Journalism & Creative Writing BA(Hons)

Th first year introduces you to fundamental study, writing, reporting and audiovisual skills, immersing you in the mindset, cultures and methods of journalists and creatives. You will explore a range of writing genres and are then encouraged to break the rules by responding creatively to others’ work. You’ll also learn about the publishing business and explore key issues and trends affecting your work and lives in the digital sphere, such as the impact of AI, online communities and fake news.   

Modules

Writing: Craft and Contexts

Explore the practice of writing as a discipline across multiple forms of creative writing.   

You will develop your critical skills, strategies for writing to deadlines, and understanding of the cultural context and traditions writers and readers work within. There is a highly practical element to the module, as you create original pieces with constructive feedback from tutors and peers. 

Writing Studio 

Develop your writing for academic and professional purposes. Learn the fundamentals of academic research, study and writing. Explore reading and writing as tools for creative practice, and develop a persuasive and effective writing style, applying these skills in a wide range of contexts, such as news, social media, and apps. Examine how language shapes the experience of different audiences on different platforms. 

News Lab: Multimedia Reporting 1 

In the first module on our News Lab strand, you will learn the fundamentals of reporting and news writing, and how to record and edit audiovisual stories. It aims to inspire your curiosity, helping you to understand what news is, how to interrogate digital and real-world sources to generate good story ideas, and how to interview people with confidence. 

Breaking the Rules: Remix and Writing Back 

A radical and provocative creative writing module which covers remix and writing back in theory and practice. You will be writing about, back to, and from texts of all kinds (including the written, spoken, and visual as well as poetry, fiction and non-fiction). This includes reversionary writing, collage, reviewing, adaptation, pastiche and parody, using texts as source material. You will also consider genre, information content, point of view, tone and context.   

Publishing Studio: Technologizing the Word 

This module introduces you to a range of publishing and production methods and contexts. You'll design your own project in the studio and choose bespoke training to align to your ambitions. Projects might include book design, zine making, performances, stage shows or exhibitions. You’ll participate in publishing activities, such as typography, binding, curation, exhibiting and event management. 

Discovering Digital Cultures 

This module provides a framework for understanding media-conscious storytelling through creative technologies. It explores the approaches of content creators, digital story-makers and creative disrupters to social media, brand identity and digital citizenship. You will also explore how blended realities, VR/AR and generative AI are shaping our understanding of the body and the environment. 

Your second year explores longer-form writing in a wider range of non-fiction contexts, more complex reporting tasks and specific craft and production contexts. You will also engage in news trends and methods from around the world and take part in more explicitly collaborative work, with a strong focus on transferrable employability skills including pitching and business planning. Creatively, you can develop a specialism with optional modules such as Screenwriting, Poetry and Magic & the Impossible. 

Modules

News Lab: Local is Global

Develop your multimedia storytelling skills by exploring stories connected across borders. You will focus your work, individually and collaboratively, around a theme, with resonance both regionally and beyond, exploring through practice journalism’s role in promoting social justice and challenging Eurocentric assumptions about news cultures.   

Creative Non-Fiction 

Explore how creative, journalistic and critical skills can be used to create essays, interviews, travel writing, reviews, journals, diaries, and biography; areas which until recently were often not seen as creative writing. You will consider how the need to convey factual information can be balanced with the creative potential of language narrative and form, and consider the ethical issues involved. 

Making Magazines 

Work as part of a team to conceive, plan and create a new magazine with digital and print editions, built on a sound business plan. You will learn about the creative and commercial contexts of magazine production, and the processes involved in planning, funding, distribution and promotion. Using industry-standard software, you will create a prototype edition, taking responsibility for all the editorial and visual content. 

Collaboration

This module invites you to work with your peers and external clients to research and realise a collaborative project, applying your skills alongside valuable transferable ones, such as negotiation, problem-solving, teamwork and project management. It uses a Challenge Based Learning (CBL) approach that develops these employability skills and the ability to critically reflect on your professional practice. 

Optional modules

Games

Learn the craft of writing for games. How do established narrative techniques apply and adapt to interactivity? What does it mean to write for an active audience and players with agency? You’ll critically consider everything from small indie titles to AAA blockbusters, from mixed reality to immersive, to help you unpack writing and narrative design methods to use in your own games. 

Poetry

You will not only write your own poetry, but also give it a context within current practice. Through reading and discussing a wide range of historical and contemporary writing, workshopping your own poems, attending seminars and guest readings, you will be able to show an understanding of contemporary poetry which will help you write, revise and think about your own work. 

Satire & Scandal

In 1729 Jonathan Swift advocated that people ‘eat unwanted and poor children’. He was writing satire that showed up poverty and inequality in a brutal, unforgiving light.  

Since then, shocking, scandalous and satirical texts have continued this work. This module will examine some of the texts that ripped apart societal taboos and held a light up to hypocrisy and humbug. 

Screenwriting

This module introduces you to the craft and creativity of writing for the screen, invluding cinema, television and online. Learning by doing, you will form a Script Development Team, responsible for the development of individual writing projects. You will therefore work in a ‘Writers' Room’ style, common in the industry. As a team member, you will act as script editors as well as writers to see projects through to completion. 

Fiction

Explore the craft of fiction, learning about characterisation, narrative structure and building language landscapes. You will study various published works as craftspeople considering how fiction is made. You will consider the varying demands of the short story, the novella and the novel, before taking your work into public contexts, either as submissions to established venues, organised public readings or DIY publications. 

Magic & the Impossible

This module explores science fiction, fantasy and contemporary fairytales, focusing primarily on contemporary texts. You will explore representations of the future and the past, in both real and imaginary worlds, and consider them within wider cultural, historical and social contexts. Using a range of conceptual and critical tools, you will evaluate representations of gender, reality, the body, time and place.   

Radio & Theatre

Learn to write plays for theatre and radio. You will consider the many aspects of writing for a live medium, including staging, budget, production and audience, and consider how to write for specific venues or companies. For radio, you will investigate the advantages and disadvantages of writing for a ‘blind’ medium, and the very specific relationship between sound and listener. 

You can choose to take an optional professional placement after your second year on a three-year programme. 

You’ll be responsible for finding your own placement, with support from the Employability team. 

Choosing this option will enhance your industry experience and skills while studying. 

How you’ll study during your professional placement

You’ll spend time working in a professional context, as part of a business or organisation. This can be in one role, or up to three, and must be for a minimum of 24 weeks. 

You’ll develop in-demand workplace skills, deepen your insight into industry and grow your network of contacts, all of which could help you get ahead in your career after graduation. 

Throughout this year, you’ll develop a portfolio of work that includes critical self-reflection on what has been learned from the experience. You’ll be required to evidence your experiences, the skills you’ve learned and your professional growth. 

Your final year enables you to bring your skills together as you prepare for a career or further study. You will develop your professional portfolio in a live reporting project and deepen your research skills in preparation for a final project, which can be creative or critical.  A dedicated module makes your CV, portfolio and online presence career-ready, helping you to find and present work experience and start applying for jobs. Creative options include modules focusing on crime, writing for children and young adults, and works exploring what it means to be human. 

Modules

News Lab: Going Live

In this final News Lab module, you will apply your professional, collaborative and digital craft skills in a deadline-driven newsroom, sharing responsibility for organisation, quality and workflow. You will take on distinct editorial roles in a production cycle which will include live video and/or radio outputs, learning the importance of rigorous editing and the creative and commercial imperatives that drive successful production.   

How to be Right: Advanced Investigation and Research 

The vast quantity of information and data online, along with material from more traditional sources, means journalists and scholars have unprecedented access to resources and tools to process them. Building on the academic and professional skills you have developed, this module helps you to apply a range of methodologies to conduct advanced research in both contexts. 

The Springboard 

Prepare to step into the world of work by applying the enterprising, organisational and reflective skills which will help you stand out from the crowd in the increasingly complex media, publishing and communications landscape. You will bring together the portfolio materials you have built up during your degree and enhance them with a project focused on enterprise and entrepreneurship, as well as the opportunity to engage in work experience. 

Mini-Documentary

Round off your degree with a creative flourish by producing the sort of short, powerful non-fiction film or audio that is proliferating as the world’s most dynamic organisations compete for hearts and minds in the digital age. You will learn how to refine your story idea, tailor it to the audience and pitch the concept, before working under supervision to produce the final documentary and the materials needed to share and promote it. 

Dissertation

This module invites you to produce a piece of substantial written academic research on a subject arising from your studies. You will work independently, with academic support, helped by workshops which will help you refresh and expand your research and critical thinking skills, exploring a range of scholarly methodologies and developing your understanding of the conventions of structure, language, tone, citation and referencing associated with academic writing.   

Creative Portfolio

Work independently, with academic support, to produce a substantial piece of writing, or a collection of pieces. Workshops will help you refresh and expand your research and craft skills. The genre, form and topic are your choice but will be informed by the culture, disciplines and purposes of your preferences – so can be creative or journalistic in nature. While the core of your project should be written work, complementary other media can be included.   

Optional modules

Children and Young Adult

This module examines the market for children and young adult writing, its history and current context, and how such writing might challenge or confirm received ideas about gender or race. We look at some classics, but move quickly to focus on your writing, and the readers of this form: children and young adults themselves. The module includes work with local schools. 

Crime and Dark Fiction

Crime remains a big-selling genre in the world of books. Yet the pages of these titles are filled with murder, assault and all kinds of violence and despair. There has been an upsurge in the popularity of horror films recently too and folk horror is again on the rise. This module examines the allure of all things dark, looking at how crime, horror and the monstrous shift and change in representation at different times. What do our darkest fears tell us about ourselves?   

Beyond Human: writing in the Anthropocene 

The concept of the ‘Human’ is entrenched in political, social and economic assumptions about superiority and power. As we begin to recognise our place in an era that has come to be known as the Anthropocene, this module will examine what role our literatures play in how we understand ourselves. How solid is our ‘humanity’ and where do we draw the lines between inside and outside, self and other, nature and culture? Can we separate ourselves from our technologies? 

Writing Romance, Power and Desire

This module will explore a wide range of genres and subgenres that focus on romance, desire, and the erotic (e.g., Mills and Boon, bonkbusters, literary fiction, historical fiction, commercial women’s fiction, confessional writing, Rom-coms, Romantasy, film and TV). You will examine subjects such as theories of desire and questions of consent; sexualities and identities; AI partners and sex robots; the normal and the deviant; race, disability, and the body. 

This creative journalism degree features practical and peer-reviewed workshops, lectures, seminars, and self-directed work. You'll get tutor contact time each week, and the chance for frequent one-to-one tutorials. 

Your typical week can be any combination of lectures, seminars, tutorials (with a group or individually), demonstrations, practical workshops, and guest speaker events, combined with your own independent study. ‘Independent study’ may include reading, research in the library (on campus or online), meeting your colleagues to plan projects, attending meetings or events with contacts or sources, doing work experience, or producing work in writing or other media in preparation for a coming class or deadline.  

Timetabled sessions are predominately on campus, with online conferencing software available for everyone. You will have synchronous and asynchronous online teaching and learning. Your core learning is backed up with guest events, optional off-campus activities and trips and opportunities to network, find placements and pitch your writing and journalism to real publishers and other outlets, including our own platforms. 

100% of your assessment will be coursework.

Assessment methods

Giving and receiving feedback is not only vital for your own development but also to help you become an effective professional – especially in the creative industries. This can be challenging, and it is with practice in the supportive environment of the course that this will become second nature and an essential part of your own growth. 

The course features a variety of assessment types based on the modules chosen, which could include:  

• Portfolio – a selection of your work  
• Presentation – a presentation made to a lecturer, class and/or panel  
• Report – a formal summary of a project or other activity  
• Journal – a reflection on your practice  
• Essay – an academic argument addressing a question or a hypothesis  
• Practical – an example of your creative or journalistic work  
• Case Study – an evaluation of a particular event, person, content, artefact, etc.  
• Dissertation – an extended piece of academic writing, longform written or media project 

We'll push you to make the most of any outside opportunities, so you can utilise our facilities and support. You'll also gain valuable industry insights from our visiting speakers and Writers in Residence, who have previously included Lionel Shriver, Philip Marsden and Simon Armitage. 

Course equipment and costs - The materials and kit costs for this course are currently under review. Please see the previous year's course cost information below for a rough guideline to support your planning. 

Books:

The majority of the texts and other resources you need for your studies will be freely available to you via the library and the virtual learning environment, Learning Space, once you have enrolled. The number of books you might need to purchase will vary from module to module, depending partly in years 2 and 3 on the options you select. But we recommend you allow for an annual books budget of £150-£200.

Equipment and software:

A laptop will be an essential piece of equipment along with a reliable broadband connection (if you are living in University accommodation you will have this). We do not recommend any particular operating system, but on-campus computers are equipped with Microsoft and Apple functionality. Although we have our own stock of iPhones to support lessons in mobile journalism, you are strongly advised to have a smartphone of your own. A mid-range phone with a minimum of 64GB storage will be fine.

Adobe Creative Cloud - You may be eligible for discounted licenses through Adobe's education pricing and Falmouth University seeks to provide further discounts when possible. If any discounts are available, we will communicate these to you. For more information please visit Adobe Creative Cloud.

Study trips:

We intend to provide optional study trips each year in which you can participate. In previous years we have taken trips to such places as New York, London, Stratford, and Bristol. Costs have ranged to approximately £1,000 for trips abroad to a few hundred pounds for those in the UK. Traditionally, we also run a free study trip to Prussia Cove, Cornwall, for all third-year students near the start of the final term. Your performance on the degree will not be affected if you do not attend these.