76-754 Watchdog Journalism

9–12 units, Carnegie Mellon University

The practice of journalism involves covering the news of the day. Investigative journalism uncovers it, digging through public records and data to expose corruption or correct social injustices. The process takes patience and persistence, as well as familiarity with right-to-know laws, to find that gold nugget of information that exposes secrets or becomes the missing piece to a larger puzzle. In this course, students will learn investigative techniques that make the powerful accountable, using government documents, financial filings and databases to spot undetected crime patterns, an unfair housing policy or perhaps questionable spending by a non-profit charity. Investigative journalism has a storied history of exposing wrongdoing and today many of the tools historically used to tell those stories are available to everyone. This course will help budding journalists, researchers and anyone else interested in addressing societal problems find those tools and learn how to use them. This course meets the Dietrich College Deciding Gen Ed requirement.

Prerequisites: none listed

Offered: Spring 2026

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