Our Urban Journalism Program

It is hard to imagine any subject more central to the mission of the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism than the coverage of New York City. The University has an unparalleled network of professors whose research focuses on every conceivable public policy issue, neighborhood, and ethnic group. The J-School is fortunate to benefit from these connections; they inform our curriculum, provide guest speaking and adjunct opportunities, and generate eye-opening field trips.

Students who choose the urban reporting concentration are especially well positioned to take advantage of the School’s NYCity News Service, which promotes student work in print, multimedia, and broadcast formats about New York City.

Who Leads our Program
Sarah Bartlett, formerly of Fortune, BusinessWeek and The New York Times, heads up our urban program. She draws on an array of terrific adjuncts and working journalists with experience in print, multimedia, and broadcast to round out the roster of instructors.

Our Program

Students who choose to specialize in urban reporting take four courses. The first, Covering City Government and Politics, is taken in their second semester. The second is a required summer internship that follows the second semester. Among the media outlets where the School’s urban concentration students have spent their summers are:  NY Daily News, Newsday, Newark Star-Ledger, The New York Times, City Limits, Crain’s New York Business, and WNYC. In the third semester, students take Covering New York City’s Economy and Business and Covering New York City’s Immigrant Communities. While the focus of the four courses is New York City, the reporting and analytical skills students develop are of universal relevance and can be applied to other urban areas as well.

The Courses

Covering City Government and Politics
This course gives students a thorough understanding of how to report on the way the city is governed – how power is wielded and policy decisions are reached. Using a variety of different media formats, students learn how to produce news and feature reports on the vast New York City government bureaucracy, public authorities, and unofficial but key players such as lobbyists, labor unions, business, advocacy groups, and community organizations.

Covering NYC’s Economy and Business
The goal of this course is to help students understand and report effectively on the key economic and business forces shaping life in New York City. With the aid of selected readings and guest speakers, students learn about the city’s most important industries and employers, the role of small businesses and immigrant entrepreneurs, and the impact of real estate and economic development. After getting an overview of the strengths and weaknesses of New York City’s economy, students focus on some of the cutting-edge economic issues the city faces.

Covering New York’s Immigrant Communities
This course teaches students to cover critical social issues in New York City through the unique lens of ethnic communities. With 37 percent of the city’s population now foreign-born, journalists need to be able to navigate a variety of immigrant cultures in order to deliver fresh, compelling stories about education, housing, health, poverty, criminal justice, and race relations, among others. This course takes advantage of the rich ethnic mix of New York to help students develop cross-cultural reporting skills and tell powerful, previously untold, stories that reveal much about the human condition.