JoURNALISM PROGRAM

Northwestern University in Qatar’s program in Journalism is overseen by The Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Medill was created in 1921 to teach boys how to become newspapermen. It has come a long, long way. Nearly a century later, Medill today is teaching boys and girls, men and women, to be 21st century multimedia journalists. Today, our students learn to do journalism on paper, on air and online.

The phrase “to do journalism” is central to the Medill Way of learning. Here, students learn by doing.

Medill (pronounced meh-DILL and named for Joseph M. Medill, the famous 19 th century editor and owner of the Chicago Tribune) and its alumni have a celebrated and storied past, but it’s the future the school now offers its students. Medill graduates today still go to work in traditional journalism careers as newspaper, magazine and broadcast reporters and editors, but increasingly they also are sought out to be Web producers and publishers, to provide journalism for all kinds of emerging digital media, and to become such things as public relations writers and executives.

Medill prepares its students for those careers by teaching critical and innovative thinking skills and real-world techniques for covering and dis-covering news. Medill students are taught as much in the neighborhoods of the city as in the classrooms of the campus, and in real-world, for-credit residencies. The Medill Way has proved to be the right way.

THE CURRICULUM

Medill is an accredited school of journalism whose curriculum has two related parts: training in the art and craft of journalism and education in the liberal arts necessary to prepare students to be informed journalists. Students at Medill take roughly two-thirds of their classes outside journalism, in the liberal arts. We require that each student take classes in literature, history, economics, statistics, natural science, political science, fine art and philosophy or religion. To ensure that graduates have a deep understanding of at least one field other than journalism itself, we require students to take six semester-long courses in one of those liberal arts fields.

In the first or freshman year of study, students will take two journalism courses – one overview course about journalism’s past, present and future and the first storytelling course that emphasizes writing but also requires students to use video cameras to tell stories. Liberal arts courses comprise the rest of the first-year curriculum.

In the sophomore year, students will learn to do journalism in the neighborhoods of Doha, where students will find real stories about real issues and real people. Also in the sophomore year, students will begin to focus on a particular medium – newspapers or television, for instance – in preparation for their junior year residency.

In that junior year, students will be placed for approximately 10 weeks in a professional residency. There, in a newsroom somewhere in the world, students will be (and by then will be prepared to be) part of the regular, professional reporting staff. That semester will have begun with an intensive four or five week study of law and ethics. Students will take no other classes during that semester – just the intensive and the residency.

The senior year will be the time when students have the most opportunity to take some journalism electives, though some may be taken in earlier years. These electives might include Design, Magazine Writing, New Media Storytelling, Environmental Journalism, Religion Journalism, Science Journalism, and Public Relations.

After graduation, Medill is committed to helping its students find the jobs that will get their careers started.

Click here for more information about coursework in the Journalism program.