Return to: Areas of Study

Mission

The Journalism and Documentary Storytelling (JDS) minor focuses on developing in students versatile multimedia storytelling skills and the personal, creative, and civic motivations to exercise those skills for public audiences. The program offers hands-on experience in the creation and analysis of print journalism and non-fiction filmmaking. Students learn the fundamentals and conventions of craft in both media, deepen habits of observation, research, and reflection, and bring these skills to bear on subjects about which they care deeply.

Journalism and Documentary Storytelling is part of the Department of Communication, Media, and Performance, which emphasizes a liberal arts approach to learning that encourages students to develop habits of cultural awareness and respect, engaged citizenship, thoughtful professionalism, and a meaningful private life in order to contribute to a more equitable world.

Our lives are saturated by nonfictional storytelling, public portrayals in words and images of what is happening in the world, what is worth knowing, and who counts as authorities on these subjects. The JDS program gives students a critical perspective on the nature and social consequences of this public storytelling, while equipping them to tell their own stories about the world. The verbal and visual storytelling skills JDS students develop are useful in nearly every academic field, including most students’ majors, and in many of the professions they occupy after college. At the heart of the minor is a core aspiration of Allegheny’s larger liberal arts mission: to help students become humane, responsible, and adept communicators, capable of portraying a wide range of subject matter for various audiences, including the one our democracy ostensibly runs on, the “general public.”

Courses

To see the courses offered in this department or program, please use the “Course Search” link from the menu at the right of this page.

Programs

• Journalism and Documentary Storytelling Minor

Return to: Areas of Study