Emerson College’s graduate Journalism program educates professionals regarding how to find and verify the truth, empower the voices of citizens, and serve as a watchdog to the powerful. Good journalism catalyzes civic engagement by broadening access to a forum of ideas. To do this, journalists must adapt to changing media environments while staying rooted in the profession’s core values and practices: gathering information, making sense of it, and telling fair, accurate, and compelling stories.
Emerson’s program design provides the skillsets and values for students to practice their craft inside and outside the newsroom. Students develop an innovator’s mindset, learning to tell multimedia stories about people and communities struggling to be heard. As they practice their craft, students produce and publish their work on professional websites and news outlets on radio, television, and the web and as part of class projects. We emphasize an experiential approach that values storytelling for diverse audiences. All students graduate with a multimedia portfolio that serves as a professional clip file.
The department’s core curriculum teaches students to:
- Identify and report on under-covered communities. One student might choose to cover an emerging immigrant group. A second might explore the culture of aging bikers and their machines. A third might look at the growing community of families with gay, lesbian, or transgender parents. We prize student-driven story pitches and help sharpen angles, suggest resources, and guide access to relevant materials.
- Listen to the cultural critiques of community members to gain an understanding of what it means to represent people fairly and fully.
- Build a reputation for reporting and storytelling using best practices in social media.
- Examine new outlets for competitive ideas, from the Kaiser Health News network, which partners with NPR, to nongovernmental organizations and think tanks that increasingly produce independent journalism.
- Apply their skills in emerging story forms and at new digital news outlets through expanded internship opportunities.
- Build methodically on new skills over 14 months to produce crisp, concise, and compelling news reports across platforms to more in-depth research for longer-form journalism.
Journalists need to stay up on the digital pipelines that funnel information. An evolving curriculum offers courses in emerging areas of journalism such as data visualization, which turns mountains of data into accessible graphics-dominant stories. Students complete their studies by participating in a rigorous, portfolio-based capstone course in which they produce a body of professional-level work. Developing a résumé and hunting for an internship provide the professional experience that employers demand.
Emerson journalism remains grounded in the foundations of history, law, ethics, and research that inform all intelligent, contextual news. The program focuses on how new technologies change and expand the capabilities and expectations of journalism. While students may graduate with a passion for television or radio news or web producing or long-form storytelling, they also graduate with the dexterity to adapt as digital mediums continue to change.
The following Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs) drive the Journalism curriculum:
- Students will develop a commitment to journalism that serves and empowers the public, helping audiences understand the connections among local, national, and global issues.
- Students will understand the role of journalism in a democratic society, from its historical foundations to the revolutionary changes in digital media.
- Students will find, assess, and analyze different modes of information: from statistics and government reports to public regulations and legislation.
- Students will write stories with precision, clarity, and fairness.
- Students will master storytelling across a variety of platforms.
- Students will interact respectfully with a variety of diverse communities to contextualize their racial, cultural, linguistic, and economic makeup.
Admission Requirements
Applicants must meet the College’s admission standards, including TOEFL scores if applicable, official transcripts, two letters of recommendation, an essay, a professional résumé, and examples of written/published work.
Degree Requirements
The Master of Arts degree in Journalism is an accelerated 14-month program. It requires the completion of 40 credit hours, including a 4-credit capstone class and an internship. Students must be in good academic standing to graduate.
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