Dear Alumni,
Wishing you a happy spring! We’ve had lots of exciting news, launches and goings-on around the J-School in recent weeks:
*ICYMI: Craig Newmark Philanthropies announced a $10 million launch gift to fund free education for Newmark J-School students. The gift raises the school’s endowment to $30 million and will allow half of the class to study tuition-free starting in Fall 2025. The school has set a goal of raising an additional $30 million, to enable all students to attend without tuition by the end of 2026, the 20th anniversary of the J-School. Listen to Brigid Bergin ’07 of WNYC chatting with philanthropist Craig Newmark and Dean Graciela Mochkofsky about this on the Brian Lehrer Show. Share in the excitement and spread the word about our free tuition campaign. Please consider resharing this message from Newmark J-School.
*J+ launched the AI Journalism Lab, a tuition-free, hybrid project supported by Microsoft. The three-month program will include hands-on workshops and classes led by the J+ team.
*The J-School’s Data Journalism program, led by Sandeep Junnarkar, announced the launch of the Du Bois Data Lab, a data collaboration with Howard University’s Center for Journalism and Democracy. The program will allow 15 undergraduate students from HBCUs to attend a one-week intensive, tuition-free workshop in data journalism—including a $400 stipend and all travel, housing and meal expenses covered.
*At the Career Services internship fair on February 15, current students stopped by the internship tables to chat with hiring managers, among them many Newmark alumni, including LOOKOUT founder Joseph Jaafari ’16 (pictured below).
*Alumni Affairs kicked off the first three sessions in our new series of workshops for mid-career alumni, starting with Jeremy Caplan‘s “Useful Tools for Journalists” on November 29, followed by Rebecca Klein’s “How to Succeed in Leadership Roles” on January 24, and Prabha Natarajan’s “Introduction to Product” on March 6. Look out for more alumni workshops later this year!
*Photojournalism Director John Smock has transformed the first floor hallway of the building with an exhibit featuring photos by 17 alumni created over the past 15 years. Next time you’re visiting campus, check out the incredible photos, displayed on vinyl sheets and taken by these talented alums: Jake Naughton ’14, Anya van Wagtendonk ’19, Joe Swide ’16, Brock Stoneham ’13, Sandra Roa ’09, Scott Klocksin ’16, Mary Conlon ’20, Allegra Abramo ’15, Julius Constantine Motal ’14, Alissa Ambrose ’11, Aaron Adler ’10, Pamela Subizar ’20, José A. Giralt ’18, Hiram Alejandro Durán ’19, Joe Caffrey ’23, Christian Colón ’23 and Kyle Kucharski ’18. On March 5, Subizar visited the J-School with one of the subjects of her photography, Lissette, a girl with Down syndrome, and her mother (pictured below) so they could view the photos of themselves.
Read on for more alumni updates, upcoming events and opportunities, and a Q&A with Colin Weatherby ’12, who is putting his skills to use in a thrilling journalism-adjacent field that had him working on the Billie Eilish documentary and hunting down some exceptionally hard-to-find footage from the Amazon.
Cheers!
Salma
Salma Abdelnour Gilman
Head of Alumni Affairs
Header image: The J-School building has a new installation of photography by 17 of our alumni. Above, photos taken by Mary Conlon ’20, of Brooklyn residents as viewed through their windows in spring 2020—when New Yorkers socially
ANNOUNCEMENTS
New Chapters
Newmark J-School said a fond farewell to Jiri “George” Cermak and John Mancini, who both announced in February that they will be retiring. In late March, Rosaleen Ortiz ’08, alum and longtime designer for the J-School, is also saying goodbye to the J-School.
Jiri “George” Cermak, a veteran custodian at Newmark, joined the school when it first opened 18 years ago, and he brought his wit and wide-ranging skills to every department and space he worked in. Cermak studied architecture and design at Zvolen University in Czechoslovakia, and he has a Master’s degree in Education from Czech Technical University. A martial arts master, Cermak has multiple black belts in Shotkan Karate, Hanbo-Jutsu, Fudokan-Karate and Jiu-Jitsu. He specialized in teaching self-defense classes and has taught courses in five languages: English, German, Polish, Russian and his native Czech.
John Mancini joined the J-School in 2019 to direct the Reporting and Writing program, and he oversaw the curriculum for Craft and many other courses. Mancini also ran the NYCity News Service; coached students on their stories and helped them get published; and provided job connections, mentorship or advice for a great many students, alumni, faculty and staff. Mancini has had a long and distinguished career in journalism, which included roles as the global news editor at Quartz, editor of Newsday, and founding editor-in-chief of the Long Island Voice. He also held positions at NBC News, the AP, The New York Times and The New York Post. Mancini has been a part of Pulitzer- and Emmy-winning teams and is a former on-air reporter for NY1.
Rosaleen Ortiz, a native of Puerto Rico, graduated from Newmark in the class of 2008, the same year as her husband, Daniel Macht ’08. She continued working for the school as a designer, contributing her skills, journalistic prowess and alumni perspectives as an instrumental member of the Newmark team. During her 16 years on staff, Ortiz designed the website, marketing materials, posters, swag, slideshows and other key elements for the school. In Andy Lehren’s class, Ortiz and Macht reported as part of a team that won CUNY’s first-ever IRE prize for Best Student Investigation. Ortiz and Macht, Digital Media Manager at KCRA, are now based in Sacramento with their son.
Cermak, Mancini and Ortiz will all be dearly missed by the J-School community. We wish them all the best on their next adventures.
EVENTS
From Democracy to Dictatorship: How to Cover Conflict and Crisis: A Master Class with Mikhail Zygar
Please join us for a four-part master class (first session pictured above) led by Press Freedom Fellow Mikhail Zygar and featuring some of the leading journalists covering Russia and the Ukraine conflict.
Distinguished Professor Masha Gessen will join the discussion as a special guest for some of the sessions. This series is a unique opportunity for those interested in the challenges of covering rising authoritarianism around the world.
The next and last sessions will take place on March 27 and April 3. Full details are available here. Please register soon to secure your spot.
When: March 27 and April 3, 6-7:30 p.m.
Where: Newmark J-School, 219 West 40th St., Room 308, New York, NY
Register here.
Audio Shop Talk: Mitra Kaboli in Conversation with Jess Shane
Acclaimed audio documentarians Jess Shane and Mitra Kaboli will dive into the thorny nature of documentary and the creative and ethical challenges of working in narrative audio amidst the current appetite for compelling personal stories. The evening will start with a short listening portion with excerpts of Shane’s recent series, Radiotopia Presents: Heartbreaking, Shocking, Transformative, followed by a discussion and Q&A.
When: March 14, 6:30-7:30 p.m.
Where: Newmark J-School, 219 West 40th St., New York, NY
Register here.
From the Gridiron to Broadcast: A Conversation with Nate Burleson and Vanessa Botelho
Join Nate Burleson (pictured above), former NFL wide-receiver turned CBS Mornings Anchor, and Vanessa Botelho, Associate Professor of Broadcast and Digital Journalism at Newmark J-School, for a conversation about Burleson’s journey from professional football to broadcast journalism, the hurdles he’s faced along the way, and how he’s cultivated a distinctive “voice” that resonates with millions of network television viewers.
When: March 19, 12:30-1:30 p.m
Where: Newmark J-School, 219 West 40th St., Room 308, New York, NY
Register here.
The Evolution of Nonprofit Journalism: A ProPublica Perspective
Join us for a lively 30-minute talk with ProPublica founder Dick Tofel to explore the recent history and evolution of journalism business models. We’ll consider ProPublica’s origins and how and why nonprofit journalism has surged. We’ll delve into various facets of the field and reflect on its challenges. A discussion and Q&A will follow.
When: March 26, 12:30-2 p.m.
Where: Newmark J-School, 219 West 40th St., Room 442, New York, NY
Register here.
OPPORTUNITIES
McGraw Fellowship for Business Journalism
Do you – or a reporter you know – have a great idea for a high-impact story that “Follows the Money,” but you need resources to get it done? If so, the J-School’s McGraw Fellowship for Business Journalism would love to hear from you. The deadline to apply for the Spring 2024 Fellowships is March 31.
The McGraw Fellowship provides up to $15,000 and editorial support for experienced journalists to produce deeply reported investigative or enterprise stories on critical economic, financial and business topics. Previous McGraw Fellows have explored a wide variety of topics — and you don’t need to be a business reporter to apply. Many have been generalists, or cover areas such as health care, inequality, or the environment. Journalists from diverse backgrounds are strongly encouraged to apply. The Fellowship is open to both freelance and staff journalists who work in all forms of media and have at least five years’ professional experience. For further information and examples of our previous Fellows’ work, go to www.mcgrawcenter.org or contact us at .
Apply here.
More info here.
Application deadline: March 31
ALUMNI UPDATES
Win-Win
- Roxanna Asgarian ’11 has won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence, presented by the American Library Association, for her book “We Were Once a Family: Love, Death, and Child Removal in America.”
- Gwynne Hogan ’14 has been awarded with The Front Page Award for Journalist of the Year for her coverage of the migrant crisis in New York (more links here and here).
- Rachael Levy ’14 was on the Reuters team that won a Polk award for investigations into Elon Musk’s companies.
- Priscilla Alabi ’17 has been nominated for an NAACP Image Award for her work as story editor in the podcast “Going Wild with Dr. Rae Wynn Grant”, under the Outstanding News and Information category. The podcast also won a Gold Signal Awards in the Diversity category.
- Vanessa Swales ’18 has been nominated for two Milwaukee Press Club awards for her reporting for the Journal Sentinel.
- Hannah-Kathryn Valles ’23 and Mark Banchereau ’23 were awarded the 2024 Overseas Press Club Foundation Scholar Award. They were among the 18 winners selected from the competition.
Featured News
- Angela Hill ’07 will start a new position as the Ida B. Wells Professor in Journalism at Arizona’s State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
- Courtney Carter DeJesus ’10 has published a children’s book, “Eva The Kid Reporter.”
- Tara Bracco ’13’s book “Poetic People Power” was published by the University of Wisconsin’s Cornerstone Press on Feb. 21.
- Bianca Flowers ’14 has been appointed as Reuters’ first U.S. Race and Justice Correspondent. Flowers (pictured below) is a multimedia journalist who recently covered manufacturing and labor relations for the world’s largest news agency. Prior to joining Reuters, she was a Senior Video Journalist and on-air talent at Dow Jones.
- Rachel Glickhouse ’15 has joined Grist as the Director of Partnerships.
- Michaela Ross ’15 was promoted to Deputy Editor of Bloomberg Government’s congressional policy team in Washington, D.C.
- Alexa Pipia ’15, Stefan Anderson ’17, Reynaldo Leaños Jr. ’18 and Dan Whateley ’19 shared their insights as part of the New Media Lab at Macaulay Honors College’s “Careers in Journalism” panel on February 6.
- Erin DeGregorio ’17 has been promoted to Associate Writer at Fordham Law School.
- Alyxaundria Sanford ’17 started a new job as Digital Engagement Specialist at the Innocence Project.
- Tat Bellamy-Walker ’19 has received IRE’s Ottaway Fellowship to attend the Data Journalism Bootcamp at the University of Missouri-Columbia.
- Netsanet Negussie ’19 co-produced the film “Power,” which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January and will also have its international premiere at the CPH:DOX festival in Copenhagen, in competition for the Human Rights Award. The film explores the relationship between policing and power in the United States.
- Jake Wasserman ’20 has been nominated by the German-American Fulbright Commission to join the Berlin Capital Program. He will participate in the program this September.
Amanda Harrington ’22 has been nominated to participate in Fulbright’s 2024 Berlin Capital Program.
Max Maldonado ’22 has been selected as PBS Frontline’s 2024 Tow Journalism Fellow. The fellowship lasts for one year and is funded by the Tow Foundation.
Yvette (Brown) Monèt ’22 (pictured below) is training to become a Weekend/Nightside Producer at Fox 5 News.
James O’Donnell ’22 has joined the MIT Technology Review as Tech Reporter. He just finished a Frontline fellowship and got a front page byline in The Washington Post.
Lucy Papachristou ’22 started a new job as Reuters’ Breaking News Correspondent, Russia and will cover news related to Russia and CIS countries (Central Asia, Caucasus and Belarus).
Amanda Braitman ’23 will start a new position at Cover Climate Now as Associate Audience Editor.
Nicholas Morgan ’23 has accepted a position at Debtwire as a Reporter.
Rebecca Redelmeier ’23 started a new job as Climate Reporter at WSKG, the NPR affiliate in Ithaca, NY.
ALUMNI Q&A
A CHAT WITH… COLIN WEATHERBY ’12
Colin Weatherby ’12 had no idea that his current job title — archival producer —even existed back when he first graduated from Newmark J-School and got a job at Buzzfeed Video. Weatherby had started journalism school on the recommendation of a college friend, Shane Kavanaugh ’10, then worked in documentary film production before moving into archival research, a field that turned out to be a combination of the things he loves to do most.
Here, Weatherby tells us how he ended up veering into archival production, describes his work on the Billie Eilish documentary “The World’s a Little Blurry,” and gives a glimpse into the day-to-day life of archival production — which he’ll discuss in more detail when he joins us later this year for an event exploring a range of inspiring journalism-adjacent career paths. Stay tuned! —Salma Abdelnour Gilman
What made you decide to go to J-School?
I had never had ambitions to be a journalist, but I’d started writing for Shane Kavanaugh’s magazine Overflow in South Brooklyn. Shane was my old friend from college, and I’d seen he’d started this nice glossy magazine. He asked me to write a couple of things because he thought I was a funny guy with some decent ideas. I wrote some reviews of bowling alleys and stuff.
I had been in environmental education after college, working for educational non-profits in Brooklyn, then I left and moved to Panama for a few years to help build rain harvesting systems.
When I moved back to Brooklyn and I asked Shane what got him into magazines, he said, hey, go to CUNY. I walked around, looked at the campus, and thought, this seems pretty cool.
How did you get inspired to go into documentary after your start in magazines?
I’d long wanted to work in documentary film, and I had interned during college but ended up working in education for nearly a decade after undergrad. I went into J-School with a pretty swashbuckling attitude. I saw myself as traveling the world as an investigative journalist, and wanted to be writing hard-hitting long-form exposes for The New Yorker. I thought that was the path, then realized after a while that lifestyle wasn’t exactly what I wanted.
I took Bob Sacha’s video class and it spun my head around. Video was in a whole new era back in 2012. We just started to have streaming content, and news vloggers were starting to pop up. The world of video journalism was promising at the time.
After graduation I ended up making a lot of science-oriented videos for Fast Company, did freelance environmental videos, and traveled to Ecuador to shoot videos for a non-profit there. And then out of nowhere I found myself working at Buzzfeed. Buzzfeed Video had just started to expand dramatically in Los Angeles. I learned so much there. It was a soup to nuts operation. Every single skill I learned at CUNY suddenly came into play.
I got to make lots of fun mini documentaries on all sorts of people. I had the perspective and training that people there didn’t have. I had Bob Sacha in the back of my head always saying, “Get the verité!” The camera needs to tell the story.
My goal was to transition into the world of long-form documentary. Going from digital into the documentary world is a challenge. The digital online world is its own thing and there’s not a lot of crossover.
What led you to discover archival production as a career path?
I ended up moving into documentaries by getting into the research side. The production side of documentary is great, but expect to spend long hours on planes to the middle of nowhere. I’ve done a lot of that work, and it’s a lifestyle. I realized research is where I wanted to be.
Post-production research became the thing that drove me. My role as an archival producer is a lot like P.I. work: trying to find a video someone shot in 1986 but I don’t know what state they live in or if they’ll be hostile to this project.
Right as I was leaving BuzzFeed in 2016, I joined a documentary producers’ organization in New York called the Video Consortium. I liked that there were a lot of young people doing what I was doing, and a lot of digital transition people. Everyone had been doing short docs for Vox and The New York Times, and we all had ambitions of being in more long-form content. This organization wanted to start a chapter in L.A. I went to the first organizers meeting and the organizer liked me and asked me to start the first L.A. chapter.
I wasn’t yet part of this world but had started volunteering to set up projectors, rent chairs, hold screenings to build networking events for documentary filmmakers. I started getting hired on documentary productions, long-form projects, short form projects. I would take people out for drinks and say, “Hey, how did you do this?”
In 2019-2020 I realized there was more work to be done in post-production. Documentary is really a post-production world; it’s where decisions are made, stories are made. Thankfully I learned how to edit at CUNY. Editing is the way in, or at least understanding editing systems really helps.
I would tell people that I have a strong background in research, and I know how to get involved in archives, how to find people you probably can’t. I started to be able to identify opportunities for myself to get involved in research. That’s how I ended up where I am now.
What do you do day-to-day as an archival producer?
Archival producing is the one piece of documentary production that even documentary producers don’t fully understand. It changes from project to project. There are three big buckets:
- Finding stock footage. When there are holes that need to be filled in terms of visuals—for example, working on a production set on the Napo River in the Amazon—I have to find those pictures and figure out how to license them. I really enjoy that needle-in-a-haystack stuff.
- Going out to hunt for local footage. For example, we know this event took place in 1989 in Minnesota and we need to find footage from local news. I go door to door seeing if anyone has videos recorded on a handy cam, and talking to the local community. This is the part that’s probably most similar to P.I. work.
- Sorting the archive. An enormous archive of material gets dumped on a production, then I get hired to sort it, date it, log it, and put all kinds of metadata on this footage that helps producers make decisions about what the story is. In my current project we were given 800 hours of undated footage and 27,648 photographs. I know that number in my head because I had to sort all of it. I spent two months with this footage, literally connecting dots like, he’s wearing brown pants in this shot and red pants in this shot, then sorting everything by brown pants days and red pants days, and piecing together the timeline of this entire project.
What’s a memorable production you’ve worked on recently?
I was hired to work on the Billie Eilish documentary that came out a few years back. It was built without any interviews. The reason that was possible was because Billie’s mom had been recording her since she was born. We had 14 terabytes of iPhone footage.
We would find, for instance, that Billie loves this brand of beans, and here are all the times she bought them. She liked these seven boys, and here’s when she wrote this song or that song, and here’s where she and her brother got into a big fight. There’s one song where you hear this intense drill sound, and that was when she was getting a root canal fixed on her teeth. She pulled out her iPhone and said to her brother, This has to be in our song—listen to this.
I was on that project for over a year. It was an amazing process. The director is R.J. Cutler, who did “The September Issue.” He was hand-selected for the project by Billie and her mom.
The idea was to be a fly on the wall. I think Billie was also apprehensive about talking about her work that much. She wanted to show the process. I went into the project before she was famous, in 2018, and I had no idea who she was. She was popular with 13-year-olds at that time but she wasn’t a global superstar yet. That happened while we were doing the project.
Right now I’m working on a project about a jungle expedition in the Amazon in 2012 that did not go well. Nobody died but many people got close. The man who led the expedition is very involved in the project and gave us a lot of footage. But we have a guy who doesn’t want to be involved, doesn’t want his name in there. I’m like, how many times did we call him yesterday? I want to send him a gift basket. A big piece of my job is to try to figure out the clearances, the legal framework, and what is Fair Use.
What was one of your favorite J-School moments?
One of my favorite memories of J-School is that I made my very first short-form documentary for Bob Sacha’s class. I found a seven-foot Greek wrestler named Malta the Damager who was also a superintendent at a building in midtown. An ex-girlfriend of mine lived in this guy’s building. I had been posting on Instagram for people to send me story leads.
Which professors or classes prepared you the most for your current role?
It was so much fun to shoot the wrestler footage and edit it, and I would be so pumped to show it in Bob Sacha’s class and get feedback. He said, “This is just a montage. You’ve got a story here but this is just a montage. I don’t care about him flexing and jumping off ropes. I want to know more about who he is.” I was like, “Oh no, Bob didn’t like it.” He did, but he gave me a list of shots that were really important to get in there. He made me better at telling the story in the footage.
Emily Laber-Warren was also pivotal for me and helped me focus on my areas of interest. The research part of science journalism is so vital. That was a huge eye opener for me and has changed my perspective on how science journalism is done. You need to know what you’re doing very quickly in science journalism or you won’t have time to turn around the information coming at you. Emily was very supportive and understood we were all trying to find our niche.
A huge resource for doing this work was Barbara Gray. I would go into the J-School library and hang out with her and say, “I wish I could find this person’s tax returns from 2010.” She would let us know where we could look for things. How to do search queries in archives is a skill that I think is going to be much more useful. It’s complicated when searching for something like footage. Search queries are an art that’s much more complicated than people understand.
Tim Harper is larger than life. He made me understand that for every inspiring, emotionally gratifying job you get, there’s like 20 that are just about getting it done. You’ve got to give it your best even if you’re not 100% excited about it. Tim did a great job, and Bob too, of making you understand there’s no reason to cut corners. You’re only hurting yourself in the end. I also learned from them that even if you don’t intend to be a freelancer, you need to have the brain of a freelancer. Everyone in this industry has been through a thousand layoffs. You’ve got to be prepared to pitch.
In Tim Harper’s class, you learn ways to look at a scene like a journalist. For example, we have all this footage and we don’t know where it was shot or how it was shot. So I go back to my research brain. There are three people wearing Cleveland Indians hats, so maybe this was shot in Cleveland.
Once we had to find a woman in her McDonald’s uniform working at a McDonald’s in Dallas in 1996. Everyone was overwhelmed by the proposition of finding a photo of her. I spent a month calling every McDonald’s in the Dallas area, asking who owned each one, calling around to see who has employment records of this woman.
That’s the dog-on-a-bone mentality you learn in journalism school. You don’t pick that up as an average human.