Program Overview
The Journalism Certificate Program trains students to be 21st-century thinkers, writers and media professionals. Journalism today is engulfed in change. Online technology and the rise of citizen journalism are altering how journalists gather, report and convey information, and students need to be ready. Our instructors, many of whom are working journalists, strive to combine lessons on reporting, interviewing and writing skills with discussions on how best to use new media to convey information. Students discuss the best medium to tell a story – through text, images, graphics, or video – and then set about reporting, writing and producing it.
The program, approved through the SUNY system, begins by teaching the fundamentals of reporting, writing, editing and producing stories for print, online and broadcast journalism. Introductory courses teach students where to go for information, how to conduct successful interviews, and synthesize information. More advanced courses delve into the nuances of feature, opinion and online writing, and examine the possibilities web and video offer.
Our faculty members publish and edit regularly and are aware of the skills and instincts young journalists need to succeed. They are also willing mentors and routinely take time beyond class hours to assist students. UB has produced numerous successful journalists, including CNN's Wolf Blitzer (1999, 1970), CNN Senior Producer Pam Benson (1976), NPR's Terry Gross (1972), and Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Tom Toles (2002, 1973) and has an active alumni network to help students get jobs.
Students write news and feature stories for every JC class. They also blog and use Twitter and other networking tools to relay information as they cover local stories and engage in hands-on exercises and breaking news assignments designed to prepare them for the daily routine of a journalist working on deadline.
To join the program, students must have a minimum GPA of 2.5. They then follow a set curriculum of four journalism courses, two electives and two internships. In recent years, students have interned at WBF0 radio station, Chanel 2, YNN Buffalo (owned by Time Warner), The Buffalo News, Artvoice, Niagara Newspaper Group, the Darwin Martin Restoration Corp., and more. For some students, these internships have led to entry-level journalism jobs.
Many JC students choose to write for one of the three student publications, The Spectrum, Visions or Thread (previously Generation). Here, students are in charge, making daily decisions about coverage, relevance and timeliness as well as facing the daily ethical challenges involved in producing a newspaper, magazine and website.
Ethics are a key element of the program and Ethics in Journalism is a required class. Journalists are society's gatekeepers; they report news, but they also sustain communities, providing fodder for discussion, gossip, disagreement and informed opinion. Certificate holders will learn the responsibility of such power by focusing on the moral and legal constraints that bind journalists. They will study examples of ethical choices journalists have made and discuss the decision-making behind the choices.
The program, like professional journalism, is interdisciplinary; it offers courses through the English, Communication and Media Study departments. This allows students to take courses in all three related fields.
A certificate in journalism can be a lifelong asset even to students who do not choose journalism as a career. Journalism offers an ideal starting point for those curious about people and the world. It provides a chance to get informed about local communities, state laws and international debates. It's an invitation to ask questions, a way to get paid to travel, a chance to meet new people and find out about their lives.
As journalist and screenwriter Nora Ephron said, "My advice to everyone is: 'Become a journalist.' ...I think it's the most amazing way to learn how people live. I mean, to be able to dip into other people's lives at the unbelievably ludicrous points you get to when you're a journalist, either when they've just been killed, or they're just about to win the Oscar, or they've just written a really wonderful book, or they just demonstrated against something worth demonstrating against. It's truly a way of getting out of whatever narrow world we all grow up in. We all grow up in the most narrow worlds, and then we go to another narrow world, which is college, where no matter how different everyone is, they're all the same. Suddenly they're all wearing the same thing suddenly, and reading the same books suddenly, and thinking about the same philosophical question suddenly. You know, if you have a chance to be a newspaper reporter for three or four years – before you do whatever you want to do – do it because you will know so much."
