Titled Judith Clark’s Radical Transformation, the story chronicles Clark’s life in prison and her evolution from an unrepentant young revolutionary to a model inmate. Robbins reported the story during a series of prison visits with Clark starting in 2006. He first knew her as the former high-school sweetheart of a good friend.

Clark was 31 when she was one of four people, including Weather Underground member Kathy Boudin, arrested for armed robbery and murder in the Brinks heist.

Indrani Sen

Sen has extensive experience as a reporter, editor, and journalism teacher. Early in her career, she worked for a Boston paper that covered the city’s black and Latino communities. She has reported on crime, education, and politics for several metro papers, including Newsday. As a freelancer, she has written for The New York Times, Saveur magazine, Ms., thenation.com, and many other publications. She also served as the co-editor of the hyperlocal news blog The Local, a collaboration between the CUNY J-School and The New York Times. In addition to teaching Craft of Journalism and Hyperlocal Reporting at the J-School, she has taught at a public high school in the South Bronx.

“I’m just beside myself with excitement about this job,” said Sen. “Voices’ mission is close to my heart.” Sen immigrated to the United States when she was 12; she is half Indian and half Italian.

The CUNY J-School acquired what was then the Voices that Must Be Heard website from the New York Community Media Alliance last spring. Under the temporary editorship of Prof. Bernard Stein, it was relaunched as Voices of NY on Sept. 8.

The new Voices editor was selected from a highly competitive pool of more than 100 applicants that included CUNY J-School alumni, Voices contributors, and Ippies award winners. The Ippies awards honor journalistic excellence in the city’s community and ethnic press. The CUNY J-School acquired the awards program in the same transaction as Voices of NY.

“It was very gratifying to see the interest in Voices from so many highly-qualified candidates,” said Garry Pierre-Pierre, project director of the CUNY J-School’s community and ethnic media initiative. “We are thrilled to have Ms. Sen on board and look forward to seeing her take Voices to the next level.”

Sen has a B.A. in English literature and language from Oxford University and a M.S. from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

By BRENDAN SPIEGEL
Published: November 19, 2011 in The New York Times

WHEN news breaks in Nigeria, Omoyele Sowore is there. His Web news operation was the first to publish a photo of the Nigeria-born “underwear bomber” arrested in December 2009, and when a suicide bombing this summer shook a United Nations building in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, he was the first to publish on-the-ground reports and photos. During the presidential election in Nigeria in April, he published real-time photos, videos and reports from the field, exposing instances of ballot rigging, and attracting over eight million page views in one month.

Mr. Sowore, 40, is not based in Abuja, Lagos or anywhere nearby, but in a cluttered seventh-floor office on a gritty stretch of West 29th Street in Manhattan. Armed with a laptop and a server, he has established his Web site, Sahara Reporters, as a major player in the Nigerian press, despite being 5,000 miles away.

And he is only one of a growing number of New York-based journalists in exile taking advantage of cheap and easy Web-publishing technology, and the growing access in the developing world to the Web, to report with impunity from afar.

A recent report from the Committee to Protect Journalists, an organization devoted to promoting press freedom, counted at least 649 journalists from around the world forced into exile over the past decade, with 91 percent unable to return home, and only 22 percent able to work in their profession. These include reporters from dictatorships like Cuba, but also from places like Russia and Mexico — democracies where working as a truth-seeking reporter can be a dangerous proposition.

In Nigeria, “now that we have, so to speak, democracy, you would expect the media to be more vibrant, but the opposite is the case,” Mr. Sowore said in an interview.

“It is not so much a problem of freedom of speech,” he said, “but freedom after speech. You can say a lot of things in Nigeria, but the question is: Will you still be a free person? Will you still be alive after you freely express yourself?”

MR. SOWORE grew up in a small village on the Niger River Delta, where, he said, corrupt government officials reaped the benefits of the region’s oil-rich land while doing little to improve the lives of its impoverished residents. That experience impelled him to become a leader of antigovernment activists while a student at the University of Lagos, a position that he said resulted in his being harassed, abducted and ultimately tortured at the hands of the pro-government police.

In 1999, he attended a peace conference at American University in Washington. Fellow activists recommended he seek help in the United States for the psychological aftereffects of torture, and one colleague put him in touch with the Bellevue/NYU Program for Survivors of Torture, an initiative that helps victims rebuild their physical and mental health. He had planned to go back to Nigeria, but doctors advised, for his mental health, against an immediate return. Instead, he sought political asylum in the United States and enrolled as a graduate student in public administration at Columbia University. Frustrated by his distance from his homeland, he soon realized that his re-entry into Nigerian political activism could come online.

“I have always been a lover of the media,” Mr. Sowore said, reminiscing about a comparatively robust news landscape when a military junta led Nigeria from 1983 to 1998. “These guys then were really daring. They would publish what they wanted, and weren’t afraid of the military. The newspapers just refused to allow themselves to be proscribed.”

IN 2004, Mr. Sowore and Jonathan Elendu, a fellow Nigerian exile based in Michigan, created an online publication called Elendu Reports. Mostly, they focused on the questionable activities abroad of Nigerian politicians, publishing photographs of extravagant houses and luxury car collections allegedly bought with the spoils of corruption, and following paper trails to offshore accounts.

Back home, their exposés ignited widespread outrage. The domestic press may have been too intimidated to report on the rampant corruption, but by publishing the articles online from a base here, Mr. Sowore and Mr. Elendu were free of government-sponsored violence. Meanwhile, rapidly spreading Internet access in Nigeria — the World Bank estimates Nigeria had nearly 44 million Internet users in 2009, up from fewer than one million in 2003 — helped them reach enough people that officials had no choice but to address the ensuing uproar. In several cases, the articles led to the arrests of prominent politicians.

“It just got bigger and bigger as we went along,” Mr. Sowore said. “People back in Nigeria thought we had some sort of wizardry, always finding these stories, but we were just following the money, and no one was able to stop us.”

Mr. Sowore said he had a falling out with Mr. Elendu in 2006. (Mr. Elendu could not be reached for comment.) Mr. Elendu continued with his site, but Mr. Sowore soon started Sahara Reporters, named less for geography than to symbolize his desire to “kick up a storm across Nigeria,” from the basement of his home in Englewood, N.J. Using a network of contacts in the United States and in Nigeria, he continued to report on corruption but also expanded into breaking news. Soon, reporters based in Lagos began to send him controversial dispatches that their own editors refused to print. Mr. Sowore is happy to publish them, shielding the reporters’ names when necessary for their protection.

“Our reporters have a layer of protection they can’t have in Nigeria, where the police can arrest you and harass you,” Mr. Sowore said. “They can’t bomb our offices. They can’t get the police to shut us down.”

In 2008, with financial support from the Ford Foundation and the Global Information Network, an independent, nonprofit organization focused on news from the developing world, Mr. Sowore moved his operation to Manhattan, although he also works from his home, his car, coffee shops or wherever he happens to be when a story breaks across the Atlantic. His workday often begins at midnight New York time, when Nigeria wakes up and he starts getting tips by phone and e-mail.

IN contrast to Mr. Sowore, “most journalists are unable to contribute from exile,” said Lonnie Isabel, director of the International Reporting Program at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism.

“It would be impossible to do this kind of work inside Iran,” he said. “New York has been a great place to work from, because there are so many resources here and because the community is so welcoming to immigrants from all over the world.”

Of course, the ultimate dream for each of these far-flung publishers is to set off enough political change back home that exiles like themselves will one day be safe to return.

“I certainly hope to be publishing Sahara Reporters in Nigeria someday,” Mr. Sowore said. “Part of what we are doing now is fighting for a space to be able to do this legitimately, building it to the point where it will be useless to fight us.”

Leymah Gbowee (center in blue) with Visiting Associate Professor Prue Clarke (at rear in white) and her New Narratives team of reporters in Liberia.

Clarke, who teaches international reporting at the CUNY J-School, has worked closely with Gbowee on New Narratives, which trains women journalists in Africa. Clarke has done extensive reporting on post-war recovery Liberia, and was the first international journalist to foreshadow the election of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf as Africa’s first woman president. Sirleaf shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Gbowee and Tawakul Karman of Yemen, a pro-democracy campaigner.

This past summer, Clarke celebrated the first anniversary of New Narratives with a dinner in Monrovia, Liberia. New Narratives reporters have broken a dozen stories in the last year prompting a UN investigation into peacekeeper behavior in Liberia and numerous government initiatives to tackle issues such as teen prostitution, child labor, and police brutality.

Two New Narratives reporters won national reporting awards and one was selected to travel to “Water Week” in Sweden on a Pulitzer Center grant to report on water and sanitation issues. Their work has appeared in Global Post, Newsday, AOL News, Reuters, the Christian Science Monitor, and the World Vision Report. CUNY student Ichi Vazquez interned with the project this summer, breaking a major story on police brutality and teaching local reporters interactive skills.

The annual compilation recognizes up-and-comers in government, politics, non-profits, and news who are helping to shape New York City and beyond.

Danny Massey

Juan Manuel Benítez

Lisa Armstrong (Craft of Journalism, International Reporting Topics) received an academic fellowship from The Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma. As part of the fellowship, she attended a workshop at Columbia University and will be using her stipend for in-class projects for her Topics in International Reporting section this fall. Also, the work that she and her Pulitzer Center colleagues did in Haiti recently received The National Press Club’s Joan Friedenberg Award for Online Journalism.

Jeremy Caplan (Director of Education, Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism) completed a redesign of the CUNY J-Camp continuing education site and ran a series of summer J-Camp journalism workshops. He also designed and taught a new entrepreneurial journalism course at Vienna’s FH-Wien Graduate School of Journalism, taught video storytelling courses online for the Society of American Travel Writers and for the American Society of Journalists and Authors, led digital tools workshops for the Poynter Institute faculty and staff, and taught workshops for emerging journalism entrepreneurs from around the country at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla.

Prue Clarke (International Reporting, Audio) celebrated the first anniversary of her media support project for African reporters, New Narratives, with a dinner in Monrovia, Liberia. New Narratives reporters have broken a dozen stories in the last year prompting a UN investigation into peacekeeper behavior in Liberia and numerous government initiatives to tackle issues such as teen prostitution, child labor, and police brutality. Two New Narratives reporters won national reporting awards and one was selected to travel to “Water Week” in Sweden on a Pulitzer Center grant to report on water and sanitation issues. Their work has appeared in Global Post, Newsday, AOL News, Reuters, the Christian Science Monitor, and the World Vision Report. CUNY student Ichi Vazquez interned with the project this summer, breaking a major story on police brutality and teaching local reporters interactive skills.

Greg David (Director of the Business & Economics Reporting Program) completed most of his book, “Modern New York: The Life and Economics of a City.” Publisher Palgrave Macmillan has scheduled the book for release next spring.

Susan Farkas (Broadcast Writing & Production) started her own production company, Farkas Media. She has since produced pieces on refugees for the United Nations refugee agency and been retained by the UN to train Palestinian journalists. She was also nominated for an International Emmy for the film she co-produced on Cambodia.

Alex Goldmark (Radio Newswriting and Reporting) joined with a small team of other WNYC producers and volunteers to launch Longshot Radio, an experiment in new, participatory methods of audio storytelling. It’s an offshoot of Longshot Magazine, which makes a full, 68-page print magazine from start to finish in 48 hours. The radio team used over 100 pieces of tape submitted from around the country to produce more than 30 stories and a half hour special on the the theme of debt.

Tim Harper (Writing Coach, Craft of Journalism) edited a book, “The History of the Indus River Valley,” by the renowned Pakistani engineer, Sayid Ali Naqvi, for for Oxford University Press, and ghost-wrote a memoir for an Indian couple who were among the first Sikh doctors to immigrate to the United States in the 1960s. He also edited “The Linebacker in the Boardroom,” a business leadership book by Marvin Russell, who played on Notre Dame’s national championship football team before going on to a distinguished business career. He is now working on a book by the National Park Service ranger who was falsely accused of crimes and demoted by his supervisors after blowing the whistle on Washington Redkins owner Dan Snyder’s clear-cutting of parkland trees blocking the view of the Potomac from his mansion.

Sandeep Junnarkar (Interactive Journalism) produced a series of videos and mobile phone-cast radio shows for his J-Lab-funded project, Family Life Behind Bars. The videos explore the experiences of children, parents, and spouses who have a family member in prison. But rather than covering a person’s entire experience, each video delves into focused themes, like what is a perfect moment between a father and son when the father is in prison. The project also mobile phone-cast (and web-cast) radio shows that invited guests and listeners to discuss issues around incarceration and the impact on family members. Junnarkar continued to oversee the SAJA Reporting Fellowships, which give out nearly $40,000 annually to journalists to cover under-reported stories about South Asia and the South Asian Diaspora.

Frederick Kaufman (Narrative Journalism) wrote an article for July’s Wired about the coffee industry’s Cup of Excellence competition in Columbia.

Andy Lehren (Investigative Reporting) was a lead reporter for The New York Times team that won this year’s Daniel Pearl investigative reporting award from New York’s Deadline Club. The honor was for the newspaper’s examination of the Wikileaks trove of diplomatic cables and war logs. Many of the in-depth stories have been brought together and expanded in a new book, “Open Secrets: Wikileaks, War and American Diplomacy.” He received a Punch Award and a Publisher’s Award, two New York Times prizes, for his coverage. He also traveled to Johannesburg to be the keynote speaker at this year’s Taco Kuiper Award ceremonies, given for the best investigative reporting in South Africa. He spoke about his work on Wikileaks, as well as the Gulf oil spill and West Virginia mining disaster, at the computer-assisted reporting conference held by Investigative Reporters & Editors. He will be a speaker at this year’s Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Kyiv, Ukraine, and at an international journalism conference in the Netherlands.

Matt McAllester (International Reporting, Narrative Journalism) finished editing a collection of stories about food in wartime by foreign correspondents. “Eating Mud Crabs in Kandahar: Stories of food during wartime by the world’s leading correspondents” features original stories by Jon Lee Anderson of The New Yorker, Rajiv Chandrasekaran of The Washington Post, Barbara Demick of The Los Angeles Times, Scott Anderson of The New York Times Magazine, Farnaz Fassihi of The Wall Street Journal, the late photographer and filmmaker Tim Hetherington, and many others. It’s scheduled to be published on October 20.

Paul Moses (Covering City Government and Politics) won the Catholic Press Association Award for Best In-Depth Reporting for “Emotions Run High: Anti-Incumbent Mood Imperils Democratic Fortunes,” (National Catholic Reporter, Oct. 11, 2010.) He also attended the Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowship in Science & Religion Seminar, “Beyond 9/11,” at Cambridge University. It covered religion and terrorism post 9/11.

Melinda Wenner Moyer (In the Lab) published a feature in Glamour’s May issue, “The New Toxic Threats To Women’s Health,” and a story she wrote about chemicals in food appears in the September issue of EatingWell magazine. In addition, “It’s Time to End the War on Salt,” an online piece she wrote for Scientific American in July, was highlighted in The Wall Street Journal’s Notable and Quotable column. When she wasn’t writing, Melinda was spending time with her son Dean, who was born on April 29.

Yoruba Richen (Video Documentary, International Reporting Topics) was awarded three production grants this summer for her documentary “The New Black,” which examines homophobia in the black church. She received a Robert Giard Fellowship, which helps artists dealing with human sexuality, gender, and LGBT issues; a production grant from Chicken & Egg Pictures, which supports women filmmakers; and co-production funds from the Independent Television Service, which provides funding and promotion of independent films for broadcast on public television. Richen also hired CUNY J-School ’10 alum Samantha Stark as assistant to the producer on the documentary. “The New Black” will be completed by January 2013.

Geanne Rosenberg (Legal and Ethical Issues) collaborated with the Youth Media Team at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society on projects to help high school and undergraduate students assess the quality of online information they are consuming, creating, and sharing. She also supervised the hyperlocal food site East20Eats.com at Baruch College.

Indrani Sen (Craft of Journalism) wrote an article for Edible Manhattan, The Foodshed: Breadwinners, that will be included in the 2011 edition of the book “Best Foodwriting,” which is scheduled for release next month.

Jennifer Smith (Introduction to Environmental Journalism) received a grant to report on climate change research in the Arctic, through the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass. She spent 10 days at a long-term ecological research station at Toolik Lake, on Alaska’s remote North Slope. Scientists there are studying how increasing global temperatures affect plants, animals, and carbon cycles in the Arctic.

John Smock (Photojournalism) has joined Small World News as an adviser. SMW provides media training that emphasizes new tools and a progressive approach to journalism in Africa, the Middle East, and Afghanistan. Smock continues to work with Pajhwok Afghan News, an independent wire service based in Kabul, as a visual media consultant following the extension of a USAID grant that provides development support to Afghan media outlets.

Dody Tsiantar (Craft of Journalism) helped launch ReinventingGreece.org, a website put together by a group of Greek-American journalism students in Athens. The team produced original reporting about the crisis in Greece and how the country is trying to recover and cope. The students were Athens Fellows, part of an annual program put together by Hellenext, a non-profit Greek social networking organization with a mission of linking up Greek American students with Greek American professionals. Tsiantar served as the team’s journalism adviser and editor.

The videos document human rights abuses in health care settings. They feature stories from the Ukraine, Namibia, and Cambodia.

A behind-the-scenes account of the story from the Ukraine ran in the Open Society blog.

“The World Through Women’s Eyes” will feature films from Afghanistan, India, Haiti, Liberia and the Congo that explore social issues related to women around the globe. The goal is to help further women’s human rights initiatives through the reporting around it.

“Documentary filmmakers, particularly on international stories, have taken a prominent role in covering the intimate stories about people and localities that show the impact of news events. And journalists, particularly foreign correspondents, have become filmmakers, using the web primarily to keep stories alive that they feel aren’t being adequately covered by more traditional foreign desks,” said festival chair Lonnie Isabel, who heads the International Reporting Program at the CUNY J-School.

Participants will include filmmakers Abigail Disney, Virginia Williams, Renée Bergan, Dawn Sinclair Shapiro, and Risa Morimoto; documentary photographer Marcus Bleasdale; and activists Agnes Kamara-Umuna, Naheed Bahram, and Sunita Viswanath from Women for Afghan Women. “We intend to use this series as a platform not just for viewing films but for significant discussions about continuing the wonderful film making and finding ways to forge partnerships among foreign correspondents, filmmakers, producers, and student journalists. We want to listen to activists and come up with ideas to keep the world’s most horrific practices against women in the public discussion,” Isabel said.

This series is planned as the first of an annual festival that will, in subsequent years, award grants for student documentary filmmakers. Co-sponsors include the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting and the International Reporting Project. Partners include the Daphne Foundation, the Overseas Press Club, and Women for Afghan Women.

The films and panels are free of charge. For more information, contact festival coordinator Brianna Hyneman at recreatingbri@gmail.com or visit the festival website.

“Tom Robbins is known for breaking news, holding public officials accountable, and maintaining the highest standards of integrity and ethics in his reporting. Our students and faculty will benefit tremendously from having him in our midst,” said Stephen B. Shepard, the Journalism School’s founding dean.

Robbins will serve as a general resource to the students and faculty and teach an investigative reporting course in the Urban Reporting concentration, which is overseen by Professor Sarah Bartlett. The new course will focus on generating investigative stories for the city’s community and ethnic press, as part of the School’s ongoing commitment to bolstering that segment of the city’s media industry. Thanks to a recent Ford Foundation grant, the Journalism School has embarked on a major fund-raising effort to establish a permanent Center for Community and Ethnic Media.

“Good investigative reporting is critical medicine for a great metropolis, and I look forward to working with the terrific team Steve Shepard has assembled at CUNY’s Journalism School to help develop a new corps of diggers for the truth,” said Robbins. His role at the School is made possible by a grant from the Kohlberg Foundation.

The $150,000 grant announced today will help the CUNY J-School lay the groundwork for establishing a New York Community and Ethnic Media Center. An earlier $150,000 award was earmarked for teaching digital media skills to ethnic and community journalists so they can expand their online news offerings.

“Helping community and ethnic media maintain their journalistic and economic vitality is of critical importance to New York, and we are thrilled that the Ford Foundation’s generosity will enable us to contribute to that goal,” said Professor Sarah Bartlett, director of the J-School’s Urban Reporting Program, who is overseeing both projects on behalf of CUNY.

The project leader for both grants is Garry Pierre-Pierre, an experienced executive from New York City’s publishing community with strong connections to the vast array of ethnic media organizations. Pierre-Pierre is editor and publisher of The Haitian Times, an English-language weekly serving New York’s 500,000-strong Haitian community, as well as readers in Haiti. He shared a Pulitzer Prize as a New York Times staff writer for coverage of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.