Alumni updates and other cool social journalism happenings
You know you’re curious about the latest socialj news
Got more CUNY-J social journalism news that I missed? Let me know! I’ll try to do these more often.
March 2018
Simon Galperin’s (’16) Community Information Cooperative was featured in Nieman Lab.
Viktoria Munch (’17) is now working as an intern at Eater.
ProPublica and NPR’s ‘Lost Mothers’ story won the Polk Award for Medical Reporting. Social journalism adjunct professor Terry Parris Jr. and his metrics and outcomes class worked on elements of this story in the spring of 2017.
Martika Wilson, ’16, is interning at Norwood News in the Bronx.
Check out this thread from social journalism professor Luis Miguel Echegaray, ’15, on how March was a great month in terms of coverage and representation for the Latino community in Sports Illustrated.
Kristine Villanueva, ’17, is now working part-time with Spaceship Media. Their mission is to use journalism to support meaningful dialogue and communication between communities at odds.
Pedro Burgos, ’15, an ICFJ Knight Fellow, was featured in MediaShift: “How A Local Newsroom In Brazil Learned To Track Its Impact.”
February 2018
Allen Arthur’s big investigative piece dropped in The Marshall Project and it is awesome. It will also run in six TN papers.
Simon Galperin (’16) is quoted in this Nieman Lab piece, “GroundSource switched from an email newsletter to a SMS newsletter and actually got responses.”
Director Carrie Brown is now serving on the advisory board of Your Voice Ohio.
Allen Arthur’s (MA ’16) story on how Tennessee puts ailing, mentally ill, pregnant and juvenile prisoners in solitary confinement to help jails save money made the front page of USA Today. The story is starting to produce impact: Two Tennessee Senate committees are “looking into” state safekeeping laws.
Alyxaundria Sanford (MA ’17) just landed a gig as a reporter/moderator at Spaceship Media. She’ll be working with them on their new project, The Many, which will bring people from different political, social and cultural beliefs and backgrounds together for productive and informed conversations.
Simon Galperin (MA ’16) has a solution to end the local news crisis. In just a week he was over halfway to funding his project on Kickstarter.
A project social journalism students helped with in Terry Parris Jr.’s class has been nominated for an Ellie in the public interest category. Students in the class of 2017 helped work on callouts for “The Last Person You’d Expect to Die in Childbirth.”
When Luis Miguel Echegaray applied to the social journalism program, he was an actor and soccer coach thinking about making a big career change. His dream job, he said, was to be the “Anthony Bourdain of sports” — listening to people and understanding the role playing sports or being the fan of a team meant in their lives. Well, just three years later, after stints at Vice and the Guardian, he’s now co-host of SI TV’s Planet Fútbol, head of Latino/Spanish content for Sports Illustrated, and a CUNY-J adjunct professor. If you haven’t checked out some of his videos, here’s a lighthearted one he did with Top Chef contestants about cooking for the Super Bowl.
Social journalism alum Katelyn Gillum (’16) not only has an interesting job as a senior community specialist at Meetup, she’s going to be doing it while visiting 12 cities in 12 months. Here’s a post about what she’s up to.
Alum Philip Clapham (’16) got what he describes as his “dream job” as a senior communications officer at the International AIDS Society in Switzerland.
Director Carrie Brown is now serving on the steering committee at Gather, a community of practice around journalism engagement for reporters, editors, students, and educators. If you are interested, join — it now has a Slack team that hopefully will get some good conversations and resource sharing going.
January 2018
Social journalism alum Sebastián Auyanet, ’17, got a job at NowThis, where he will be working with editors Andy Carvin and Kim Bui on the Newsroom team.
Social journalism adjunct professor Terry Parris Jr. of ProPublica wrote a piece that epitomizes many of they key lessons we hope our students learn in the program: How the Public Fueled Our Investigations in 2017
Program director Carrie Brown judged the social media category at the Ellie National Magazine Awards, sponsored by the American Society of Magazine Editors in association with the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
December 2017
On December 7, social journalism student Angelo Paura teamed with Matt MacVey to host an event “Inside Virtual Reality Ethics and Tech” with industry leader Jamie Pallot at the j-school; turnout was good and attendees learned about some of the latest research on how people respond to VR.
Student Kristine Villanueva got her piece “How a Project on Underground Music Went Analog to Increase Engagement” published in MediaShift.
Alum Rachel Glickhouse, ’15, will be teaching a class in the spring on social journalism and community engagement at the New School. Rachel currently runs the Documenting Hate project at ProPublica.
September 2017
Social journalism student Melissa DiPento won a Teaching Terrifically in the 21st Century Award from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication’s Newspaper and Online News Division. Melissa is teaching a social media course this semester at Brooklyn College.
Last spring, students in our community engagement course helped The Guardian come up with new product ideas. If you are curious, socialj student Ghita Benslimane wrote a piece about it.
Social journalism students are interning at CNN, City & State, Wikitribune, Racked, and Storyful, to name just a few!
