UC Berkeley Journalism - Program

The goal of the Graduate School of Journalism is to produce professional print, broadcast, and new media journalists who move on to positions of leadership and influence. The two-year Master of Journalism (M.J.) program provides intensive training in journalism skills and teaches the traditions and principles of the field.

In Documentary: Courses Faculty Events Careers

Documentary

Berkeley's documentary program is grounded in the values of professional journalism—accuracy, eloquent clarity, aggressive research and reporting, fine writing, ethics, and analysis—combined with fundamentals of solid filmmaking. Documentary production here places great value on visual imagery and a wide range of storytelling styles—investigative, historical, biography, personal essay, and cinema verite. All courses are practical rather than theoretical and are built around teaching skills and the sensibility required to make documentaries intended for the largest possible audience, with emphasis on innovative prime-time television.

"In my own work and in students' work over the years, I've found no relationship at all between the remoteness of the location and the quality of the documentary. It's curious; some of the very best grad student documentaries have been made in the parking garage across the street from North Gate Hall, the Engineering Department next door, as well as in Bhutan or Tanzania. Some of my very best shooting was done a few miles from home, and some of my worst was in the interior in Brazil; some of the very best student camera work was done in Oakland, and some of the most unusable came from halfway around the world."

Jon Else, professor

All documentary students are required to take Introduction to Television News, Reporting for Television and History of Documentary during their first year. In the second year, students take Documentary Production and the Master's Project Seminar, a year-long intensive production seminar in which they produce a professional half-hour documentary suitable for national broadcast. Second-year coursework covers writing, directing, videography, sound recording, production management and editing skills specific to documentary. All work is digital.

"Last January I returned from an exhilarating month teaching documentary filmmaking to former ANC combatants in South Africa. Still reeling from jet lag and culture shock and armed with a healthy dose of attitude, I dragged myself to campus to face the 'privileged' J-School documentary students. Immediately I was jolted awake. These students were engaged, passionate, earnest and bold. We dove into the gloriously collaborative process of structuring their documentaries: stories from Emeryville to Calcutta, from ecological disasters to Olympic champions, from the ethics of photojournalism to the morality of the Catholic Church. Truly nowhere in the world could I have a richer experience than teaching at the J- School."

Deborah Hoffmann, lecturer

Master's project films should be adventuresome, meaningful, and suitable for wide prime-time distribution on PBS, commercial networks or cable TV. Every year several master's project films are picked up for nationwide prime-time broadcast, and nearly all have regional broadcast and extensive exposure at film festivals. Films have covered such wide-ranging topics as robotic flies, the history of Bulgaria, former Black Panthers exiled in Tanzania, step dancing, stuttering, rape, arranged marriages in India, weight lifting in Afghanistan, monster trucks, opera, the introduction of television into the Kingdom of Bhutan, gentrification in Oakland, and Mormon missionaries. Over the past several years, student films have won first place in the National Student Emmy and Student Academy Awards and have premiered at numerous film festivals, including Sundance and Cannes.

The Center for New Documentary

The Center for New Documentary explores, tests and promotes new ways of producing high quality, long-form television documentaries at very low cost. The center was opened in response to a rising chorus of frustration over fundraising and the skyrocketing cost of mainstream documentary production. Seed funding came from the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation and the Gerbode Foundation