Full-time Faculty

Winnie O’Kelley is an industry veteran known for her outstanding journalistic career as an editor on business and finance, with a specialty in economic impact and corporate wrongdoing.

She served as executive editor for Bloomberg News covering government, legal issues and financial regulation. In this role, she managed several hundred journalists around the world, overseeing news and enterprise stories at the intersection of power and business, including financial fraud, cybersecurity and privacy and health care fraud. Additionally, she was executive editor of the Washington bureau.

More recently, she created a global financial investigations team that covers everything from Russian money laundering and sanctions violations to corporate accounting shenanigans and collusion. O’Kelley is also a regular guest on Bloomberg TV, providing context and analysis on the latest financial headlines.

Prior to Bloomberg, O’Kelley worked for 20 years at The New York Times, where she held several leadership roles. She was David Kocieniewski’s editor on his Pulitzer Prize-winning series on tax avoidance, “But Nobody Pays That.”  As the deputy business editor, she managed the paper’s coverage of the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath.

In 2012, O’Kelley received the Lawrence Minard Editor Award, a Gerald Loeb recognition for lifetime achievement. She earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University.

Ty Lawson is a creative global media and education professional experienced in broadcast and digital news as well as filmmaking. Prior to coming to Columbia, He was the inaugural Marion M. And John S. Stokes Visiting Professor in Race and Culture in Media at Loyola University’s School of Communication and Design. At Loyola, he spent two years developing classes that prepared journalist for the ever-changing media landscape. This included Advanced Journalism, Storytelling on Emerging Platforms and Mapping Human Trafficking which he taught with students in the USA and Argentina. Ty has worked for national and international broadcasters ABC News' "Good Morning America”, NBC’s “3rd Hour Today”, BBC Worldwide, and CCTV’S CGTN Digital division producing innovative content. He started his career in local television news working in
various markets across the nation including Chicago, Boston, and Houston.

As a filmmaker, Ty has produced more than a dozen short films that have screened at the world’s biggest film festivals including Cannes, Berlinale, and Toronto. He was selected as a Berlinale Talent in 2014. His career has taken him around the world living in New York, Beijing, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Seoul. Ty is a graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts with a MFA focusing on International Media Producing.

He has served as an adjunct professor at ESRA International Film School’s (France) graduate study abroad in New York City and a guest lecturer at Universidad Austral (Argentina), Macquarie University (Australia), The University of Hong Kong, and Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

Ty is excited to be teaching at the Columbia Journalism School. While here, he hopes to continue developing transformative courses under the banner “Media that Matters”. Ty is a member of the Writers Guild of America, Executive Board Member, the Louisiana Professional Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, and a Member, Ghetto Film School Roster.

Steve Coll is an editor at the Economist, the author of nine books of nonfiction, and a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Between 1985 and 2005, he was a reporter, foreign correspondent and senior editor at the Washington Post. There he covered Wall Street, served as the paper’s South Asia correspondent in New Delhi, and was the Post’s first international investigative correspondent, based in London. He served as managing editor of the Post between 1998 and 2004. The following year, he joined The New Yorker, where was a staff writer until 2023, when he joined the Economist as a senior editor. 

Coll is the author of “Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, From the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001,” published in 2004, for which he received an Overseas Press Club Award and a Pulitzer Prize. His 2008 book, “The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century,” won the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction in 2009 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Biography. His book “Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power” won the Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Award as the best business book of 2012. His book "Directorate S," a follow-up to "Ghost Wars," received the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. 

His most recent book, published in February 2024, is “The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the CIA, and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq.” 

He has four children and is married to Eliza Griswold, the journalist and poet. He has a B.A. in English and history from Occidental College.

Sheila Coronel began reporting in the Philippines during the twilight of the Marcos dictatorship, when she wrote for the underground opposition press and later for mainstream magazines and newspapers. As Marcos lost power and press restrictions eased, she reported on human rights abuses, the growing democratic movement and the election of Corazon Aquino as president. 

In 1989, Coronel and her colleagues founded the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism. Under Coronel's leadership, the Center became the leading investigative reporting institution in the Philippines and Asia. In 2001, the Center’s reporting led to the fall of President Joseph Estrada. In 2003, Coronel won Asia’s premier prize, the Ramon Magsaysay Award. 

Coronel has written and edited more than a dozen books on the Philippines, freedom of information and investigative journalism. She has trained journalists around the world and written investigative reporting textbooks for journalists in Southeast Asia and the Balkan region. She speaks frequently at international investigative reporting conferences and writes about global investigative journalism. 

Coronel joined the faculty of the Journalism School in 2006, when she was named director of the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism. In 2011, she received one of Columbia University’s highest honors, the Presidential Teaching Award. 

Coronel believes we are in a pivotal moment for investigative reporting, one that is ripe with opportunity but also fraught with challenges and threats. Coronel’s work outside of the Journalism School reflects her desire to build strong institutions that support free and independent reporting in a turbulent media landscape. She is chair of the Media Development Investment Fund board. She also sits on the boards of the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Columbia Journalism Review, ProPublica and the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism. She is also a member and former board chair of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

Her recent work is on the populist Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte and police abuses in the war on drugs.

Sara Ganim is a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and former CNN investigative correspondent who regularly publishes in print and broadcast. A multi-platform reporter, Ganim has written for newspapers, cable television, audio, and documentaries and has won several of the industry’s top awards.

At age 24, she won a Pulitzer Prize for the Harrisburg Patriot-News for breaking and covering the investigation into former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky’s sexual abuse of young boys.

Ganim then spent seven years at CNN, covering multiple beats, including federal government agencies, the rise of the anti-fascist movement in the U.S., the NCAA, and contaminated American drinking water.

In 2015, she won a Sigma Delta Chi award from the Society of Professional Journalists for her investigative report exposing the low reading levels of some college athletes.

Since leaving CNN, Ganim has mostly worked in audio, developing, reporting and hosting several award-winning podcasts. Her most recent project was "Believable: The Coco Berthmann Story," produced by Dear Media. "Believable" was named one of The Atlantic’s top 25 podcasts of 2023.

In 2021, she launched a podcast with Advance Local and Meadowlark Media called "The Mayor of Maple Avenue," about the intersection of trauma and addiction and societal failures in the wake of the #meToo movement. The podcast won the Keystone Award for best podcast of 2024.
Ganim also created the podcast "Why Don’t We Know," which won the EWA’s public service award in 2020.

In 2020, she also made her first independent film, No Defense, which garnered film festival recognition. She has consulted or reported for several other films, including the Emmy-nominated films, Deadly Haze and Paterno.

Ganim is a prior recipient of Hearst, Loyola Law School and Columbia Spencer Education fellowships. Other recognitions include the the 2020 Education Writers Association public service award, 2012 National Sexual Violence Resource Center Visionary Voice Award, 2012 APME President’s Award, 2011 George Polk award, the 2011 Scripps-Howard award, 2012 American Society of News Editors for distinguished writing, 2011 Sidney Hillman’s Sidney Award, a 2010 Golden Quill and the 2010 Bar Association journalism award, 2008 Gannet Media Foundation multimedia award.

She is currently the journalist-in-residence at the University of Florida’s Brechner Center for Freedom of Information. She also serves as a member of the board of trustees at Lebanese American University.

She is a 2008 graduate of Penn State University.

Samuel G. Freedman is an award-winning author, columnist, and professor. A former columnist for The New York Times and a professor at Columbia University, he is the author of the nine acclaimed books, and is currently at work on his tenth, which will be about Hubert Humphrey, Civil Rights, and the 1948 Democratic convention.

Freedman’s previous books are Small Victories: The Real World of a Teacher, Her Students and Their High School (1990); Upon This Rock: The Miracles of a Black Church (1993); The Inheritance: How Three Families and America Moved from Roosevelt to Reagan and Beyond (1996); Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry (2000); Who She Was: My Search for My Mother’s Life (2005); and Letters To A Young Journalist (2006); and Breaking The Line: The Season in Black College Football That Transformed the Game and Changed the Course of Civil Rights (2013).

With his colleague Kerry Donahue, Freedman co-produced a radio documentary and authored a companion book, both entitled Dying Words: The AIDS Reporting of Jeff Schmalz and How it Transformed The New York Times. The documentary and book were released in conjunction with World AIDS Day on December 1, 2015, and since then the documentary has been broadcast on more than 500 NPR member stations. Most recently, Freedman wrote Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom: The Journey From Stage to Screen, the companion book to the film adaptation of August Wilson’s classic play.

Small Victories was a finalist for the 1990 National Book Award and The Inheritance was a finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize. Upon This Rock won the 1993 Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism. Four of Freedman’s books have been listed among The New York Times’ Notable Books of the Year.
 
Jew vs. Jew won the National Jewish Book Award for Non-Fiction in 2001 and made the Publishers Weekly Religion Best-Sellers list. As a result of the book, Freedman was named one of the “Forward Fifty” most important American Jews in the year 2000 by the weekly Jewish newspaper The Forward.

Freedman was a staff reporter for The New York Times from 1981 through 1987. From 2004 through 2008, he wrote the paper’s “On Education” column, winning first prize in the Education Writers Association’s annual competition in 2005. From 2006 through 2016, Freedman wrote the “On Religion” column, receiving the Goldziher Prize for Journalists in 2017 for a series of columns about Muslim-Americans that had been published over the preceding six years.

Freedman has contributed to numerous other publications and websites, including The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Daily Beast, New York, Rolling Stone, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, Buzzfeed, Salon, Slate, Chicago Sun-Times, Tablet, The Forward, Ha’aretz, The Undefeated, The Root, and BeliefNet.

Freedman was named the nation's outstanding journalism educator in 1997 by the Society of Professional Journalists. In 2012, he received Columbia University’s coveted Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching. Freedman’s class in book-writing has developed more than 100 authors, editors, and agents, and it has been featured in Publishers Weekly and the Christian Science Monitor. He is a board member of the J. Anthony Lukas Book Awards and member of the Journalism Advisory Council of Religion News Service. 

Freedman holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism and history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Robert Smith is a host for NPR's Planet Money where he tells stories about how the global economy is affecting our lives.

Prior to Planet Money, Smith was a national and New York City correspondent for NPR, covering a variety of breaking news stories, from Hurricane Katrina to the "Miracle on the Hudson" landing of US Airways Flight 1549.

Smith’s career in radio started at KPCW in his hometown of Park City, Utah. He continued his passion for radio at the campus radio station at Reed College in Portland, Ore., before moving on to work at public radio stations in Portland, Salt Lake City and Seattle.

Robe Imbriano is the Emmy Award-winning showrunner of the Hulu series, Killing County, which he Executive Produced with Colin Kaepernick.  He co-created the Netflix documentary series Amend, starring Will Smith and featuring Mahershala Ali, Samuel L. Jackson, Sherrilyn Ifill, Bryan Stevenson and a distinguished group of scholars, participants and actors to tell the story of the 14th Amendment and America’s struggle with equality. 

He was a showrunner of the launch of Soul of a Nation, the very first major broadcast network series about Black life in America, nominated for 11 Emmy Awards in its very first season.  Imbriano has written and produced for everyone from Diane Sawyer and Peter Jennings to Bill Moyers and Oprah Winfrey, winning numerous honors along the way.  He created a series of first-person pieces featuring the voices of America’s economically and socially marginalized for ABC News in prime time.  He’s profiled Jay-Z and Hank Aaron, explored the lives of scientists with Neil deGrasse Tyson, and compared Jazz to Democracy with Wynton Marsalis and Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.

Richard R. John is a historian who specializes in the history of business, technology, communications, and American political development. He teaches and advises graduate students in Columbia’s Ph.D. program in communications, and is member of the core faculty of the Columbia history department, where he teaches courses on the history of capitalism and the history of communications. His publications include many essays, eight edited books, and two monographs: "Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse" (1995) and "Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications" (2010).

John has been a fellow at the Newberry Library in Chicago and the Smithsonian Institution's Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D. C., and has served as a visiting professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. Among the institutions that have sponsored his research are the College of William and Mary, the American Antiquarian Society, and the National Endowment of the Humanities, which awarded him a faculty fellowship in 2008. Spreading the News received several national awards, including the Allan Nevins Prize from the Society of American Historians and the Herman E. Krooss Prize from the Business History Conference. Network Nation won the first Ralph Gomory Book Prize from the Business History Conference and was the 2010 Best Book in Journalism and Mass Communication History, an award bestowed by the History Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. In 2019, he was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship for his research on the history of American anti-monopoly thought. Partial funding for Professor Richard R. John's research project on American anti-monopoly thought is provided by the Economic Security Project. John is a former president of the Business History Conference, an international professional society dedicated to the study of institutional history.

Between 1977 and 1989, John earned a B.A. in social studies (magna cum laude), a M.A. in history and a Ph.D. in the history of American civilization, all from Harvard University.

Nina Berman is a documentary photographer and filmmaker. Her work explores American politics, militarism, environmental issues and post violence trauma. She is the author of Purple Hearts – Back from Iraq, (Trolley, 2004) portraits and interviews with wounded American veterans, Homeland, (Trolley, 2008) an examination of the militarization of American life post September 11, and an autobiography of Miss Wish (Kehrer, 2017) a story told with a survivor of sexual violence which was shortlisted for both the Aperture and Arles book prizes. Additional fellowships, awards and grants include: the New York Foundation for the Arts, the World Press Photo Foundation, Pictures of the Year International, the Open Society Foundation, the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, the MIT Knight Science Journalism Fellowship and the Aftermath Project.

She started her photographic career in 1988 as an independent photographer working on assignment for the world’s major magazines including Time, Newsweek, Life, the New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, German Geo, and the Sunday Times Magazine. She covered a range of issues, from women under siege during war in Bosnia and Afghanistan, to domestic issues of criminal justice, reproductive rights, and political process.

Her photographs and videos have been exhibited at more than 100 international venues including the Whitney Museum Biennial, and are represented in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Museum of the City of New York, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, the Library of Congress and the Bibliothèque nationale de France among others.

She received a B.A. from the University of Chicago and a M.S. from the Columbia Journalism School.

Nina Alvarez is a journalist, documentarian and video photographer. For over twenty-five years, she has reported breaking news and feature stories from around the world, on broadcast and web segments, radio reports and long-form documentaries.

Alvarez began her journalism career at ABC News, where she was a production associate on the acclaimed documentary series, Turning Point. She went on to work in the Miami Bureau covering news in the southeast US and Latin America and established the Mexico City Bureau in 1997, reporting and producing breaking news, feature and investigative stories in Latin America and the Caribbean. Her work with the network's top on-air talent was broadcast on World News Tonight with Peter Jennings, Good Morning America, Nightline and 20/20 and was recognized with three national Emmy Awards.

Since 2001, she has reported and produced news and longform stories for Univision, NBC, CNN, NPR, MTV News and Al Jazeera from the Middle East, Africa, Central Asia and Latin America.  From 2015 to 2017, she was also Senior Producer at the Fusion/Netflix investigative series, The Naked Truth, which was recognized with the Alfred I. duPont Columbia Journalism Award, an Emmy nomination and the Al Neuharth Award for Innovation in Investigative Journalism. Alvarez is currently a Senior Editor of Investigative Projects at Futuro Media Group.

An important theme in Alvarez's work has been the experience of migration, historically and today. She has produced numerous video reports on refugees, undocumented laborers. victims of violence or exploitation and children. In 2001, she crossed the desert border herself on assignment with ABC News Nightline. She was a producer on the Oscar-nominated film, Which Way Home (2009). She produced an episode for the landmark PBS series, Latino Americans (2012), for which she received a Peabody Award and the Imagen Award. Her short film, Fields of Promise (2016), was broadcasted on America ReFramed (PBS World Channel) and awarded the Alfred I. duPont Columbia Journalism Award. She is currently documenting the stories of Salvadoran refugees in the US, some of whom fled the civil war over thirty years ago and are now fighting deportation. The project has received support from the Independent Television Service and Latino Public Broadcasting. 

The rights of women and girls is also an important theme in Alvarez's work. At ABC, she produced several stories about domestic violence in immigrant, low income and wealthy communities. In 2005, she documented the stories of women in northern Nigeria with injuries related to giving birth for the International Reporting Project Fellowship. In 2006, Alvarez produced, directed and photographed the Showtime documentary, Very Young Girls, which follows the stories of several New York City girls who were sexually exploited and trafficked domestically.

Alvarez is a native New Yorker, daughter of Salvadorans and mother of a Salvadoran-Irish-French-American daughter.

Nicholas Lemann was born, raised and educated in New Orleans. He began his journalism career as a 17-year-old writer for an alternative weekly newspaper there, the Vieux Carre Courier. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College in 1976, where he concentrated in American history and literature and was president of the Harvard Crimson. After graduation, he worked at the Washington Monthly, as an associate editor and then managing editor; at Texas Monthly, as an associate editor and then executive editor; at The Washington Post, as a member of the national staff; at The Atlantic Monthly, as national correspondent; and at The New Yorker, as a staff writer and then Washington correspondent.

In September 2003, he became dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, at the end of a process of re-examination of the school's mission conducted by a national task force convened by the university's president, Lee C. Bollinger. During Lemann's time as dean, the Journalism School launched and completed its first capital fundraising campaign, added 20 members to its full-time faculty, built a student center, started its first new professional degree programs since the 1930s, and launched significant new initiatives in investigative reporting, digital journalism, executive leadership for news organizations, and other areas. He stepped down as dean in 2013, following two five-year terms. Now Joseph Pulitzer II and Edith Pulitzer Moore Professor of Journalism and Dean Emeritus, he also directs Columbia Global Reports, a book publishing venture. From 2017 to 2021, he was the founding director of Columbia World Projects, a new institution that implements academic research outside the university.

Lemann continues to contribute to The New Yorker as a staff writer. His books include Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream (2019); Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War (2006); The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy (1999), which helped lead to a major reform of the SAT; The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America (1991), which won several book prizes. He has written widely for such publications as The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and Slate; worked in documentary television with Blackside, Inc., "FRONTLINE," the Discovery Channel, and the BBC; and lectured at many universities.

Lemann currently serves on the boards of the Authors Guild, the Knight First Amendment Institute, the Thomson Reuters Founders Share Company and the Russell Sage Foundation. He is a member of the New York Institute for the Humanities and was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010 and a fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science in 2019.

Michael Shapiro worked at newspapers in New Jersey and Chicago for five years before becoming a magazine writer. His work has appeared in such publications as The New Yorker, Esquire, The New York Times Magazine and Sports Illustrated. He is the author of five non-fiction books, Japan: In the Land of the Broken Hearted, The Shadow in the Sun, Who Will Teach for America, Solomon’s Sword and The Last Good Season.

Shapiro received his M.A. at the University of Missouri.

Michael Schudson grew up in Milwaukee, Wisc. He received a B.A. from Swarthmore College and M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard. He taught at the University of Chicago from 1976 to 1980 and at the University of California, San Diego from 1980 to 2009. From 2005 on, he split his teaching between UCSD and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, becoming a full-time member of the Columbia faculty in 2009.

He is the author of eleven books and co-editor of four others concerning the history and sociology of the American news media, advertising, popular culture, Watergate and cultural memory. He is the recipient of a number of honors; he has been a Guggenheim fellow, a resident fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Palo Alto, and a MacArthur Foundation "genius" fellow. His most recent books include The Rise of the Right to Know (Harvard, 2015), Why Journalism Still Matters (Polity, 2018), and Journalism: Why It Matters (Polity, 2020). He has been awarded honorary degrees by the University of Groningen (The Netherlands) and Hong Kong Baptist University.

Schudson's articles have appeared in the Columbia Journalism Review, Wilson Quarterly, and The American Prospect, and he has published op-eds in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, the Financial Times, and The San Diego Union.

Mark Hansen joined Columbia Journalism School in July 2012 and took on the position of inaugural director of the east coast branch of the Brown Institute for Media Innovation. Prior to joining Columbia, he was a professor at UCLA, holding appointments in the Department of Statistics, the Department of Design Media Arts and the Department of Electrical Engineering.  He was also a Co-PI for Center for Embedded Networked Sensing, an NSF Science and Technology Center devoted to the study of sensor networks. Prior to UCLA, Hansen was a Member of the Technical Staff at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey.

For nearly three decades, Hansen has been working at the intersection of data, art and technology. Hansen has an active art practice involving the presentation of data for the public. His work with Ben Rubin, Jer Thorp and The Office for Creative Research has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum, the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, the London Science Museum, the Cartier Foundation in Paris, and the lobbies of the New York Times building and the Public Theater (permanent displays) in Manhattan.

In terms of his journalistic experience, Hansen has been a long-standing visiting researcher at the New York Times R&D Lab, a late-career intern at the Marshall Project, and a consultant with HBO Sports. Hansen teaches mainly advanced data analysis and computational journalism at Columbia. In 2018, Hansen’s Computational Journalism course at Columbia Journalism School contributed the original reporting for the New York Times’ piece, The Follower Factory, which exposed the bot economy behind the sale of fake followers on Twitter. In July 2018, the article was cited by Twitter as the reason for its “purge” of tens of millions of suspicious accounts.

Hansen holds a B.S. in Applied Math from the University of California, Davis, and a Ph.D and M.A. in Statistics from the University of California, Berkeley. He has been awarded eight patents and has published over 60 papers in data science, statistics and computer science.

Marguerite Holloway has written about science — including climate change, natural history, environmental issues, public health, physics, neuroscience and women in science — for publications including the New York Times, the New Yorker, Natural History, Wired and Scientific American, where she was a long-time writer and editor. She is the author of The Measure of Manhattan, the story of John Randel Jr., the surveyor and inventor who laid the 1811 grid plan on New York City, and of the researchers who use his data today (W.W. Norton, 2013). She wrote the introduction to the most recent edition of Manhattan in Maps (Dover, 2014).

Holloway enjoys interdisciplinary teaching and often collaborates with colleagues working in documentary, photojournalism and animation — particularly in the realm of climate change storytelling. She has worked on several innovative interdisciplinary digital and data projects. She and colleagues at Columbia and Stanford universities had a Magic Grant from the Brown Institute for Media Innovation to develop Science Surveyor, a prototype for an algorithmic tool to improve science journalism. Holloway and colleagues from Fordham and Brown universities worked on The Templeton Project, a sensor-based effort to chronicle the story of New York City’s rats, funded by the Tow Center for Digital Media.

Holloway has a B.A. in comparative literature from Brown University and an M.S. from the Journalism School. She won the Distinguished Teacher of the Year award in 2001 and a Presidential Teaching Award in 2009; the New York Observer named her one of the city’s top professors in 2014.

Keith Gessen is a founding editor of n+1 and a contributor to The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, and the London Review of Books. He is the editor of three nonfiction books and the translator or co-translator, from Russian, of a collection of short stories, a book of poems, and a work of oral history. He is also the author of two novels, All the Sad Young Literary Men and A Terrible Country, as well as a book of essays, Raising Raffi.

Most of Gessen's journalistic work has focused on the effects of the collapse of communism on the countries of what used to be the Soviet Union. His New Yorker article on the insoluble problem of Moscow traffic -- a legacy of militant Soviet urban design combined with the anti-planning ethos of hypercapitalism — was included in Best American Travel Essays in 2011. His New Yorker story on the opening to shipping of the Northern Sea Route above the Russian Arctic as a result of global warming was included in Best American Science and Nature Writing in 2013. He has written about the wars and revolutions in Ukraine, as well about the experts in the U.S. government who work on the region.

Gessen began his career as a book reviewer for the early online magazine FEED, and subsequently contributed review-essays to Dissent, The Nation, and The New York Review of Books. He started n+1 with Mark Greif, Chad Harbach, Benjamin Kunkel, Allison Lorentzen, and Marco Roth in 2004.

Gessen was born in Moscow and grew up outside of Boston. He graduated from Harvard with a B.A. in History and Literature in 1998, and subsequently received an M.F.A. in Creative Writing (Fiction) from Syracuse University. In 2014-2015 he was a fellow at the Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars at the New York Public Library.

June Cross is a winner of the duPont-Columbia Journalism Award, a National Emmy and a 2021 Peabody Award. Her career has highlighted stories of the dispossessed and the intersection of race, politics and public health. She is best known for "Secret Daughter", an autobiographical documentary made in 1996 which was later developed into a memoir by the same name.

She began her career as an intern at The Boston Globe and PBS' flagship station, WGBH. She went on to what is now PBS NewsHour, and then to CBS News, before obtaining a job as staff producer at PBS FRONTLINE, where she worked for nine years. She joined the Columbia Journalism School in 2001 and received tenure in 2006. In 2010, she founded the Documentary Specialization.

Juan Manuel Benítez has worked as a New York City-based bilingual journalist for more than two decades, covering politics, climate change, and the Latino community. In 2003, he joined NY1 News as a reporter, launching its Spanish-language sister station, NY1 Noticias. There, he hosts a current affairs show, Pura Política, and the weekly podcast Off Topic/On Politics. Both stations are now part of Spectrum News, a network of more than 30 local news and regional sports channels.

Benítez has extensively covered the administrations of mayors Michael Bloomberg, Bill de Blasio, and Eric Adams, as well as countless political campaigns, including Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s 2008 primary for the Democratic presidential nomination. He has also served as a moderator and panelist in many electoral debates.

Over the years, Benítez has also worked as a guest host for WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show and as a columnist for publications like El Diario La Prensa. He has also been a political commentator for MSNBC and other outlets. He started his career in journalism as a reporter for Hispanic Market Weekly.

For more than a decade, he was an adjunct professor at CUNY’s Craig Newmark School of Journalism, where he designed its bilingual program.

His climate change coverage has taken him to places like The Netherlands and has earned him a New York Emmy Award. He is also the recipient of The New York Press Club and The New York State Associated Press Association awards. He came to New York as a La Caixa fellow.

Benítez has a master’s degree from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and a bachelor’s degree in Anglo-German Language and Literature from the University of Extremadura. He has also been a student at the University of Heidelberg, the University of Lisbon, and Kalamazoo College.

Born in Badajoz, Spain, he lives in Harlem with his husband, Tazjuan Starr.

Jonathan Weiner grew up around science — his father was a scientist at Columbia. He majored in English at Harvard, and then stumbled into an editing job at the magazine The Sciences, where, to his own surprise, he fell in love with science writing. After five years, Jonathan left the magazine to write his first book, “Planet Earth,” the companion volume to a PBS television series. He wrote books for the next 20 years and joined Columbia in 2005.

Jonathan’s book “The Beak of the Finch” won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science. His other books include “Time, Love, Memory,” a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction, and a finalist for the Aventis Science Prize; and “His Brother's Keeper,” a finalist for Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His latest book, “Long for This World,” was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

Jonathan has written for the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, Slate, and many other places. Before Columbia, he taught writing at Princeton, Rockefeller University and Arizona State University. His book research has received support from NASA, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

“We have joined the caravan, you might say, at a certain point; we will travel as far as we can, but we cannot in one lifetime see all that we would like to see or learn all that we hunger to know.” —Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey.

www.jonathanweiner.com

Jonathan Soma is a programmer and educator who focuses on making unapproachable data accessible. He has made maps, processed data, and crowdsourced stories with ProPublica, WNYC, The New York Times, and others.

In 2009 he helped create Big Apple Ed, a web application that crunched NYC school data, which was awarded third place in New York City's first annual Big Apps contest. Since then, Soma's personal projects - analyzing the Japanese census, MTA travel times and more - have been featured everywhere from Gawker to The New York Times Style section.

In 2010 Soma cofounded the Brooklyn Brainery, a community-driven recreational school where he instructs on neuroscience, the Loch Ness Monster, and everything in between. He is also a speaker at Masters of Social Gastronomy, a monthly lecture series on culinary history, food science and culture.

Soma earned his B.A. in Cognitive Science from the University of Virginia.

Joanne Faryon is an award-winning investigative journalist, producer and podcaster. She specializes in long-form, investigative multimedia projects. She has reported in Canada and the U.S. for both regional and national news outlets. Faryon teaches reporting and Shoe Leather: An Investigative Podcast.

Faryon’s work has been published and broadcast in the Los Angeles Times, The National Post, CBC National Radio News, CBC TV’s The National, CBC Newsworld, the PBS NewsHour, NPR and across public media stations in California.

Faryon is the creator and host of the investigative podcast "Room 20," a production of the LA Times Studios. It’s the story of an undocumented migrant who spent 15 years on life support in a California nursing home, unconscious and unidentified. It debuted in the U.S. and Canada at number one on the Apple podcast charts and remained at the top of the charts for weeks. She is the story editor of a new hit podcast released by Warner Media about the life and work of renowned film director Peter Bogdanovich. Faryon is currently working with Warner on a podcast about the life of Lucille Ball.

In her project, "Impossible Choice," Faryon exposed California’s “vent farms” – special nursing home units where thousands of people spend years on life support. In her documentary, "Life in Prison: The Cost of Punishment," she went inside three California prisons to document how sentencing laws contribute to an aging, sick, and expensive prison population. She chronicled the final weeks of an 89-year-old man dying of heart disease when examining why one of the country’s most respected hospices was being investigated for Medicare fraud. She was the first journalist to report on immunized people getting sick with whooping cough during the 2010 California epidemic and raise questions about the efficacy of the vaccine. Her documentary, "When Immunity Fails: The Whooping Cough Epidemic," was the result of an international partnership with KPBS, inewsource.org, and Radio Netherlands Worldwide.

Faryon’s work has been awarded Columbia’s Meyer Berger Award for in-depth human interest reporting and an Investigative Reporters and Editors first place in the multi-platform category. She has been honored with nine Edward R. Murrow awards, two Emmys, a Golden Mike for investigative reporting and has twice received a National Award for Excellence in Health Care Journalism. Her work has also been recognized by USC’s Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in television political journalism, the Webby Awards, the Podcast Academy and by the Manitoba Human Rights Commission for Meritorious Service for continued coverage on the extreme right and the Ku Klux Klan in Canada.

Jelani Cobb joined the Journalism School faculty in 2016 and became Dean in 2022. He has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2015. He received a Peabody Award for his 2020 PBS Frontline film Whose Vote Counts? and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Commentary in 2018. He has also been a political analyst for MSNBC since 2019.

He is the author of The Substance of Hope: Barack Obamaand theParadox of Progress and To the Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic. He is the editor or co-editor of several volumes including The Matter of Black Lives, a collection of The New Yorker’s writings on race and The Essential Kerner Commission Report. He is producer or co-producer on a number of documentaries including Lincoln’s Dilemma, Obama: A More Perfect Union and Policing the Police.

Dr. Cobb was educated at Jamaica High School in Queens, NY, Howard University, where he earned a B.A. in English, and Rutgers University, where he completed his MA and doctorate in American History in 2003. He is also a recipient of fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation and the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

He currently serves on the Board of Directors of the American Journalism Project, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2023.

Howard W. French is a career foreign correspondent and global affairs writer and the author of five books, including three works of non-fiction, a work of documentary photography and a book from Norton Liveright about Africa and the birth of modernity.

He worked as a French-English translator in Abidjan, Ivory Coast in the early 1980s, and taught English literature for several years at the University of Abidjan. His career in journalism began as a freelance reporter for The Washington Post and other publications in West Africa. He joined The New York Times in 1986, and worked as a metropolitan reporter with the newspaper for three years, and then from 1990 to 2008 reported overseas for The Times as bureau chief for Central America and the Caribbean, West and Central Africa, Japan and the Koreas, and China, based in Shanghai. During this time, he was twice the recipient of an Overseas Press Club Award, and his work has received numerous other awards.

From 2005 to 2008, alongside his correspondence for The Times, French was a weekly columnist on global affairs for the International Herald Tribune. 

His most recent non-fiction book, titled Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War, was published by Norton/Liveright in October 2021.

His immediate previous book, Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China’s Push for Global Power, was published by Knopf in March 2017, was widely reviewed and featured by The Guardian and other publications as one of its notable books of the season.

He is the author, previously, of China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa, published by Knopf in May 2014. China's Second Continent was named one of 100 Notable Books of 2014 by The New York Times, and was cited by The Economist, The Guardian and Foreign Affairs and several other publications as one of the best books of 2014.

He is also the author of A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), which was named non-fiction book of the year by several newspapers.

His book of documentary photography, Disappearing Shanghai: Photographs and Poems of an Intimate Way of Life, was published in 2012 (Homa & Sekey). It was produced in collaboration with the Chinese poet and novelist, Qiu Xiaolong. The photography from this project has figured in solo and group exhibitions on three continents and has been acquired in both museums and private collections.

French was a 2011-12 fellow of the Open Society Foundations. Other awards include an honorary doctorate from the University of Maryland. He is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, and since leaving the New York Times, he has also written occasional articles that newspaper, as well as for Atlantic magazine, Guardian Longreads, the Wall Street Journal (book reviews), The Times Literary Supplement, Bookforum and other publications.

French speaks French, Chinese, Spanish and Japanese.

Helen Benedict is a novelist and journalist specializing in refugees, the effects of war on civilians and soldiers, social injustice, and on violence against women. Her most recent book, the novel, THE GOOD DEED (April 2024), her nonfiction book, MAP OF HOPE AND SORROW; STORIES OF REFUGEES TRAPPED IN GREECE, and her articles have focused on Middle Eastern and African refugees, while her earlier work covered Iraqi refugees in the U.S., American women soldiers, and sexual assault. In 2021, Benedict was awarded the 2021 PEN Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History (link is external) for her book, "Map of Hope and Sorrow." (Footnote Press, 2022).

Benedict is credited with breaking the story about the epidemic of sexual assault of military women serving in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Her recent articles on refugees have been published in The New York Times, The Nation, Slate, Guernica, Arrowsmith Journal and elsewhere; while her work on war is reflected in her novel, "Wolf Season," (2017, Bellevue), her previous novel “Sand Queen” (2011, Soho Press) and her non- fiction book, "The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq," (2009 and 2010, Beacon Press), which won her the Ida B. Wells Award for Bravery in Journalism in 2013. Benedict was also named one of the “21 Leaders for the 21st Century” by Women’s eNews. In 2015, she was a finalist for the U.K. Liberty Human Rights Arts Award for her play, “The Lonely Soldier Monologues.” Her work has also won the EMMA (Exceptional Merit in Media Award) from the National Women's Political Caucus, the Ken Book Award from the National Alliance on Mental Illness and the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism.

Benedict's non-fiction book, “The Lonely Soldier,” led to a class-action suit against the Pentagon on behalf of women and men who were sexually assaulted in the military and also inspired the 2012 Oscar- nominated documentary about sexual assault in the military, “The Invisible War.” Her earlier book, “Virgin or Vamp: How the Press Covers Sex Crimes” is widely taught in journalism and law schools and has helped to change the way several newspapers cover sexual assault, while her book, “Recovery: How to Survive Sexual Assault” is used by rape crisis centers around the country. She has testified twice to Congress as an expert on sexual assault in the military.

Giannina Segnini is a Professor of Professional Practice at the Journalism School at Columbia University in New York.

Until February 2014, Segnini headed a team of journalists and computer engineers at La Nacion, Costa Rica’s newspaper. The team was fully dedicated to unfold investigative stories by gathering, analyzing and visualizing public databases. Her team processed the data and developed the interactive application for the OffshoreLeaks project, published by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) in 2013. She also partakes actively in the ICIJ’s Panama Papers project.

More than fifty criminal cases against politicians, businessmen and public officials originated by its revelations were pursued by law-enforcement in Costa Rica, the United Kingdom, France, Finland and the United States, including two former presidents of Costa Rica who were found guilty of corruption charges.

Segnini has been an ICIJ’s active member since 2007 and member of its board of advisers since 2015. Segnini is also a member of Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), the Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJN), Global Editors Network (GEN), Instituto de Prensa y Sociedad (IPYS) and the Gabriel García Márquez Foundation.

Her work has garnered the Maria Moors Cabot Award (2014), the Excellence Award from the Gabriel García Márquez Foundation (2013), the Spanish Ortega y Gasset Prize (2005), the award for Best Journalistic Investigation of a Corruption Case for Latin America and the Caribbean (2005, 2006 and 2009), the highest Costa Rican award in journalism, the Pío Víquez Prize (2013) and the Jorge Vargas Gene Award, Costa Rica’s National Journalism Award (2000, 2003 and 2004), among others.

Segnini was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University (2001-2002) and graduated as a Journalist at the University of Costa Rica. She is member of the jury for the Global Data Journalism Awards (GEN), the Gabriel García Márquez Awards and the Best Journalistic Investigation of a Corruption Case for Latin America and the Caribbean Awards.

In the past decade she has also lectured as a guest speaker at a number of international conferences on data investigative journalism and corruption, such as the Global Investigative Journalism Conference (GIJC), the International Anti-Corruption Conference held by Transparency International, the Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) conferences, the International Press Institute, the News World Summit and the Latin American Conference on Investigative Journalism, among others.

She has also served as a consultant for academic and international organizations around the World such as Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in New York, Deutsche Welle Akademie in Germany, International Academy of Journalism (Intajour) in Germany, the Master’s Program on Data Investigative Journalism and Visualization at El Mundo, Spain,; Master de Periodismo in El País, Spain,  Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), Universidad Javeriana in Colombia, Universidad Francisco Marroquín in Guatemala, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the Organization of American States (OAS), the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Freedom House, Inter American Press Association (IAPA) and Grupo de Diarios de América (GDA).

Giannina Segnini has also trained hundreds of journalists at leading media outlets in various countries around the world such as O Globo and Folha de São Paulo in Brazil, The Sun, The Sunday Times and the Times in the United Kingdom, El País in Spain, Leading European Newspapers Alliance (LENA), all media outlets in Timor-Leste, Kiev Post in Ukraine, Moscowand Orenburg in Russia, Revista Semana and El Tiempo in Colombia, El Nacional and Cadena Capriles in Venezuela, El Mercurio and MEGA in Chile, El Periódico and Siglo XXI in Guatemala, La Prensa in Panama, among others.

Emily Bell is founding director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School and a leading thinker, commentator and strategist on digital journalism.

Established in 2010, the Tow Center has rapidly built an international reputation for research into the intersection of technology and journalism. The majority of Bell’s career was spent at Guardian News and Media in London working as an award-winning writer and editor both in print and online. As editor-in-chief across Guardian websites and director of digital content for Guardian News and Media, Bell led the web team in pioneering live blogging, multimedia formats, data and social media, making the Guardian a recognized pioneer in the field.

She is co-author of “Post Industrial Journalism: Adapting to the Present” (2012) with CW Anderson and Clay Shirky. Bell is a trustee on the board of the Scott Trust, the owners of The Guardian, a member of Columbia Journalism Review’s board of overseers, an adviser to Tamedia Group in Switzerland, has served as chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Advisory Council on social media, and has served as a member of Poynter’s National Advisory Board.

She delivered the Reuters Memorial Lecture in 2014, the Hugh Cudlipp Lecture in 2015, and was the 2016 Humanitas Visiting Professor in Media at the University of Cambridge.

She lives in New York City with her husband and children.

Duy Linh Nguyen Tu is a journalist and documentary filmmaker, focusing on science, climate, and the environment. His work has appeared in print, online, on television, and in theaters. He is also the author of Narrative Storytelling for Multimedia Journalists (Focal Press).

Tu is the Dean of Academic Affairs and Professor of Professional Practice and teaches reporting and video storytelling courses. He is also a graduate of the program. 

Dhrumil Mehta is Associate Professor in Data Journalism and Deputy Director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism. As a data journalist since 2014 for the website FiveThirtyEight, Mehta helped to illuminate American attitudes and media coverage on everything from COVID-19 to the impeachment of Donald Trump to the Black Lives Matter movement.

Mehta has produced a variety of digital-native works that utilize data-driven methods of journalistic inquiry as well as presentation. For example, when the mass shooting happened in Parkland, Florida in 2018, Mehta composed a nuanced interactive quiz to test readers’ knowledge about where Americans stand on gun policy based on polling data.

Mehta’s analysis of data on media coverage of Hurricane Maria showed that the devastation in Puerto Rico received relatively little media coverage when compared to other natural disasters and news stories.
Mehta also built and maintained the site’s core databases, applications and other reporting tools, including a public data repository that serves as a resource to readers, reporters and academics.

As a Visiting Associate Professor in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, Mehta has equipped public policy students with the programming and data skills to better manage issues at the intersection of technology and governance. He also worked with graduate students at Columbia’s School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and the Journalism School to tell cartographic narratives, guiding students from idea to research, interviews, data analysis and presentation.

Mehta holds a master’s degree in computer science from Northwestern University with a focus on artificial intelligence and a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the same university.

David Hajdu is one of the most respected arts critics in America. Currently the staff music critic for The Nation, he served as music critic for The New Republic for 12 years. In a career spanning more than 30 years, he has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, Harper's and other publications.

Hajdu is the author of seven books of cultural history, criticism, and fiction: Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn, Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Mimi Baez Fariña and Richard Fariña, The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America, Heroes and Villains: Essays on Movies, Music, Comics and Culture, Love for Sale: Pop Music in America, Adrianne Geffel: A Fiction, and A Revolution in Three Acts: The Radical Vaudeville of Bert Williams, Eva Tanguay and Julian Eltinge, a work of graphic nonfiction with art by John Carey. He is a three-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and three-time winner of the ASCAP/Deems Taylor Award for Music Writing. His book Lush Life was named one of "Hundred Best Nonfiction Books of All Time" by The New York Times.

In addition to writing about music, Hajdu is a successful songwriter and librettist for concert music. His most recent project is the song cycle "The Parsonage," a work of historical nonfiction in musical form, created in collaboration with the composers Regina Carter, Ted Hearne, Sarah Kirkland Snider, and others.

Hajdu's book in progress is a history of machine-made art, AI, and computational creativity, to be published by W.W. Norton.

In 2022, Hajdu was appointed by President Biden to the National Council on the Humanities.

Daniel Alarcón began working as a journalist in 2004, first in print for Latin American outlets such as Etiqueta Negra, and later for American and European publications including Harper’s, the New York Times Magazine, El País, and Granta, where he was named a Contributing Editor in 2010. In 2012, he co-founded Radio Ambulante, a groundbreaking Spanish language podcast, the first of its kind covering Latin America with long-form narrative radio journalism. Under his leadership, Radio Ambulante has reported stories from all over the region, and partnered with outlets like Public Radio International and BBC Mundo to reach audiences across the US and worldwide.

Alarcón’s long-form journalism has included deeply reported pieces focusing mainly on Peru, the country where he was born, with topics ranging from the rise of the new nationalist left, the book piracy industry, and the emerging democracy inside Lima’s most notorious prison,  Lurigancho. This last piece, “All Politics is Local,” was published in Harper’s in 2012, and was a finalist for a National Magazine Award that year.

Alarcón began his career as a fiction writer. His first short story, “City of Clowns,” appeared in The New Yorker in 2003, and HarperCollins published his first collection, "War by Candlelight," two years later. His first novel, "Lost City Radio," was published in 2007, named a Best Book of the Year by critics across the country, and eventually translated into over a dozen languages. "At Night We Walk in Circles," his most recent novel, was a finalist for the 2014 PEN/Faulkner Foundation Award.

Alarcón graduated from Columbia University in 1999 with a BA in Anthropology; he earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Iowa in 2004.  In 2012-13, Alarcón joined the University of California Berkeley’s Graduate Journalism School as an Investigative Reporting Fellow. In 2021, he was named a MacArthur Fellow.

Dale Maharidge has been teaching at the journalism school since 2001; he first taught here in the early 1990s. He was a visiting professor at Stanford University for ten years and before that he spent fifteen years as a newspaperman, writing for The Cleveland Plain Dealer, The Sacramento Bee, and others. He’s written for Rolling Stone, George Magazine, The Nation, Mother Jones, The New York Times op-ed page, Smithsonian, Slate, The Guardian, among others.

Most Many of his books are illustrated with the work of photographer Michael Williamson. The first book, Journey to Nowhere: The Saga of the New Underclass (1985), later inspired Bruce Springsteen to write two songs; it was reissued in 1996 with an introduction by Springsteen. His second book, And Their Children After Them (1989), won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 1990. Other books include Yosemite: A Landscape of Life (1990); The Last Great American Hobo (1993); The Coming White Minority: California, Multiculturalism & the Nation's Future (1996, 1999); Homeland (2004); Denison, Iowa: Searching for the Soul of America Through the Secrets of a Midwest Town (2005); Someplace Like America: Tales from the New Great Depression (2011); and Leapers, (2012); His most recent book is Bringing Mulligan Home: The Other Side of the Good War, (2013); a March 2013 release by PublicAffairs. Snowden’s Box: Trust in the Age of Surveillance (with Jessica Bruder, 2020); Fucked at Birth: Recalibrating the American Dream for the 2020s (2021); and a forthcoming novel, Burn Coast. A podcast, “The Dead Drink First,” (2019) reached number one in all categories on Audible for several weeks.

Maharidge attended Cleveland State University. He was a 1988 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.

Maharidge has held residencies Yaddo and MacDowell artist colonies.

Bill Grueskin's career includes senior print and online editing roles, as well as six years as academic dean at Columbia Journalism School.

He began his journalism career as a reporter and editor at the Daily American in Rome. He then served as a VISTA volunteer and founding editor of the weekly Dakota Sun on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota.

He worked as a reporter and editor in Baltimore and Tampa before moving to The Miami Herald where he eventually became city editor. On his first day in that post, Hurricane Andrew hit Dade County, and the Herald’s coverage of the storm won the Pulitzer Gold Medal for public service.

Grueskin joined The Wall Street Journal in 1995, editing Page One features and projects. In June 2001, he became managing editor of WSJ.com and oversaw the staff during and after the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, next to WSJ’s offices. While at WSJ.com, the number of subscribers doubled to more than one million, and the site introduced blogs, interactive graphics and video.

In May 2011, Grueskin, along with Ava Seave and Lucas Graves, co-authored "The Story So Far: What We Know About the Business of Digital Journalism,” a report that examines online traffic and engagement patterns, emerging news platforms, paywalls, aggregation and new sources of revenue.

In 2007, he was named WSJ’s deputy managing editor, overseeing 14 domestic news bureaus, and combining print and online editing desks.

He came to Columbia in 2008 as Academic Dean. At the Journalism School, he oversaw a dramatic transformation of the curriculum, designed to give students more flexibility to focus on skills ranging from video to data visualization to long-form digital journalism.

In June 2014, he was named an executive editor at Bloomberg, overseeing efforts to train the global news staff to reach broader audiences across digital platforms.

Grueskin has a B.A. in classics from Stanford University and an M.A. in international economics and U.S. foreign policy from Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies. 

Azmat Khan is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter whose work grapples with the human costs of war. 

She is an investigative reporter for both the New York Times and New York Times Magazine, a Carnegie Fellow, and the Birch Assistant Professor at Columbia Journalism School, where she also leads the Li Center for Global Journalism. 

Her investigations for the New York Times, the PBS series FRONTLINE, and BuzzFeed's Investigations team have prompted widespread policy impact from Washington to Kabul and won more than a dozen awards. They include a Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting, a National Magazine Award for Public Interest Journalism; a National Magazine Award for Reporting; a Polk Award for Military Reporting; the Overseas Press Club’s Ed Cunningham Award for Magazine Reporting and the Roy Rowan Award for Investigative Reporting; the Hillman Prize for Magazine Journalism; the John Seigenthaler Courage In Journalism Award; the Deadline Club Award for Independent Digital Reporting; the Deadline Club Award for Magazine Investigative Reporting; SAJA's Daniel Pearl Award for Outstanding Reporting on South Asia; and other honors.

Her multi-part series in the New York Times, "The Civilian Casualty Files," was awarded the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting. The project was the culmination of more than five years of Khan’s reporting, including ground investigation as the sites of more than 100 civilian casualty incidents in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, more than 1,300 formerly secret military records she obtained in a legal battle with the Pentagon, and scores of interviews with military officials, pilots, strike cell teams, intelligence informants, local officials, airstrike survivors, and their families.

Khan serves on the Board of Directors of the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, as First Vice-President of the Overseas Press Club’s Board of Governors, and is a co-founder of The Gumshoe Group. She is an International Security Program Fellow at New America, where she was previously a Future of War Fellow. She was also previously a fellow at the Macdowell Colony and a Logan Nonfiction Fellow at the Carey Institute for Global Good.

She received an MSt. from Oxford University, which she attended as a Clarendon Scholar, and a B.A. from the University of Michigan. She has also studied at the American University in Cairo, Egypt.

Ari L. Goldman has taught at the journalism school since 1993. He is the director of the school’s Scripps Howard Program in Religion, Journalism and the Spiritual Life. The Scripps Program has enabled Professor Goldman to take students in his “Covering Religion” seminars on funded study-tours abroad during spring break. In the past, his class has visited India, Russia, Ukraine, Ireland, Italy, Israel, Jordan and the West Bank. To learn more about his most recent trip to India visit his class blog. 

In addition to the religion seminar, Professor Goldman also teaches Reporting, the Master’s Project and the course “The Journalism of Death & Dying,” which looks at everything from writing obituaries to covering natural disasters and suicide.

"It’s not about the technology; that is going to change. It is about thorough reporting, clear writing and being an ethical journalist."

Before coming to Columbia, Goldman spent 20 years at The New York Times, most of it as a religion writer. In addition, he covered New York State politics, transportation and education. He was educated at Yeshiva University, Harvard and Columbia. Goldman was a Visiting Fulbright Professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem; a Skirball Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies in England, and a scholar-in-residence for a semester at Yeshiva’s Stern College for Women.

In addition to his teaching on the university level, Goldman is on the faculty of the School of The New York Times where his course, “Writing the Big City: Covering New York,” is one of the most popular offerings. It is open to high school students of all ages.

He occasionally contributes articles and reviews to The New York Times, The Washington Post, Salon, The New York Jewish Week and the Forward.

Web feature: A Day in the Life: Four hours With Ari Goldman

Andie Tucher, a historian and journalist who has taught at the journalism school since 1998, writes widely on the evolution of conventions of truth-telling in journalism, photography, personal narrative, and other nonfiction forms. She is the author of Not Exactly Lying: Fake News and Fake Journalism in American History (Columbia University Press 2022). Her previous book Happily Sometimes After: Discovering Stories From Twelve Generations of an American Family (UMass 2014) explores stories told by her ancestors as truthful to make sense of their world — stories about kidnaps, murders, changeling children, lost fortunes and how the great-grandmother of Chief Justice John Marshall married Blackbeard by mistake. Tucher is also the author of Froth and Scum: Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and the Ax Murder in America’s First Mass Medium (UNC 1994), which won the Allan Nevins Prize from the Society of American Historians. 

Before coming to Columbia, Tucher served as a speechwriter for Clinton/Gore ’92. She was an editorial associate to Bill Moyers at Public Affairs Television and edited his book World of Ideas II (1990). She also served as editorial producer of the historical documentary series "The Twentieth Century" at ABC News and an associate editor of Columbia Journalism Review.

Her articles, many of which are available on Academia.edu, have appeared in Photography and Culture, American Journalism, Book History, Journalism History, Journalism Practice, Columbia Journalism Review, Humanities, common-place.org, and other scholarly and popular publications.  

Tucher graduated from Princeton as a Classics major, earned her M.S. in rare-book librarianship from Columbia’s bygone School of Library Service and holds a Ph.D. in American Civilization from New York University. She is a faculty member in the journalism program of the Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics. In 2010 she was elected Executive Secretary of the Society of American Historians. She isn’t a bad photographer but wishes she were a better pianist.

Alisa Solomon directs the Arts & Culture concentration in the M.A. program, teaching its core seminar as well as an array of M.S. courses; among them, Ethics, Reporting, Criticism workshop. She began her journalism career in the early 1980s as a theater critic at the Village Voice and, while continuing in that role in her 21 years on staff at the Voice, also covered such areas as U.S. immigration policy, LGTB issues, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, electoral politics, and women’s sports. Nowadays, she contributes regularly to The Nation, covering live performance and scripted TV. As a freelancer, she has contributed to magazines, newspapers, and radio stations ranging from Glamour and Poz to the Guardian, New York Times and WNYC.

Trained academically in theater history and dramatic literature, Alisa stays connected to the field, contributing to journals like The Drama Review and America Theater. Her books include Re-Dressing the Canon: Essays on Theater and Gender (winner of the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism) and Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ (winner of the Kurt Weill Prize, the Jewish Journal Prize, and the Theatre Library Association’s George Freedley Memorial Award). Alisa also has an arts practice as a dramaturg. Most recently, she has been working with Anna Deavere Smith on her Pipeline to Prison Project.

Alisa believes that to write about the arts is to write about the world: Covering the field involves not only aesthetic considerations, but also politics, law, social issues, economics, trade policy – you name it. A cultural journalist gets to do everything.

Though born and raised in the Midwest, Alisa considers herself a thorough New Yorker. In good weather, you can find her commuting from downtown to campus on two wheels via the Hudson River bike path.

Alisa received her B.A. at the University of Michigan’s Residential College, and her MFA and doctorate in Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism at the Yale School of Drama.

Alexis Clark is an author and freelance journalist. She writes about history with a focus on race, culture and politics during World War II and the Civil Rights era. She’s a contributing writer for History.com with stories on African American culture, the military and milestones in social and racial justice. Clark’s also a correspondent for the public affairs television program, Matter of Fact with Soledad O’Brien, where she reports on historic and contemporary issues, such as poverty, food insecurity, the building trades industry and neglected neighborhoods.

Clark has written a variety of features for The New York Times over the years, from the treatment of Black servicemembers in World War II to sibling separation in New York State’s foster care system. She contributed to “Beyond the World War II We Know,” a Times series documenting lesser-known stories from the war. Clark also helped launch “Past Tense,” a special digital series in 2018. The project brought narratives of the past to life in a series of articles that showcased photographs from the New York Times archive.

Clark has received grants from the Ford Foundation for her World War II research projects, and her narrative non-fiction book, "Enemies in Love: A German POW, a Black Nurse and an Unlikely Romance," was published by The New Press in 2018. The book has since been covered by The New Yorker, The New York Times, PBS Newshour Weekend, NPR, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Matter of Fact with Soledad O’Brien, Essence, WNYC and Bloomberg TV. In addition, “Enemies in Love” is being developed into a television series.

Clark started her journalism career in 2002 and is a former senior editor at Town & Country magazine where she covered cultural and philanthropic events across the country, including President Barack Obama’s inauguration. Her work has also been published by Smithsonian.com, Preservation Magazine, NBC News Digital and other publications. Clark is currently under contract with Penguin Random House for a nonfiction book on America’s Black sororities and their fight for gender and racial equality.

Clark, a Dallas native, is a graduate of Columbia Journalism School. She also holds an M.A. in Government from the University of Virginia and a B.A. in Political Science from Spelman College. 

Notable Work

• “When Jim Crow Reigned Amid the Rubble of Nazi Germany.”
• “The Children's Crusade: When the Youth of Birmingham Marched for Justice.”
• “Returning From War, Returning to Racism.”
• “How Food Insecurity is Impacting Voter Apathy.”
• “For One Night in 1965, the Supremes Brought the Two Detroits Together”
• “Vernon A.M.E. Church Continues Its Mission 100 Years After the Tulsa Race Massacre.”
• “Separated in Foster Care, Siblings Reunite in Camp

Professor Stille graduated with a B.A. from Yale University and earned an M.S. at Columbia. He has worked as a contributor to The New York Times, La Repubblica, The New Yorker magazine, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, Correspondent, U.S. News & World Report, The Boston Globe, and The Toronto Globe and Mail.

He is the author of Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families Under Fascism (1991); Excellent Cadavers: The Mafia and the Death of the First Italian Republic (1995); The Future of the Past (2002); and The Sack of Rome: How a Beautiful European Country with a Fabled History and a Storied Culture Was Taken Over by a Man Named Silvio Berlusconi (2006).

Stille is the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award for best work of history (1992), Premio Acqui (1992), San Francisco Chronicle Critics Choice Award (1995), and the Alicia Patterson Foundation award for journalism (1996).