Urban Reporting
"Good investigative reporting is critical medicine for a great metropolis."
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.
What better place to learn about urban reporting than New York City? The city’s richly diverse population, its sophisticated (some would say Byzantine) political system and its powerhouse economy offer endless potential for stories.
We are fortunate to be able to draw on CUNY’s unparalleled network of professors to assist in that pursuit; they inform our curriculum, provide guest speaking and adjunct opportunities, and generate eye-opening field trips.
We also benefit from our professional ties to the city’s top reporters. In our most recent initiative, urban students can take an investigative reporting course with renowned reporter Tom Robbins.
The stories our urban students generate feed right into the School’s many distribution outlets: the NYCity News Service, which promotes student work in print, multimedia, and broadcast formats; 219 West, the monthly TV show which airs on CUNY-TV; and The Local, the hyperlocal website we run in conjunction with the New York Times.
The Urban Reporting program is also working closely with the city’s vast array of community and ethnic media outlets, thanks to Ford Foundation grants. Separately, The Sidney Hillman Foundation every year recognizes the work of an urban concentration student with its Urban Journalism Award for Social Justice Reporting.
Our Curriculum
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. (Some choose, however, to do their internships in other cities or countries.)
In the third semester, students take Covering New York City’s Economy and Business and Covering New York City’s Social Issues. 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.
Courses
Covering City Government and Politics
This course gives students a thorough understanding of how 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, City Council, and unofficial but key players such as lobbyists, labor unions, business, advocacy groups, and community organizations.
Instructors: Errol Louis, Douglas Muzzio, Sarah Bartlett
Covering NYC’s Economy and Business
The goal of this course is to help students understand the economic and business forces shaping life in New York City. 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 cutting-edge economic issues the city faces.
Instructors: Greg David
Covering New York’s Social Issues
This course teaches students how to produce fresh, compelling stories about critical social issues in New York City, such as education, housing, health, poverty, criminal justice, and race relations. Students learn about the public policies that attempt to address those social issues, different ways to measure the effectiveness of those policies, and how journalists can improve the public’s understanding of these issues.
Instructors: Mark Winston Griffith, Sarah Bartlett
Student work
- "Swaranjit Singh, first time candidate for New York City Council", by Jacqueline Linge
- "Urban Birds", by Sherry Mazzocchi
- "Push to Insulate Deaf Students from Dissimilar School", by Kerri MacDonald — New York Times — May 3, 2010
- "NYC Continues Efforts to Curtail Art Vending in Public Parks", by Shane Dixon Kavanagh — City Limits — Aug. 27, 2010
- "Pols Aim to Bridge Racial, Ethnic Divisions", by Amy Berryhill — City Limits — July 19, 2010
- Crain's New York special report: Economic Outlook, by Annie Byrnes, Mike Reicher, Kerri Macdonald, Anastasia Economides, Daniel Macht, Joe Walker
- Jacqueline Linge describing her work "Divided Love" on CUNY-TV’s Brian Lehrer Live show
- "Trafficking America's Children", by Teresa Tomassoni
- "Hope and Hunger at Food Pantry", by Uche Abanobi — NYC News Service — Oct. 27, 2010
Places Students Have Interned Or Worked After Graduation
- Daily News and NYDN.com
- WNYC
- News 12
- Washington Post Newsweek Interactive
- Reuters TV
- WNBC
- Star-Ledger
- ABC News
- MSNBC
- Newsday
- NY1
- Time.com
- CBSNews.com
- Crains New York Business
- WKBW-TV (Buffalo)
- CUNY-TV, Brian Lehrer Live
- Bronx News Network
- amNY
- New York Times
- Salon.com
- Christian Science Monitor
- San Francisco Magazine
- City Hall
- WUOT (Knoxville, TN)
- The Oregonian
- WBRE/WYOU (Scranton, PA)
- The Crime Report
- UN Radio
- New York Post
- Norwood News
- Times-Ledger
- City Limits
- Scholastic
- New Haven Independent
- Talking Points Memo
- Queens Courier
- The Brooklyn Paper
- Brooklyn Independent TV
- Haitian Times (Port au Prince Bureau)
- WHYY (Philadelphia)
- NBC Local Integrated Media
- The Daily Beast
- Mott Haven Herald
- Hunts Point Express
- Politico.com
- CUNY-TV, Brian Lehrer Live
- NBCNews.com/li>
- Citizens Budget Commission
- Bloomberg News
- WENY-TV (Elmira, NY)
- Riverdale Press
- Glamour
- AOL Patch
- WSJ.com
- NJ.com
- The Daily Pilot (LA)
- Variety
- Jersey Journal
