Note: Special Topic courses are listed below.
The minimum residency requirement is three terms of full-time study starting in Summer (May-August), followed by Fall (September-December), and Winter (January-April), completed in this sequence. Classes typically end the second week in April.
Students must successfully complete sixteen courses, as specified. All courses, except where otherwise noted, are 14-week half courses.
Elective courses will be offered according to curricular needs and instructor availability. Spaces may be limited, particularly in the media courses.
We will make every effort to place you in courses according to your indicated preference, but reserve the right to do so based on academic standing in your chosen specialization.
Elective courses will be offered according to curricular needs and instructor availability. Spaces may be limited. Course offerings, content, and enrolment maximums may vary from year to year. The administration reserves the right not to offer all courses and to cancel undersubscribed courses.
Self-directed study of a topic not otherwise covered in the Journalism curriculum, under the supervision of a regular faculty member in the Graduate Program in Journalism. A proposal form is available in the
Student Forms area of the FIMS Intranet (FIMS login required).
This course is intended to provide young journalists with a framework for effective foreign reporting. Students taking this course will study and debate some of the underlying issues in international reporting today, preparing them to move eventually into foreign assignment roles in Canadian newsrooms or to undertake assignments or postings abroad.
One of the founders of mass communications studies Harold Innis contended that not only did technology influence and shape the methods by which we communicate, it also influenced social, political and economic formations. This course will examine the perspective of emerging technologies from antiquity to the present day. The perspective will be historical, and communications, societies and empires will not be ignored.
The course will introduce students to the craft of writing for the magazine market. Evaluating the marketplace, preparing queries and story pitches, and developing the story will all be covered. Various magazine story formats will be examined including the profile, the narrative, the issue story and the investigative piece. Particular emphasis will be placed planning, developing and writing the long feature
Develops the basic journalistic skills required to provide accurate and meaningful news and analytical reporting about the activities of the Canadian business, financial and management communities.
This course covers the theory and practice of the many-layered editing process in a print newsroom. Students will learn about different types of editing -- from big-picture assessments to basic copy editing -- and will put some theories into practice through assignments. They will also learn basic layout and pagination guidelines. In addition to the practical work, students will take a critical look at some of the issues facing editors in today's pressure-filled newsrooms.
This course will examine media's role in the deepening fractures in Canadian society -- issues of inequality, values differences and unprecedented generational fragmentation that appear to be challenging the legitimacy of Canadian democracy. Students will engage in applied research and article preparation, use polling data from one of Canada's leading social researchers and take part in a social media project. (Offered Winter 2012)
Journalists the world over have always taken pride in one of the essential building blocks of journalistic culture, namely the view that journalists are first and foremost those individuals who are the first persons to record historical events. It goes well beyond that fairly simple but important observation. The entire human experience has been recorded one way or another in the press. The press has become the treasure trove of the events of the past, some small and marginal, others of great significance. It is this legacy that we will be studying. (Offered Winter 2012)