Critical Journalism

Course Description

⚠⚠⚠ Read this section before anything else. JOU4306 carries two entirely different courses at Florida's two public institutions, and they share no content, no skills and no textbook.

Institution	Its title	What the course is
UWF	Writing Critical Reviews	"Devoted to writing reviews of books, film, art, and music." ⚠ Arts criticism — a writing course.
UF	Advanced Data Journalism	"Hands-on approach which blends journalism and data science… Learn to program in R to replace spreadsheets and databases with reproducible data analysis, and to clearly communicate results to peers and lay audiences." ⚠ A programming and statistics course.

Florida's statewide record calls the number Critical Journalism and describes it as "critical thinking and analysis as employed in the profession of journalism." ⚠⚠ That sentence is vague enough that both carriers can fairly claim it — writing a review is criticism, and analysing a dataset is analysis. The state's own record cannot settle which course this number is.

This guide covers both readings, each clearly labelled. ⚠ Do not assume from the number which one you are registering for. Read your own catalogue. The implications for transfer are set out in Special Information and they are serious.

Reading A — Writing Critical Reviews (UWF)

Arts criticism: writing informed, argued reviews of books, film, art and music for a general readership.

⚠ Criticism is not opinion, and the distinction is the course. Anyone can say whether they enjoyed a film. A critic makes a case — grounded in evidence from the work itself, informed by knowledge of the form and its history, and written so that a reader who disagrees still finds it worth reading. The discipline is that every judgement must be earned from the work.

⚠⚠ UWF's version carries a Gordon Rule writing designation, which tells you it is writing-intensive and brings a grade condition — see Special Information.

Reading B — Advanced Data Journalism (UF)

Journalism done with data: acquiring, cleaning, analysing and visualising datasets to find and tell stories, reproducibly.

⚠⚠ UF's description is specific about method in a way most catalogue entries are not: students "learn to program in R to replace spreadsheets and databases with reproducible data analysis." That is a real commitment — it means writing code rather than clicking in a spreadsheet, and it means an analysis another person can re-run and verify.

⚠ Reproducibility is the point, not a technicality. A newsroom that publishes a finding based on a spreadsheet nobody can reconstruct has no defence when the finding is challenged. Writing the analysis as code makes it checkable — by an editor, by a source, and by the reader. This is journalism adopting a scientific norm, and it is the direction the field has gone.

⚠⚠ This is an ADVANCED course. UF's prerequisite is JOU 3305 Data Journalism or JOU 4318 Sports Data Journalism — you are expected to have done data journalism already.

Learning Outcomes

Required Outcomes — Reading A (criticism)

• Distinguish review, criticism and reporting, and explain what each owes its reader.
• ⚠ Build an argument about a work from evidence within it, rather than asserting a preference.
• Describe a work accurately and economically for a reader who has not encountered it — without spoiling it.
• Apply form-specific vocabulary — for film, literature, visual art and music — precisely rather than decoratively.
• Situate a work in context: genre, tradition, the maker's other work, and what else is being made now.
• Establish and sustain a critical voice that is distinctive without being self-indulgent.
• Write to length and deadline, including the short review, where the constraint is severest.
• ⚠ Apply the ethics of reviewing — conflicts of interest, junkets, review copies, disclosure, and reviewing people you know.
• Handle negative judgement fairly: criticise the work rather than the person, and give reasons.
• Revise under editing, and apply AP Style.
• Understand the market — where reviews are published, at what length, and for what pay.

Required Outcomes — Reading B (data journalism)

• ⚠ Program in R at a working level for data manipulation and analysis.
• Produce a reproducible analysis — scripted, documented, and re-runnable by someone else.
• Acquire data — public records requests, agency portals, APIs and scraping — and know the legal and ethical limits of each.
• ⚠⚠ Clean and validate messy data, which is most of the work and where most errors enter.
• Apply appropriate statistics — rates versus counts, distributions, per-capita normalisation, and the difference between a difference and a meaningful one.
• ⚠ Avoid the standard analytical errors: confusing correlation with causation, the ecological fallacy, base-rate neglect and cherry-picking.
• Interrogate a dataset's provenance — who collected it, how, for what purpose, and what it omits.
• Produce visualisations that clarify rather than decorate, and that do not mislead through scale or selection.
• ⚠ Write the story — translate a finding into prose a general reader understands, with honest caveats.
• Explain a method to an editor and to a lay audience, and defend it to a hostile source.
• Document and publish methodology alongside the story.
• Apply ethics specific to data — privacy, re-identification, and the harm a dataset about people can do.

Major Topics

Required Topics — Reading A (criticism)

• What criticism is for, and a short history of the critic's role.
• Description, analysis, interpretation, judgement — the four moves of a review.
• Film criticism — the vocabulary of shot, edit, sound and performance.
• Book reviewing — fiction and non-fiction, and their different obligations.
• Art and exhibition reviewing.
• Music — recording and live performance.
• Voice, style and the first person.
• The short review and the long essay.
• Ethics, disclosure and conflicts.
• The contemporary landscape — the decline of staff critic positions, and criticism on newer platforms.

Required Topics — Reading B (data journalism)

• R and the tidyverse; scripting and version control.
• Reproducible workflow — notebooks, documentation, and why spreadsheets fail.
• Data acquisition — records requests, APIs, scraping.
• Cleaning — types, missing values, duplicates, joins and the errors each introduces.
• Exploratory analysis and summary statistics.
• Statistical reasoning for journalists; significance and its misuse.
• Visualisation — chart choice, scales, and misleading graphics.
• Geographic data and mapping.
• Finding the story in a dataset, and knowing when there is not one.
• ⚠ Writing from data; the nut graf of a data story.
• Methodology publication and transparency.
• Data ethics — privacy, re-identification, algorithmic accountability.

Resources & Tools

Reading A — criticism

• A Short Guide to Writing About Film (Timothy Corrigan) — the standard for film reviewing.
• How to Write About Music and the Best American criticism annuals — ⚠ read a great deal of good criticism; it is the only way to learn voice.
• Critics worth reading as models — Pauline Kael, Roger Ebert, James Wood, Jerry Saltz — and current work at the New Yorker, New York Times and Los Angeles Review of Books.
• The AP Stylebook, and the National Book Critics Circle for ethics guidance.

Reading B — data journalism

• ⚠⚠ R for Data Science (Wickham and Grolemund) — free online, and the standard introduction to exactly the toolchain UF names.
• The Data Journalism Handbook — free online.
• Numbers in the Newsroom and Precision Journalism (Philip Meyer) — ⚠ Meyer invented this field; the book is old and still right.
• Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) and NICAR — ⚠⚠ the professional home of data journalism. Student membership is cheap, the NICAR conference is where this field hires, and its tipsheet archive is free.
• R, RStudio and Quarto — all free. Datawrapper and Flourish for publication graphics.
• ⚠ Florida Statutes Chapter 119 — Florida's public records law is among the broadest in the country and is written into the state constitution. For a data journalist here it is the primary acquisition tool.

Career Pathways

• ⚠⚠ The two readings lead to genuinely different places, which is the strongest practical reason to know which course you are taking.
• From Reading A (criticism): arts and entertainment writing, features, culture desks, publishing, arts marketing and communications, and freelance reviewing. ⚠ Be realistic — full-time staff critic positions have contracted severely and most criticism is now freelance or a component of a broader features role. The transferable skill is argued, evidenced writing, which is valuable well beyond criticism.
• From Reading B (data journalism): ⚠⚠ data reporter, news applications developer, investigative data analyst — and, outside journalism, data analyst roles generally. This is one of the most reliably employable skill sets a journalism student can acquire, because R, reproducible analysis and data visualisation transfer directly to government, non-profit, research and commercial analytics work.
• Common to both: Florida's media markets — Miami-Fort Lauderdale, Tampa-St. Petersburg, Orlando and Jacksonville — and the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, one of the world's leading journalism training organisations.
• ⚠ For the data path specifically, Florida is a strong place to work: the state's constitutional public records provisions make datasets obtainable that would be difficult elsewhere, and the Tampa Bay Times and Miami Herald both have serious investigative and data track records.

Special Information

⚠⚠⚠ One number, two subjects — and what it means for transfer

The two carriers teach courses with no overlap whatsoever. One is a writing course about books, film, art and music. The other teaches programming in R. ⚠ A transfer evaluator matching on the course number alone cannot tell them apart, and the consequence is concrete: a student who took arts criticism may be credited with satisfying a data requirement, or the reverse — and either error surfaces late.

What to do:

• ⚠⚠ Never transfer this number on the number. Send the syllabus and the work.
• If a programme sheet requires "JOU4306," ask which subject is meant before assuming your course satisfies it.
• Keep your portfolio. Reviews or analyses, whichever you produced — in both halves of journalism the work settles the question.

⚠⚠ Why the state's record cannot settle it — and why neither carrier is simply wrong

The usual test for this situation is to compare the statewide title with the statewide description. Where they agree, the state is the reference and a deviating carrier is misfiling. ⚠⚠ Here they agree with each other and still fail to discriminate: Critical Journalism, described as "critical thinking and analysis as employed in the profession of journalism." Arts criticism is critical thinking. Data analysis is analysis. The description admits both.

The second test — does a dedicated number exist for what each carrier teaches? — is more revealing, and the answer is unusual:

Number	Statewide title	Public carriers
JOU3305	Data Journalism	⚠ UF — and only UF
JOU4015	Journalism Culture and Criticism	⚠⚠ none
JOU4305	Data Journalism	⚠⚠ none
JOU4318	Sports Data Journalism	UF

⚠⚠⚠ And here is the detail that explains UF's choice rather than condemning it: UF carries JOU3305 Data Journalism AND teaches Advanced Data Journalism on JOU4306. UF files the introductory course on the correct number. What Florida does not provide is an ADVANCED data journalism number — JOU4305 exists but nobody carries it, and the only other data number is sports-specific. UF needed a second-level number for a genuine two-course sequence and used one that was available.

⚠ Equally, UWF is not misfiling in any obvious sense — the dedicated criticism number, JOU4015, has no carrier either, and "critical" in Critical Journalism reads naturally as criticism.

The honest conclusion, and this guide states it rather than manufacturing a verdict: two institutions made reasonable, different readings of a vague statewide entry, in a corner of the catalogue where the dedicated alternatives are dormant. ⚠ The student's problem is real regardless of who is at fault, which is why the transfer advice above matters more than the adjudication.

⚠⚠ Gordon Rule at UWF, and a real grade trap

UWF's catalogue states that its version "Meets College-Level Communication Skills Requirement," and Florida's course file records both the Gordon Rule and the Gordon Rule writing flags against it.

⚠⚠⚠ A Gordon Rule course requires a grade of C or HIGHER to satisfy the requirement under State Board of Education Rule 6A-10.030. A C-minus passes the course and does not clear the requirement.

⚠ Two cautions: the designation is made by the institution, not the number, so it is UWF's and says nothing about UF's version; and Florida's two Gordon Rule flags are entered independently and are not a reliable guide to which component is satisfied. Confirm against UWF's published list.

⚠ Prerequisites differ completely — as you would expect from two different courses

Source	Prerequisite
UF (data)	⚠⚠ JOU 3305 Data Journalism OR JOU 4318 Sports Data Journalism — this is the second course in a sequence
UWF (criticism)	none published
Florida statewide	none recorded

⚠ The prerequisite is itself the clearest evidence of which course you are looking at. If your catalogue gates this number on a data journalism course, you are in Reading B. If it gates on nothing, you are almost certainly in Reading A.

⚠⚠ Do not attempt the UF version without the prerequisite even if you could register. It assumes prior data journalism and moves straight into R. Learning to program and learning to report from data at the same time, in one term, defeats most students.

Offering Notes

Institution	Its title	Credits	Contact hours	Notes
University of West Florida (SUS)	Writing Critical Reviews	3	not published	⚠ Gordon Rule writing designation. No prerequisite published; may not be repeated for credit. Department of Communication
University of Florida (SUS)	Advanced Data Journalism	3	not published	⚠⚠ Prerequisite JOU 3305 or JOU 4318. Letter grade. Teaches R. College of Journalism and Communications

Both carriers award three credits and neither publishes a contact-hour figure, so the 45 hours recorded here is Florida's convention for a three-credit course with no C or L suffix.

⚠⚠ Treat it as a floor in both readings. Florida's statewide record flags this number as carrying laboratory instruction despite the unsuffixed identifier — and independently, a writing course is assessed on drafts and revision, and a programming course consumes time in ways that do not resemble reading. Students consistently underestimate the second.

Position in the curriculum and transfer

An upper-division course. ⚠ In Reading A it follows a reporting course and pairs with features and longform writing. In Reading B it is the second course of a data sequence and pairs with investigative reporting and statistics.

Florida's statewide record classifies it as transferable to an institution offering the same course, with no general-education category, and marks it for dual enrolment with elective high-school credit — ⚠ boilerplate across the prefix. The (U) means upper division and nothing more.

⚠⚠⚠ The phrase "an institution offering the same course" is doing extraordinary work on this number. Two institutions offer it and they do not offer the same course. Plan accordingly.

AI Integration

⚠⚠ The two readings meet generative tools very differently, which is itself informative about where journalism is heading.

Reading A — criticism

A model will produce a competent, fluent review of almost anything, instantly. ⚠ Pretending otherwise would be useless. So what is a critic for?

⚠⚠⚠ Three things, and they are the course's actual content. First, the critic was THERE — in the cinema, at the exhibition, in the room where the music was played. A review is partly a report of an encounter, and a model has had none. Second, a critic has a body of judgement that accumulates and can be trusted or distrusted over time — readers follow named critics precisely because they learn how that person's taste relates to their own, which requires a continuous person. Third, and most practically: criticism is argument, and the argument must be about THIS work — generated reviews converge on the generic because the model is summarising consensus rather than perceiving a particular thing.

⚠ The useful boundary: use it to check your prose and to find the counterargument to your reading. Do not use it to have the reading. A critic whose judgements are borrowed has nothing to sell.

Reading B — data journalism

Here the tools are genuinely, substantially useful and the field has adopted them. Generating and debugging R code, explaining an unfamiliar function, suggesting a cleaning approach for a messy column, drafting documentation — ⚠ these accelerate real work, and a data journalist who refuses them is slower for no gain.

⚠⚠⚠ But the course's own central commitment supplies the boundary, which is unusually elegant: UF's description names REPRODUCIBLE analysis. Reproducibility means another person can re-run your work and get your result. ⚠ Code you did not write and do not understand is not reproducible in any meaningful sense — you cannot defend it, cannot explain why a choice was made, and cannot spot when it silently did the wrong thing.

Two specific failure modes.

• ⚠⚠ Generated code runs and is wrong. A join that silently drops rows, a filter applied before rather than after a grouping, a date parsed in the wrong format. None of these throw an error; they produce a plausible number. In journalism that number gets published.
• ⚠ Statistical judgement. Whether to normalise per capita, whether a change is meaningful, whether a dataset supports the claim — these are the decisions that make a data story right or wrong, and they are exactly what a model will answer confidently and without context.

⚠⚠ The professional standard is emerging and worth adopting now: publish your methodology, disclose your tools, and be able to explain every step to an editor. If you cannot explain why a line of code is there, it does not go in the analysis.

⚠ Common to both readings: never put unpublished reporting, source material or embargoed work into a consumer chat interface. It is a disclosure, and in journalism the protection of unpublished material and of sources is close to absolute.