About Investigative Journalism and Feature writing
This course covers the significance, preparation, planning and reporting techniques and methods of investigation. The course shows students how to manage and develop different sources during investigation and what kind of danger they will face during investigation. With case analyisis, it equips students with basic techniques and skills of as to how a journalist exposes immoral, illegal and unethical deeds of organizations, officials or individuals. This course also deals on feature article story structures and/or opinion based approaches of writing stories. It is a build up on newspaper journalism and is characterized by an advanced form of writing with emphasis on feature writing; profiles of people and places, issues, stories, commentaries and investigative reporting etc. Students will be expected to complete numerous off-campus writing assignments, as well as in-class writing exercises. Your previous classes in newspaper Journalism must have provided a solid journalism foundation to help move you to the advanced writing techniques of this course, and in particular, how to successfully craft both short and in-depth or longer-version pieces of nonfiction and pitch it to an appropriate publication. Class time will be spent working on writing lessons under my supervision as well as reading and critiquing industry work, and discussing such elements of writing as voice, style, use of language and command of various lead writing and story structure techniques. While the thrust of this course is written by definition, many of the tools and techniques you learn here can be applied to media work industry-wide.