This fall, Professor Kristopher Brooks will teach Business and Economic Reporting at Hunter College for the first time.
The course teaches students to produce stories that help readers make smart financial decisions.
This isn’t Brooks’ first time teaching the course; he has taught it in Albany and at SUNY Purchase. But this will be “a more polished and refined version,” he said. “After tinkering under the hood, I think I’ve got the class where I want it to be.”
Students will learn how to sift through documents to determine whether a company is profitable. There will also be guest speakers, including business editors. Students will learn how to write a story about unemployment and bankruptcy, and how to find resources to build up a story.
Although it is an upper-level class, its only prerequisite is Reporting and Writing 1. Brooks says the course is for anyone at Hunter who has “decided they want to be a journalist, but do not know what beat they want to do.” He hopes that, if exposed to business journalism, it could be an option that students may not have thought about before.
And Brooks stressed that the skills the course imparts will benefit any journalist, no matter what beat they cover. “Regardless of the medium or the specialization of a journalist, this will help students learn how to find money and track down people with ease,” he said.
Brooks has spent the last nine years covering business and the economy, and most recently, the housing market. He hopes that in teaching this course, he can help to encourage more diversity in business journalism. “There’s a healthy amount of journalists in newsrooms now but they all look the same,” he said. “We don’t have a good chunk of business journalists of color.”
Brooks acknowledges that students might find the course intimidating and think it’s all about the stock market and talking to CEOs. But it’s about much more than that, he says, and business journalism is a growing and lucrative field.
His goal is to prepare students for internships so they have a leg up when they’re on the job market. For anyone looking to pursue a career in journalism and wondering if this course might be for them, Brooks is unequivocal: “Now is the time.”
