Welcome from the Acting Chair

Welcome to the Department of Journalism.

The Department of Journalism aims to give its undergraduate and graduate students the thinking, the values and the skills needed to navigate through the rapidly changing news media landscape.

Our students prepare for careers as writers, reporters, editors and producers in print, broadcast and online journalism. They get this rigorous, hands-on education in one of the country's most fascinating news laboratories: the city of Boston.

In this vibrant news environment, our students work to hone their craft in the classroom, at campus news outlets and through internships.

In the classroom, our students confront a curriculum designed to incorporate traditional journalism theory and practice with new techniques and technologies.

As one of our students, you will learn to understand the foundations of journalism, its historical, ethical, economic and legal traditions, and how these traditional values apply in this new age of 24/7 multimedia news. You will develop reporting, writing and editing skills through a sequence of increasingly more challenging courses.

You will also learn to adjust to new technologies and new ways of thinking about technologies in writing, reporting, producing and delivering news and information. Although you can choose to specialize in print or broadcast or online journalism, we give all our students the opportunity to work and learn in all three areas. Ultimately, our students are expected to develop a portfolio of journalistic work to be used in the transition from classroom to newsroom.

The department's full-time faculty members are well-prepared in helping students with that transition, bringing years of experience working for organizations such as CNN, CNBC, WCVB in Boston, the San Jose Mercury News, the Associated Press, the Boston Globe, the New Haven Register. Their scholarly interests range from media in Africa to Asian-American representation in news to broadcast news management to journalism across the media.

The part-time faculty hail from news organizations throughout the region, such as New England Cable News, the Boston Business Journal, and boston.com. Full- and part-time faculty alike pride themselves in the quality of their classroom instruction and in the coaching and mentoring that regularly go on outside the classroom as students break news, craft feature stories, produce newscasts and publish stories in print and online.

Our students also learn from each other through their work in extra-curricular and co-curricular news activities that complement formal instruction. They can work in news at two radio stations, a closed circuit television station, a student newspaper and a student magazine. New media and multimedia outlets are emerging as well.

I hope I've given you some sense of how the Department of Journalism is working today to educate the news leaders of tomorrow. If you're interested in information concerning admission to Emerson College I invite you to visit the pages for the undergraduate or graduate admissions offices.

Janet Kolodzy, Acting Chair