Academics

What is Journalism?

Journalism at LMU connects the educational values of the Jesuit and Marymount traditions and the core creative and critical practices of the English Department to the rapidly changing future of global communication. Our experienced faculty offer hands-on instruction in the reporting, writing, editing, and technological skills across multiple platforms that students need to engage critically and meaningfully with current events and become professional journalists. Our students go on to careers at prestigious news organizations where they help make real change in the world.

What do Journalism Majors Do?

The journalism program has as its pedagogical foundation the hands-on approach of project-based learning, which connects our students to communities and lives whose stories transmit issues of social, political, cultural, and moral import. It is also rigorously interdisciplinary, incorporating instruction in film, television, photography, and radio production; communication studies; digital media; social media; and modalities not yet known or articulated. Ethical discussions suffuse the entire curriculum, first in the traditional sense of a basic professional ethics and also in the larger frame of an ethics of representation: who is reporting about whom, and why and how. Telling people’s stories is our mission.

Students can begin their Major their first year or declare it later. They learn the foundations of reporting and writing journalism in their first two years and explore journalism as a literary practice through foundational English courses. In their third and fourth year they learn new technological tools for storytelling, explore ethical and critical issues that affect journalism, and begin their specialization in modes of practice or content focus. They also begin to develop specific projects drawing on LA-based subjects, culminating in a long-form capstone project their senior year. The Major also requires hands-on experience via either an off-campus internship or work with campus media.

About Our Faculty

The journalism faculty at LMU are all dedicated professors who still actively work as journalists. They have published numerous books and written for distinguished newspapers, magazines, websites, television stations, and journals and made documentaries. Students work very closely on intensive projects with the Fletcher Jones Chair of Literature and Writing, a Nieman Fellow, and an Annenberg Fellow, among others.