uncertain uses of the comma. You need to start learning AP style and usage now. All students are urged and, in some Craft classes, required to do the exercises at Newsroom101, both the general grammar/punctuation and the AP style exercises. We’ll provide some grammar exercises and links to useful websites, such as The Tongue Untied.

4. Know how to cover news on deadline

Ask previous first-semester CUNY students. They’ll tell you perhaps the toughest adjustment is to suddenly find yourself covering an AP daybook assignment with just a few hours to deadline. Here’s an example of a recent NYC AP daybook listing of events, any of which you might be assigned to cover, and some tips on how to prepare for writing on deadline. We’ll post some breaking news exercises during the summer, much like the one on the admissions test.

5. Know how to use numbers

The use and interpretation of numbers is a constant source of problems for many journalists, and many numeracy issues crop up with journalism students. But numbers help us do our work as reporters. They are facts that tell a story. Poynter Online blogger Chip Scanlon once counted how many stories in his local paper involved numbers. On that day, it was more than one-third, and those stories appeared in every section of the paper.

During “numeracy week,” we’ll post some useful numeracy sites and recommend a free three-hour online training course from Poynter.

6. Know the tools of the trade

The explosion in communication technologies – and resulting new journalism tools, especially those for mobile reporting – allows us to tell stories faster and in a variety of new formats. Don’t let a lack of skill and confidence get in the way of your using these tools, especially on deadline. Remember that many (though not all) new methods to produce and distribute content are meant for lay audiences, so they are generally easy to use. You can likely master most of them them on your own, often using web-based tutorials to help. The goal is to make the technology so second nature, it’s as easy as pen and reporter’s notebook.

In the meantime, get a head-start by learning the capabilities of the most ubiquitous new reporter’s tool out there – your mobile phone! Begin this summer by taking a few journalistic pictures with your phone (we may periodically suggest a theme of the week, such as “interaction” or “machines” or “the color red”) and posting them on the Class of 2012 Facebook page.

7. Know the ethics of your profession

In the hurry-up, always-on media world, it’s more important than ever to understand the ethical underpinnings of journalism. We’ll post case studies about of some of the thorny issues you’ll face. Meanwhile, try out Poynter’s NewsU’s free ethics module, Introduction to Ethical Decision-Making.

8. Know how to tell stories in all formats

As journalists, we’re increasingly called on to produce excellent content for multiple platforms. Not only does that mean developing fluency with the storytelling techniques and tools needed for print, interactive and broadcast. It also means knowing which form – or forms – tell the story best. One of the smartest ways to do all this is simply to pay attention to great journalism – check out the best of the best, as judged by fellow journalists.

The Pulitzer Prizes are the big kahuna, as are the DuPonts and the Peabodys for broadcast, and the Online Journalism Awards for digital media. Here is a list of major journalism awards from Cyberjournalist.net. Seek out inspiration.