Students encounter the full range of news, sports, feature and picture story assignments they would meet on a small daily newspaper. This is often a student's first opportunity to experience working at a professional level while under deadline pressure. Students may repeat this course one semester for credit, providing they are chosen to serve as Chief Photographer or Picture Editor during the second semester. These are both paid staff positions. This non-shooting course teaches students what happens to pictures once they are delivered to an editor.
Students study layout and design and have practical assignments applying what they learn.
The course also incorporates desktop publishing techniques on the Macintosh computer in our computer laboratories. Considerable discussion of the ethics of photojournalism is included in the course. Independent Study Students who complete the above courses may engage in independent studies around a specific topic, such as long-range picture stories, with the approval of the instructor. Perhaps the best known graduate from this program is Kim Komenich, a San Francisco Examiner staff photographer who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1987 for his coverage of the social revolution in the Philippines. He follows in the tradition of another SJSU graduate, Steve Starr, who also won a Pulitzer Prize in 1970 for his coverage of an incident in which students took control of a building on the Cornell University campus.