Hester runs the school’s NYCity News Service, a multimedia, Web-based wire service that makes student stories about New York neighborhoods available to news organizations around the world. Hester was previously City Editor of the Daily News, where he helped oversee some 50 reporters and editors at America’s sixth-largest newspaper. This included generating, assigning and editing stories on tight deadlines, as well as preparing the daily story lineup. He helped run the paper’s award-winning coverage of the 2005 transit strike and the 2003 blackout, among other major stories. Hester received his BA in journalism and politics from New York University in 1988. A lifelong Brooklyn resident, he began his journalism career as an intern at the Downtown Express, a lower Manhattan weekly, where he rose to editor.