Rodger Streitmatter
Professor
Print Journalism

Washington Reporting

This course focuses on helping students develop and refine their journalistic skills in the area of feature article writing.
During this course, students write multi-source features as well as spot features about people, places, and events in and around the nation’s capital. Through these requirements, the course exposes students to—and provides them with practice in using—the techniques typically employed by a newspaper feature article writer.

A second purpose of the course is to help students develop good story ideas. With the multi-source stories, students are required to develop their own ideas for stories. Finding one’s own stories and then either carrying those ideas through to completion or abandoning them teaches students valuable lessons about what works, what doesn’t work, and what factors can create impediments to a story taking the form the writer initially envisioned.

A third purpose of the course is to help students develop their abilities to evaluate and to critique articles that they read. Beginning with the first session of the course and continuing intermittently through the final session of the course, students are required to read and to analyze sample stories written by a variety of reporters—from students to leading professionals.

Washington Reporting is a required course in the curriculum for the master’s program in Journalism and Public Affairs.

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