About Us

Geanne Rosenberg, a professor, journalist and attorney, is founding chair of the Department of Journalism and the Writing Professions at City University of New York’s Baruch College. She directs the Harnisch Collaborative Projects and McCormick Foundation News Literacy Project and serves as executive director for the McCormick Foundation high school journalism initiatives at Baruch. She recently won a grant from the Carnegie Corporation to help provide legal education and resources to American journalism schools and departments that are serving as news providers.

Professor Rosenberg teaches media law and journalism ethics at CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism and Baruch College and has worked on a pro bono basis at the Associated Press on open government-related legal matters. She authored and produced Knight Citizen News Network’s Top Ten Rules for Limiting Legal Risk and the recently launched Citizen Journalist’s Guide to Open Government, and co-authored the Poynter Institute’s News University course Online Media Law: The Basics for Bloggers and Other Online Publishers (available at http://www.newsu.org).

Prior to joining City University of New York, she taught as an adjunct at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. Her journalism experience ranges from local community coverage through journalistic projects on complex national and international issues, including work as a business and legal journalist covering law, accounting, technology, media, regulatory issues and many other topics. Her articles have appeared in dozens of newspapers and magazines including Columbia Journalism Review, The New York Times, Investor’s Business Daily and The National Law Journal.

She has a J.D. from Columbia University’s School of Law , where she was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar; an M.S. in Journalism from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism; and a B.A. in English from Bryn Mawr College.

Roslyn Bernstein has published news and feature articles, catalogue essays and opinion pieces on education, neighborhood development, media, culture and the arts. Her published work includes stories on corporate art collections, nonprofits and startups, as well as profiles of individual artists, educators and business leaders. She has reported from the United States, Eastern Europe, Israel and China for publications including The New York Times, Newsday, The Village Voice, New York, Parents, Contemporanea, American Banker, Artnews and the Columbia Journalism Review. She has recently been writing arts stories for Buzzine, an online culture and entertainment magazine, and for Tablet, an online magazine of Jewish news, ideas, and culture.

Professor Bernstein’s latest book, Illegal Living: 80 Wooster Street and the Evolution of SoHo, is a nonfiction work focusing on the biography of the first artists’ live-work building in SoHo, created by Fluxus visionary George Maciunas. In 2009, she published Boardwalk Stories, a collection of 14 linked tales spanning the decades 1950 to 1970.

Keenly interested in New York City urban issues, Professor Bernstein teaches a range of courses in journalism and creative writing including Perspectives on the News, Journalistic Writing, Feature Article Writing, Creative Journalism and Journalism and the Literary Imagination. She is also on the faculty of the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.

During more than three decades at Baruch, Professor Bernstein served as the director of the undergraduate journalism program. She founded and is now the publisher of Dollars & Sense, Baruch’s prize-winning magazine, and serves as director of the Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence Program, a unique literary salon that brings a different distinguished writer to campus each semester.

A recipient of Baruch’s Distinguished Teaching and Service Awards as well as the Faculty Service Award from the Baruch College Alumni Association, Professor Bernstein earned a B.A. in political science from Brandeis University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in English from New York University.

Bridgett Davis teaches a range of Journalism and Creative Writing courses at Baruch College. Her essays, reviews, and articles have appeared in The Washington Post, New York Newsday, Columbia Journalism Review, The Wall Street Journal, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and The Chicago Tribune, as well as other publications.

Professor Davis’ debut novel, “Shifting Through Neutral,” was published in hardcover by HarperCollins in 2004 and in paperback a year later and was chosen as an “Original Voices” selection by Borders Books. She is completing her new novel, entitled “Lagos,” which is set in 1980s Nigeria and inspired by her experiences while doing research on African media women.

Professor Davis is also a filmmaker. Her feature-length drama, “Naked Acts,” was theatrically released in 1998. Professor Davis was the screenwriter/producer/director of the film, which has screened in 25 film festivals on four continents and won key awards.

She received a BA in English from Spelman and an M.S. in journalism from Columbia and was honored by the New York Association of Black Journalists with its 2007 Excellence in Education Award.

Vera Haller is one of the online experts in the Department of Journalism and the Writing Professions at Baruch. She created the department’s first course in multimedia reporting, which introduces students to storytelling across platforms by integrating text, photos, audio and video. She also helped oversee the creation of a high-tech multimedia laboratory/classroom for the department and is part of a team working on a department project to launch a hyper-local website in the East 20s of Manhattan.

Professor Haller remains active as a journalist, reporting and producing multimedia stories — including video, podcasts and audio-photo features — for news Web sites such as nytimes.com and worldpoliticsreview.com. She has also written for the Columbia Journalism Review and the Gotham Gazette.

Before joining the faculty at Baruch, Professor Haller was the editor in chief of amNewYork, a daily newspaper published by the Tribune Company, where she shaped coverage for more than 300,000 readers. Before moving to amNewYork, Professor Haller was editor of NYNewsday.com, Newsday’s website devoted to New York City news. A founding staff member, she helped launch the award-winning site after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. At NYNewsday.com, Haller won a New York Press Club Front Page Award in 2005 for a web feature about the subway system’s centennial.

She began her journalism career at The Associated Press, where she was a reporter and editor in its New York bureau. During the 1990s she worked overseas, including four years as a reporter for Reuters in Rome, where she covered stories about political corruption, the Vatican and Italian arts and culture. While in Rome, she contributed articles to The Washington Post on a regular basis. Moving to Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1998, she established a freelance career, publishing articles in USA Today, Newsweek, Forbes International and The International Herald Tribune, among other publications. She wrote about the AIDS crisis in southern Africa and the transition to a post-apartheid democracy. She also co-wrote the content for Time Out’s Web site on Johannesburg. Returning to New York, Professor Haller worked as a writer for CNN before joining Newsday.

She is a graduate of Boston University. She speaks Italian and German.

Katina Paron is a journalism educator with 16 years of youth media experience. She is the co-director of the NYC High School Journalism Collaborative at Baruch College, where she is also an adjunct lecturer. She is the founding newspaper adviser for Achievement First Crown Heights High School and the Business of Sports School and an instructor with the Bronx Youth Journalism Initiative, part of the Bronx News Network. As the co-founder and former managing director of the youth news agency, Children’s PressLine, she has worked with thousands of students to develop professional quality media that has been published in the Daily News, Newsday, Metro, Minneapolis Star-Tribune and ESPN.com, among other places. She is a professional journalist who has focused on health, literary arts and youth media. Her work has been recognized by NY1 as “New Yorker of the Week” and by WCBS-TV as a “Hometown Hero.” Ms. Paron received her B.S. in journalism from Boston University.

Craig Stone is a lecturer at Baruch College who has worked on several websites within the Department of Journalism and the Writing Professions. He designed and continues to maintain the website for student-written business and society magazine Dollars & Sense, which won a Gold Crown Award from the Columbia Scholastic Press Association in its first year online. Prior to joining the Baruch faculty, Stone was the web editor at J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism at American University from 2005 to 2009. There, he was a contributing editor for Mark Briggs’ book, “Journalism 2.0: How to Survive and Thrive,” as well as Jan Schaffer’s reports, “Citizen Media: Fad or the Future of News?” and “New Media Makers: A Toolkit for Innovators in Community Media and Grant Making.” He was one of the founding members of Washington-area sports website DC Sports Box and worked as a senior writer from 2007 to 2009 while also co-hosting a news and opinion podcast covering the NHL’s Washington Capitals. He received his B.A. from University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism.

Jon Sawyer is founding director of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, a non-profit organization that funds independent reporting with the intent of raising the standard of media coverage and engaging the broadest possible public in global affairs. Jon was previously the Washington bureau chief for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, for which he reported from five dozen countries. He was selected three years in a row for the National Press Club’s award for best foreign reporting; his work has also been honored by the Overseas Press Club, the Inter-American Press Association, Investigative Reporters & Editors, and the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.

Nathalie Applewhite is an award-winning filmmaker who has worked nationally and internationally as a producer, director, and editor; and as a consultant for the UN, and media specialist at the University of Pennsylvania. As managing director of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, Nathalie supports the executive director with overall management of the Center and its strategic development, and with the selection and management of reporting projects. She is the managing producer of the interactive narrative projects and oversees their educational outreach programs. She holds a BA in Visual Anthropology from Temple University and a Master’s degree in International Affairs from Columbia University.

Lisa Armstrong is an award-winning journalist with credits in several publications, including The Washington Post, National Geographic, Parade, Ms., Essence, Redbook, USA Weekend and O, The Oprah Magazine. She is an adjunct professor at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism and has also taught at NYU. Ms. Armstrong grew up in Nairobi, Kenya and Kingston, Jamaica. In addition to an M.A. in journalism, Ms. Armstrong has a master’s degree in urban planning with a concentration in international development and has written and edited for the World Bank, UNICEF and other organizations. She is currently reporting with Andre Lambertson and poet Kwame Dawes on how Haitians infected and affected by HIV/AIDS have been living since the earthquake.

Andre Lambertson is a New York-based photojournalist, teacher, and filmmaker committed to documenting stories of hope, healing, and transformation. He creates award-winning photo essays on social issues for magazines, books, foundations, advocacy organizations and museums including TIME, US News and World Report, Life, National Geographic, The New York Times Magazine, The Ford Foundation, The George Soros Foundation and The Smithsonian Museum. His work has also been published in the books “A Day in The Life of Africa,” “A Day in The Life of The Military,” “America 24/7,” and “I RISE,” a project on gifted Black and Latino youth. He is currently reporting with Lisa Armstrong and poet Kwame Dawes on how Haitians infected and affected by HIV/AIDS have been living since the earthquake.

Howard Schneider is the founding dean of the School of Journalism at Stony Brook University and the Godfather of the News Literacy movement. After spearheading the team that developed the proposal for the SUNY system’s first Journalism School, he began teaching, in 2005, the course that is now called News Literacy. With support from the Knight, McCormick and Ford Foundations, he has spread the course to dozens of college campuses and secondary schools. For more than 35 years. Schneider was a reporter and editor at Newsday. For nearly 18 of those years, he was managing editor and then editor. Under his tenure, the paper won eight Pulitzer Prizes in categories including investigative reporting deadline reporting, arts criticism, specialized beat reporting and foreign affairs reporting. Under his leadership, Newsday was among the first newspapers in the country to create news Web sites; he also led efforts to introduce TV and radio into what had been an all-print newsroom.

Schneider began his teaching career at Stony Brook as an adjunct professor of journalism from 1980-1982. Previously, he had been an adjunct professor of journalism at Queens College in 1979. In 2003 Schneider was the recipient of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism Alumnus Award (M.S.’67). He earned his B.A at Syracuse University in psychology and journalism (’66). He has been a member of the Pulitzer Prize judging panel three times. He also serves on the Science Journalism Advisory Board of the Woods Hole Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass.

Dean Miller is the Director of the Center for News Literacy at Stony Brook University, the first of its kind in the nation. New Yorkers might remember Miller from WNET’s 2007 documentary “In A Small Town” which aired nationwide as part of the Frontline spin-off: Expose’ . It told the story of the 2006 backlash against Miller’s newspaper (The Idaho Falls, Idaho Post Register). Powerful individuals and the 30,000 member Grand Teton Council of the Boy Scouts attacked the newspaper for a series of reports that documented how Boy Scout leaders ignored warnings that well-connected Boy Scout staff had raped young boys at scout camp with impunity. Miller and his team documented Scouting’s cover-up of the crimes.

Alan C. Miller, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, is the founder and executive director of the News Literacy Project. He was a reporter with the Los Angeles Times for 21 years before leaving the paper in March 2008 to establish the project. He spent nearly 19 years in the paper’s Washington bureau, the last 14 as a charter member of its high-profile investigative team. His work prompted investigations by the Justice Department, Congress and inspector generals in federal agencies and led to congressional hearings, reforms and criminal convictions. He received more than a dozen national reporting honors, including the George Polk Award, the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting and the Investigative Reporters and Editors Medal for breaking the 1996 Democratic National Committee campaign finance scandal. His series on the Marine Corps Harrier attack jet won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. Before joining the Times, Alan worked at The Record of Hackensack, N.J., as a state and county political reporter and at The Times Union of Albany, N.Y. as a political and state investigative reporter.

Geraldine Baum is the New York bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times. In her 18 years as a reporter with the paper, she has been posted in Washington, New York and Paris, where she served as a correspondent and bureau chief. She has covered major national and international news events and created “New York, NY,” a 900-word weekly column about the city. After starting her journalism career at The Miami Herald, Baum spent seven years at Newsday. She was part of a team that won a Pulitzer in 1984. Baum is representing The News Literacy Project at the High School News Literacy Summit.

Patricia Kitchen is a feature writer covering money, consumer and career/workplace issues for Newsday. Before joining the paper in 1994, she was a senior editor at McCall’s magazine and features editor and career columnist at the American Banker newspaper. She has taught middle-school English and is currently an adjunct instructor at New York University and the Center for News Literacy at Stony Brook University. Kitchen is representing The News Literacy Project at the summit.

In pursuit of its mission to promote social justice through media reform, NYCMA developed a cluster of programs to help strengthen the editorial and business quality of the publications, advocate for access to information for immigrant and community journalists, and foster coalition building within the sector, as a means to demand transparency and accountability from local, state and federal government. A robust, well-informed, sustainable ethnic and community media is increasingly important in an media environment that fails to acknowledge and perceive with nuance the needs and concerns of the emerging ethnically diverse communities and communities of color that in New York City represent 40 percent of its residents.

Juana Ponce de León is the Executive Director of New York Community Media Alliance, and editor of Voices That Must Be Heard, the organization’s award-winning online weekly publication that serves as a window to on-the-ground issues in immigrant communities and communities of color. Ponce de León was founder and editor-in-chief of Siete Cuentos Editorial, the Spanish-language imprint at Seven Stories Press (1999-2005), which launched with the publication of the seminal Our Bodies, Ourselves in Spanish. She founded Está en tus manos, a nonprofit Spanish-language editorial organization to service Latino grassroots organizations. She served on New York State Council on the Arts Literature Panel from 2000-2003. She is the former editor of LS, the literary supplement for New Mass Media newspapers, (1994-1999). She edited several literary collections including Our Word is Our Weapon – Selected Writings of Subcomandante Marcos, and Dream With No Name – Contemporary Cuban Fiction. She is co-editor of In Search of Common Unity, an anthology of community testimonies published by Friends of the United Nations. In 2007, Ponce de León was honored by Mayor Michael Bloomberg for her work in bettering the lives of immigrant New Yorkers and is she the recipient of the Union Square Awards 2010. Her articles on Latin American and Latino literature and the independent press appeared in The New York Times Book Review; Washington Post’s One World; the Village Voice’s LS; Multicultural magazine; Publishers Weekly, and Latina, among others. She is a frequent speaker on the ethnic community press.

DC Vito (co-founder and executive director) is the Chair of the Youth Services and Education committee of Brooklyn’s 6th Community Board. He has served as chair of the committee since 2004, and was appointed to the Board in 2003. He also served on the 6th Neighborhood Advisory Board of New York City’s Department of Youth and Community Development. After earning a B.A. in International Affairs from the University of Colorado at Boulder, Mr. Vito served in the Peace Corps in Mali. When he returned, he continued organizing and serving local communities in New York City and his home state of Colorado. He has managed and worked on over 20 political and issue-oriented campaigns ranging from the local city council to national presidential races.

Tom Rosenstiel is an author, journalist, and founder and director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a think tank that studies the news media and is part of the Pew Research Center in Washington. A journalist for more than 30 years, he worked as media critic for the Los Angeles Times and chief congressional correspondent for Newsweek magazine and is vice chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists.

At his think tank PEJ, he is the editor and principal author of the Annual Report on the State of the News Media, a comprehensive report on the health of American journalism. He also directs the Project’s other research efforts, including its weekly real time content analysis of the mainstream press called the News Coverage Index and its content analysis of blogs and social media called the New Media Index.

Among his books, Rosenstiel is the author with Bill Kovach of “The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect,” winner of the Goldsmith Book Prize from Harvard University, the Society of Professional Journalist Sigma Delta Chi award for research in journalism and the Bart Richards Award for Media Criticism from Penn State.

His new book, due out this year, is entitled “Blur: How to Tell What’s True in the Age of Information Overload.”

In addition to the plentiful resources of New York City, the School itself boasts state-of-the-art media technology and a superb faculty composed of industry professionals and veteran journalists who have chosen to bring their expertise to the classroom. Students have daily contact with working journalists, developinging mentoring relationships and making the connections that will guide them both in and out of the classroom. Students also participate in professional internships across the city, gaining the hands-on experience that is so important during that first crucial job search.

Sandeep Junnarkar is an Associate Professor at CUNY Graduate School of Journalism and the former New York bureau chief of CNET News.com, and has specialized in writing about technologies used in different industries. In April 2003, his three-part report on the security risks of online banking was named “Best in Business Projects among Real-Time Publications” by the Society of American Business Editors and Writers. Junnarkar helped to create online editions of The New York Times, working as breaking news editor, writer, and web producer when the paper went live on the Internet as The New York Times on the Web. Junnarkar is founder and editorial director of www.livesinfocus.org, a multimedia web site that features stories on underreported issues. The site received a New Voices grant for 2008-2010 from J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism, which is funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. He received a B.A. in Social Science from the University of California at Berkeley and an M.S. from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Kirsten Lundberg is director of the Knight Case Studies Initiative, which she created in early 2007. Its library of journalism cases has since grown to over 35 and its cases are being used in upwards of 70 colleges and universities. Ms. Lundberg oversees case conception, production, sales and marketing (internal and external). She is editor of the collection and writes cases herself. She was formerly acting director of the Case Program, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, where she wrote numerous cases on public policy issues as a Senior Case Writer.

Ms. Lundberg’s published cases include: Reputations to Lose: BBC versus the Blair Government; When the story is us: Miami Herald , Nuevo Herald and Radio Martí; The Accidental Statesman: General Petraeus and the City of Mosul, Iraq; Politics of a Covert Action: The US, the Mujahideen and the Stinger Missile. Her cases have been widely published, including in the classified edition of Studies in Intelligence. She has written extensively on intelligence, on the management and political ramifications of terrorism, and on the transition to capitalism of command economies.

Ms. Lundberg has conducted numerous Case Method training seminars—on how to teach and how to write case studies—in the US and abroad. Before Harvard, Ms. Lundberg worked for United Press International in Moscow, Stockholm, Brussels and London. She contributed radio reports to both UPI and National Public Radio. She has published articles in Time, Newsweek, the New York Times, the Boston Globe and the London Daily Express, among others. She is a contributor to several books, including case study collections.

Jessica Goldfin joined Knight Foundation in 2007 as an intern, and was hired as journalism program associate at Knight Foundation in January 2008. She monitors and evaluates the journalism grant portfolio, assists with grant development and explores how games can be used to inform and engage communities.

Clark Bell is the McCormick Foundation’s Journalism Program Director. Clark, who joined the foundation in October 2005, oversees journalism grantmaking initiatives and shapes the program’s focus on critical issues facing the news media. Clark is a veteran reporter, columnist, editor, publisher and communications consultant. Prior to joining the McCormick Foundation, he was a managing director for American Healthcare Solutions, where he developed communications strategies for hospitals, medical foundations and technology firms.

Mark Hallett is a senior program officer in the journalism program of the McCormick Foundation. Mark joined the foundation in May 1995, and coordinates grantmaking in a number of areas, including youth journalism, free press, diversity in journalism, and First Amendment initiatives. He also has worked on conference and event planning, development of special initiatives, solicitation and review of proposals, project evaluation and foundation communications efforts. Prior to coming to McCormick, he was an editor at Safety + Health magazine, where he launched an international edition and researched, assigned and wrote stories on workplace safety and environmental issues. Mark has led workshops on nonprofit communications, internet-based research and Web site development, and has worked with several nonprofits to create their Web sites. He is an avid photographer and speaks fluent Spanish and Portuguese. He has traveled extensively and has lived in Mexico, Norway and Spain.