Entertainment and Lifestyle Writing Certificate

The entertainment and lifestyle writing certificate offers students the opportunity to specialize in reporting and writing for the niche market of their choice. Students will take basic reporting and writing courses, then put those skills to practice for one of the student-run media (the lifestyle magazine PULSE, the weekly newspaper The Observer, or the weekly newscast CentralNewsWatch) as well as for their own websites and social media accounts. They will also learn how to pitch and market stories to professional outlets. Upon completion of this certificate, students will have begun the process of branding themselves as experts or go-to writers on the topic of their choice. Students pursuing a journalism major or minor interested in earning the entertainment and lifestyle writing certificate must discuss with their academic adviser their course plan for the certificate by the term in which they complete the journalism basics requirement.

Program Learner Outcomes
Upon successful completion of this program, students will be able to:

• create thorough and compelling feature stories by discovering, evaluating and interviewing diverse sources, observing, doing computer-assisted research, and publishing professional-level content on appropriate platforms;
• craft effective messages by writing correctly and clearly in forms and styles appropriate for the media and communication professions, audiences and purposes they serve;
• think critically, creatively and independently;
• conduct research and evaluate information by methods appropriate to the media and communication professions in which they work; and
• critically evaluate their own work and that of others for accuracy and fairness, clarity, appropriate style and grammatical correctness.