Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism

I. OVERVIEW

II. DIALOGUES

Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism Overview

Exchange ideas and make new worlds with words. Since its inception, The New School for Social Research has attracted thoughtful journalists and innovative publishers. The founders included Thorstein Veblen, Charles Beard, and John Dewey—authors whose books reached a wide audience. After World War II, The New School helped create and launch the first alternative weekly urban newspaper, the Village Voice. The Graduate Faculty later attracted public intellectuals like Robert Heilbroner and Hannah Arendt, whose work appeared in publications like the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. In more recent decades, NSSR has invited outspoken journalists like Christopher Hitchens, Jonathan Schell, and Katha Pollitt to discuss their views with its graduate students in substantive courses.

The Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism program not only trains students in the traditions of criticism, critical theory, and fine writing but also offers students a variety of studio courses and working experiences that teach them how to design, edit, and distribute journals and books containing intellectually serious work. In addition to surveying traditional forms of book and magazine publishing, students explore the possibilities opened up by new media, such as the Internet, tablet applications, and print-on-demand smallbatch publications.

Our curriculum equips students to think critically about book publishing and journalism and their history; to understand the best practices of contemporary reporting and cultural criticism; to appreciate the business aspects of production and distribution; and to work collaboratively in the writing, editing, design, and publication of texts on a variety of print and digital platforms.

Unlike other publishing programs, this course of study teaches students how to edit pieces, how to write better, how to think more clearly and critically—and how to design literary texts. And it goes beyond journalism programs by teaching students how to design a business plan and lay out a cross-platform publication while acquiring a foundation in the history of written communication from the printing press to the Internet. And unlike most design curricula, this program regards design, communication technology, and form making as part of the exchange of ideas.

Degrees Offered

The Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism program offers the MA degree. Students can complete the program on a full-time or part-time basis in one or two years.

Recent Courses

Blogs, Social Media, and News Freedom by Design Political and Cultural Reporting Multimedia Publishing Production and Writing Lab

Recent Outcomes

Alexis Cassola (MA ‘18): Assistant Editor, Penguin Random House Gili Ostfield (MA ’18): Editorial Producer, the New Yorker Miles Pulsford (MA ’18): Writer, Capitol Forum Daniel Geneen (MA ’17): Audience Development and Special Projects Producer, Eater (Vox Media) Natalia Tuero German (MA ’17): Office of the Executive Coordinator and Spokesperson on Sexual Harassment, UN Women Paula Duran (MA ’15): Editor, McKinsey & Company

The Intersection of Publishing, Journalism, and Scholarship

James Miller Professor of Politics and Liberal Studies

Amid the clutter of Jim Miller’s office is a mind that refuses to be confined by traditional academic disciplines and boundaries. Since his time in graduate school, Miller has brought together areas of study that others might deem disparate. While pursuing an interdisciplinary PhD in History of Ideas, which required him to study social history, sociology, political theory, and philosophy, Miller worked in journalism as an editor at an alternative weekly newspaper. Seeing no reason to abandon either of his interests, Miller continued to publish pieces—some in Rolling Stone, others in the New Republic—after he secured a teaching position at the University of Texas at Austin. On the strength of his New Republic pieces, Newsweek hired Miller as a cultural critic and wooed him away from the academic world. Miller eventually returned, first teaching parttime at Harvard and later joining The New School full-time.

Since the publication in 1987 of Democracy Is in the Streets, an account of student radicalism in the Sixties and the first of his books to appear on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, Miller’s goal has been to unite the academic and professional facets of his life and write “intelligent, deeply researched books that are of interest to ordinary readers.” His more philosophical interests led him to write The Passion of Michel Foucault, published in 1992, which explored the idea of living a life beyond good and evil—a work he funded by subsequently writing Flowers in the Dustbin: The Rise of Rock and Roll, 1947–1977. His 2011 book, Examined Lives: From Socrates to Nietzsche, was the third to be featured on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. In 2018, Miller edited a new English language edition of Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Eminent Philosophers for Oxford University Press and wrote the provocative Can Democracy Work? A Short History of a Radical Idea, from Ancient Athens to Our World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

Miller brings the same multifaceted approach to his role as director of the Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism program. He partnered with Rachel Rosenfelt and Juliette Cezzar to create a truly interdisciplinary program that brings together journalism, publishing, and design and offers both pre-professional career training and a rigorous graduate education. Miller stresses that students seeking a traditional journalism school need not apply. He wants students who are willing to collaborate, to learn by doing, students who will stretch themselves beyond their comfort zones.

Acutely aware of the precarious situation of both the publishing and the journalism industries, Miller views the entrepreneurial spirit of the program as a catalyst to help students seize opportunity from seeming chaos and create entirely new publications and platforms. He notes, “Worlds made by words are crucial building blocks of modern society. New media have certainly transformed how we experience the textual worlds we all inhabit, but printed books and magazines aren’t going to disappear anytime soon.”

Challenging the Status Quo of Publishing and Journalism: A Conversation with Natasha Lennard

Natasha Lennard Part-Time Lecturer Contributing Writer, The Intercept [00:00:00] Interviewer: Your work focuses on social justice, criminal justice, legal matters, and anti-fascism efforts—some of the most critical issues of our time. And you’re a regular contributor to respected publications like The Intercept, The Nation, the New Inquiry, and the New York Times’ philosophy blog, The Stone, where you’ve held mainstream media and its narratives up to intense scrutiny. How does this play into your pedagogy as professor in the Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism [CPCJ] program?

[00:00:38] Natasha Lennard: I think it’s really important that if journalism is going to be taught, it be taught in a way that takes a magnifying glass—or a scalpel—to the way journalism is done today. It’s a crucial time to look seriously at the types of narratives and truths produced in our media landscape and to address the political and cultural work they do in the world.

There’s an opportunity in this particular program to impart practical skills and guide students to learn by doing, but there’s also an understanding that in CPCJ, we’re not just trying to train a set of stenographers and robot journalists. We’re trying to engage with students who want to learn critically within the media landscape that they’ll be entering into. There’s an ethical element, too, which makes The New School for Social Research so appealing.

[00:03:14] IN: So how do you and your students apply this scrutiny, or “scalpel,” to contemporary media? Is it a theoretical or a more experiential process?

[00:03:48] NL: It’s both. CPCJ faculty use the access we have to introduce our students to publishers, editors, writers, and directors in order to interrogate the reporting process. Be it Buzzfeed, the New York Times, or VICE News, we want to give a sense of the current landscape of journalism and rip away any veil of mystery around how it all works.

The Fieldwork Seminar in particular is very out and about. Students get to meet people in the industry and talk to them whilst having a

through line of paying attention to the way different aspects of New York media allow ideas to percolate and inform what is known, slightly embarrassingly, as the “marketplace of ideas.”

We learn to follow a concept that can then be made into a book. We try to trace what might stymie the spreading of an idea within the media landscape and what might aid it. It’s an ideas-based way of looking at the practical, material side of the industry.

[00:05:14] IN: And what type of projects are your graduate students producing through this process?

[00:05:31] NL: Everyone is covering very different subject matter. One student was interested in writing about the way the beauty industry imposes ideas of femininity on the public, a kind of intellectual way of looking at the “beauty market.” Other students were interested in looking at gentrification and how that occurs in the city. But what’s interesting was that even though they were all very different areas of expertise and interest, we all focused on specific ways of approaching and writing journalism.

[00:06:42] IN: Why is NSSR the right graduate school for a writer or publisher seeking to explore such issues?

[00:07:06] NL: NSSR, and The New School as a whole, have an approach to investigation that’s appealing, because it is a critical approach. NSSR has a long history of engaging in critical theory and is committed to challenging the status quo, be that in the philosophical tradition, the anthropological tradition, or media. It’s been appealing to me in terms of engaging with the school in the past, and this is the only place I would want to teach journalism in New York. But again, it’s that critical mindset that seems to underpin the school. Our role as an academic institution has always been that of an insider who isn’t afraid to be critical of the field.

I think the thing that’s important is that those—whether students or professors—who are interested in looking critically at what the media does and how it works and how it might inform the sociopolitical can get that discussion here as well as a broad training in skills that one needs to become a journalist or to get involved in publishing.