ASIAN COLLEGE OF JOURNALISM
ACJACJ
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  • Home
  • About Us
    • Overview
    • Media Development Foundation
    • Centre of Excellence
    • The Campus
    • Photo Gallery
  • Admissions
    • Eligibility & Procedure
    • Residential Accommodation
    • Fees and Scholarships
    • SAF Scholarships
  • Programme
    • Overview
    • Core Courses
    • Covering Deprivation
    • Elective Courses
    • Dissertation
    • Investigative Report
    • Postgraduate Diploma
  • Specialisation
    • Print
    • New Media
    • Broadcast
    • Integration Course
  • Faculty
    • Core Faculty
    • Adjunct Faculty
    • Guest Lecturers
    • Administration
  • Research
    • THE UNESCO MADANJEET SINGH CENTRE FOR SOUTH ASIAN JOURNALISM
    • Countering Disinformation in South India: A Regional Media Literacy Initiative
    • Print media coverage of the amendments to Juvenile Justice Act, 2015
  • ACJ Awards
    • Overview
    • ACJ Award Winners
      • ACJ Award for Investigative Journalism
      • Award for Social Impact Journalism
  • Placement
  • Events

Overview

  • Home
  • Programme
  • Overview

Overview

  • TERM
  • INTEGRATION COURSE

TERM

First Term

Reporting and writing are the central disciplines of journalism. Accordingly, the core of the ACJ curriculum in the first term is an extensive series of lectures and workshops on gathering and presenting news in the core stream (New Media, Print or Broadcast, as the case may be).


Through laboratory exercises and field assignments, students learn to seek out information and convey it in journalistic form. This experience helps them develop the variety of skills indispensable to all branches of journalism; in particular, the ability to write clear, straightforward, and concise English. In similar lectures and workshops, students learn to edit news copy and to write headlines for the core stream (New Media, Print or Broadcast, as the case may be).

Print students learn the basics of page design and layout and New Media students learn basics of coding and web design. Broadcast students learn camera techniques and video editing.


During this term, all students are required to attend a series of substantive lectures, designed to introduce them to the history of the media, to the legal and other aspects of professional journalism, and to many of the critical economic, political, social, and environmental issues of our times. These lectures, offered by outstanding scholars and media practitioners, reflect a central conviction of the Trustees of the Media Development Foundation: that journalists, especially in Asian countries today, have an important role to play in increasing public understanding of the fundamental and often complex problems of our societies, avoiding the traps of superficiality and dilettantism.


There are five required courses in the first term: Reporting, Writing and Editing; Tools of the Modern Journalist; Key Issues in Journalism; Media Perspectives; and The Media, Law and Society.

Critical analysis of the existing news media is another important element of the curriculum in the first term. This exercise helps future journalists become aware that the way in which an event is viewed and reported depends to a great extent on the imperatives of the medium in question and on restrictions imposed by shifting outside influences.


Second Term
In the second term, students continue to pursue their core stream specialisations, producing work of increasing range and complexity. They learn to select, report, edit, and produce pieces in the form required by the particular stream they have chosen. Under the guidance of professionals, they develop their skills in interviewing, researching and news gathering, and sharpen their ability to recognise and develop stories. They use the Internet and other information and data resources to discover new angles to the stories they are working on as well as new ideas for stories.


Apart from acquiring the skills to write editorials, opinion pieces and news features with detailed reportage, students in the print stream will learn to publish a lab newspaper and produce multimedia news stories for the print.acjnewsline.com and word.acjnewsline.com.


Students in the broadcast stream learn writing for TV, Camera, Editing and Studio Techniques. They start producing TV programmes and documentaries.

New Media students produce a weekly e-zine of news and public affairs: www.acjnewsline.org

Students take one or two of the three mandatory electives during this term. Students get to select from a wide range of journalism- and domain-related subjects. Click here for the full list.


The students start their integration course in the second term wherein they are first taught the fundamentals of the chosen course.

Reporting on weather patterns is also part of the curriculum. With realtime data generated by the weather station installed on the terrace of the academic block in collaboration with The Weather Company, an IBM business, students can forecast the weather for the next fortnight. With the historical data available on the Weather Company’s website, they can study the changes in the weather patterns over the years.


Third Term

In the third term, students further enhance and hone their skills in their streams of specialisation. They also continue to take elective courses.

Much of this final term is devoted to two major pieces of work required of all students — the Investigative Report and the Dissertation.

In the third term, the students conclude the integration course with a capstone project.

INTEGRATION COURSE

With cross platform and multimedia journalism gaining currency, students across all streams are exposed to the fundamentals of storytelling for the web, including an introduction to some of the state-of-the-art tools and applications, recording and producing audio and video, search engine optimisation and photo journalism.

In the second term, students would start the integration course (besides the core specialisation) which helps them acquire skills necessary for multi-platform journalism.

Thus, all students would get to learn writing and produce news content for different platforms (print, audio-visual and online). A part of this training in the second and third terms would happen in the Integrated Digital Newsroom, a production space which prepares students for the rigorous demands of real life integrated/multiplatform newsrooms.

At the end of the third term, students would be doing a Capstone project in their Integration Course (ie., the second stream of specialisation). The output would be:

  • Print: Multi-colour Broadsheet (with news stories, feature stories and opinion/analysis/op-ed articles)
  • New Media: Full-fledged news website wherein content is enhanced and optimized using multimedia, immersive, 360 degree, Virtual Reality elements.
  • Broadcast: Production of a real-time composite morning show of various segments, including, news bulletins, current affairs productions, and discussions.

Integrated Newsroom: The state-of-the-art Integrated Digital Newsroom will be used to impart hands-on training to students across streams to produce and disseminate interactive, multimedia content on web and mobile platforms.

Unlike a computer laboratory or a classroom, the Integrated Newsroom has an open, non-hierarchical environment in which students collaborate and deliver fresh, relevant and meaningful content tailored for multiple digital platforms.


The student will be trained in a newsroom environment to handle text, photographs, audio, video and interactive multimedia elements such as infographs, timelines, maps, charts, slideshows and web graphics which will be used judiciously for news storytelling.

The Integrated Newsroom is equipped with two video bays and one audio bay, besides 16 modern workstations, equipped with a wide range of software tools and applications necessary for producing multimedia content. Students and faculty supervisors get to use an interactive digital board for teaching, for exhibiting student work – either while in progress or on completion – for suggestions and critical feedback, for news listing and assigning work, and also for holding interviews in distant mode using applications such as Skype and Google Hangout.

As part of an all-inclusive approach to storytelling, students are trained in cutting-edge technological tools and formats, including 360-degree, Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), chatbots, news apps and drone storytelling.

Programme

  • Overview
  • Core Courses
  • Covering Deprivation
  • Elective Courses
  • Dissertation
  • Investigative Report
  • Postgraduate Diploma

Specialisation

  • Print
  • New Media
  • Broadcast
  • Integration Course

Contact

ASIAN COLLEGE OF JOURNALISM

Second Main Road,
Taramani,
Chennai-600 113.
Tamil Nadu
India
91-44-22542842-44/47/40
asian_media@asianmedia.org.in

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