Newmark J-School Newsletter Spring 2021

1. ENGAGEMENT JOURNALISM

Pathbreaking program gets a new name, underscoring its importance for audiences, journalists

The Newmark J-School’s degree in social journalism, launched in 2015, has been renamed — engagement journalism. The new title more accurately describes the program, which focuses on interacting with and serving communities. While social media play an important role, they are not the essence of the program. Engagement journalism, according to the program’s director Dr. Carrie Brown, is “putting a focus on what it is that the public needs — journalism more as a service than a product — putting the audience or the citizen at the center of everything we do.” With its sixth cohort due to graduate in December, the 16-month-long program has 67 alumni who have landed jobs around the globe in news organizations including Reuters, The Miami Herald, NBC News, CBS Sports, The City, The Intercept, CNN Brasil, ProPublica, The Atlantic, and Sports Illustrated.

• Read more on engagement journalism serving audiences as happens in the works of Jake Wasserman ’20 and Michaela Román ’20
• Join us on April 9, 12-3 p.m. ET for three sessions to learn about the school’s program and the ambitions of engagement journalism to transform journalism across the industry.

2. MEET OUR STUDENTS: JUANITA RAMOS

J-School opens many new doors for bilingual journalist

Juanita Ramos ’21, already an experienced reporter in Colombia but making ends meet in New York City as a waitress, found a job here in television news three years ago after visiting the J-School for an event. She returned to Newmark this fall to earn her master’s in the pioneering bilingual program in Spanish and English. Now, she is busy keeping up with the academics she cherishes, making new friends, exploring the city, and working on a TV broadcast that gets her up before dawn.

Learn more about Juanita

3. BACK ON CAMPUS

Slowly, but surely

(Photo: Bob Sacha)

Assoc. Prof. Bob Sacha’s Documentary Film Lab class is among the few that has been conducted in-person since the pandemic cleared out the campus. During the first meeting last month, Sacha greeted students with his homemade six-finger cutout to remind them to keep a six-foot distance. (Photo: John Scully)

 

 

 

 

 

4. LAURELS? WE’VE GOT LAURELS—AND NEVER REST ON THEM

Keep those kudos coming

Congratulations to the recently graduated inaugural cohort of the Executive Program in News Innovation and Leadership. These 16 newsroom leaders spent 15 months with the J-School reimagining, collaborating, and building better newsrooms that are inclusive, innovative, and cutting-edge. Catch up here on their final presentations, in which they share how they applied new lessons and strategies to their newsrooms.

Lam Thuy Vo joins the J-School on June 1 as data journalist-in-residence. She has been an adjunct for seven years and now will work closely with Prof. Sandeep Junnarkar to further develop the data journalism curriculum. She will teach in the fall and spring semesters and use her extensive industry network to advance opportunities for our students. Since 2017, she has been a senior reporter at BuzzFeed News. There, she has explored how excessive quality-of-life complaints led to the over-policing of minorities; badly constructed algorithms helped spread hate-speech and warped our understanding of politics; and changes in immigration enforcement drove immigrants into the arms of fraudulent lawyers.

Ali Velshi — the host of MSNBC’s “Velshi” and a business correspondent for NBC News and MSNBC — has joined our Foundation Board, which support’s the school’s mission by ensuring it has sufficient financial resources to advance its goals. Velshi is a longtime friend of the school; has hosted our annual Awards for Excellence dinner and hired our students as his interns. Born in Kenya and raised in Toronto, Velshi was an anchor and chief business correspondent at CNN/CNNI for 12 years. He has written two books on finance, and holds a degree in religion and an honorary doctorate of laws from Queen’s University in Canada.

Simone Sebastian ’10 was named America editor of The Washington Post, responsible for leading the news organization’s expanding America desk, guiding coverage of the nation’s biggest breaking news stories, and devising new ways of probing the cultural and political currents that shape American life. As deputy America editor, the Post noted, she edited memorable stories, including an award-winning series on struggling American farmers and a social media blockbuster about when coworkers can’t tell minorities apart.

Yoruba Richen, who heads the school’s documentary program, produced and directed “The Killing of Breonna Taylor,” a documentary for The New York Times that won the 52nd NAACP Image Award for an outstanding series/special film. The work digs into recordings, 911 calls, and more than 1,500 pages of police records to reveal a clearer picture of the botched drug raid by the Louisville police that led to Taylor’s death. The NAACP Image Awards have been described as “the nation’s premier event celebrating the outstanding achievements and performances of people of color in the arts, as well as those individuals or groups who promote social justice through their creative endeavors.”

Alana Casanova-Burgess ’10 is the host of “La Brega,” a new WNYC and Futuro Studios podcast about the Puerto Rican experience. The project was co-produced by Luis Trelles, who taught at the J-School in 2018-19 (Craft 2 en Español & Covering Latino Communities). The seven-part podcast, available in English and Spanish, was created by Puerto Rican journalists, producers, musicians, and artists on the island and in the diaspora. The podcast explores the island’s history, politics, identity, and how la brega has many different meanings to Puerto Ricans.

Greg David, a contributor covering fiscal and economic issues for THE CITY and director of the school’s business and economics reporting and the Ravitch Fiscal Reporting programs, analyzed the impact of the pandemic on the New York City economy for WNYC in a five-part series.

Jobs, jobs, jobs, thank you very much

• Ariel Goodman ’19 is working as the Tow Fellow at The Marshall Project.
• Román Gressier ’20 is a reporter and translator at El Faro/El FaroEnglish in El Salvador.
• Jocelyn Azucena Contreras ’20 is part of the data verification team at Univision Noticias/El Detector.
• Ana Lucia Murillo ’20 joined the breaking news team of The Daily Beast.
• Sean Carlson ’12 is the new host of WNYC’s All Things Considered. Prior to joining WNYC in 2015, Carlson worked as a host at WDDE in Dover, Del., and as a host and reporter at KRBD in Ketchikan, Alaska.
• Jeanmarie Evelly ’09 is the new editorial leader of City Limits, the award-winning nonprofit newsroom, which is celebrating its 45th anniversary this year.
• Cathy Rainone ’07 was promoted to audience retention manager at NBC-owned television stations.
• Teddy Grant ’17 is the new digital content producer at Black News Channel.
• Mallory Moench ’17 is covering City Hall for the San Francisco Chronicle.
• Mankaprr Conteh ’19 has joined Rolling Stone as a staff writer.
• Carmel Delshad ’11 became a senior producer for Slate’s daily news podcast, What Next
• Kyle Mackie ’17 started a new role as news director at KHOL/Jackson Hole Community Radio in Jackson, Wyo.
• Diara Townes Social J-’19 is a program manager at the Aspen Institute.
• Lisa Salinas ’20 is the Women’s Foundation Ignite fellow at the Futuro Media’s In the Thick podcast, covering politics, race, and culture.

Getting ready for a productive summer

Unique among  journalism schools, many of which encourage their students to get experience via unpaid internships, Newmark J-School insists both that they have a news internship during the summer between their second and final semester and they not work for free. The school raises funds to pay a $4,000 living stipend to students who work in an unpaid internship. Last summer, during the height of the pandemic in New York City, the school launched Newmark J-Corps so our students could work in outlets focused on underserved communities.The J-School has strengthened and expanded those relationships for this summer. We now have 30 exclusive partners — many nonprofit news outlets like the Center for Investigative Reporting and The Haitian Times. Students will also intern in legacy media companies with which the J-School has partnered in the past, including the Los Angeles Times, CNN, NBC, NPR-affiliate KALW in the San Francisco Bay area, and others.

5. EVENTS

SAVE THE DATE: Awards for Excellence

May 18 | 12 p.m. 
This year the school will celebrate its annual Awards for Excellence with a conversation with the winners via Zoom. Dean Sarah Bartlett will moderate a panel with the four winners about their work as journalists and their career paths. The awards include the Sidney Hillman Foundation Award for Social Justice Reporting, the Newsweek Magazine Alumni Prize, the Stephen B. Shepard Prize for Investigative Reporting, and the Frederic Wiegold Prize for Business Journalism. The winners will be announced prior to the event. Register

SAVE THE DATE: Latino Media Summit 2021

June 3-5 
For the first time you don’t have to be in New York to participate in Newmark J-School’s unique bilingual convening of journalists, entrepreneurs, innovators, experts, artists, and industry leaders focused on Latino audiences in the United States. The conference will cover topics specific to a broad spectrum of Latino audiences and communities, including media and technology innovations; business models; race, gender and class issues relevant to Latino news media coverage and culture; challenges in bilingual reporting, and Latinx representation in newsrooms. This three-day event offers simultaneous interpretation in English and Spanish. Learn more

PLUS!

The Newmark Network

While studying at the Newmark J-School, students learn the importance of making connections across communities to tell stories. They may not, however, fully appreciate until after graduation how the bonds they forged with faculty, fellow students, and alumni pay dividends throughout a career. The team behind the sobering “Framing Britney Spears” documentary recently provided an example of the power of the Newmark Network. Director Samantha Stark’s career at The New York Times began as an intern, recommended by her professor. Nine years later, when Stark ’10 was looking for an associate producer, she hired Melanie Bencosme ’14, who learned of the position through a J-School alumni bulletin.