Rita Omokha

Adjunct Faculty

Rita Omokha is an award-winning Nigerian-American writer and journalist in New York City. Her writing on race and culture has appeared in Cosmopolitan, Elle, The Daily Beast, Glamour, Teen Vogue, USA TODAY, Vanity Fair, The Washington Post and WIRED. Her reporting has also been featured on major networks such as CNN. Omokha’s enterprise projects include Elle’s "America Redefined" and Vanity Fair’s "They Were Sons," which examine race in America and police violence against communities of color.

Rita received an M.S. from Columbia Journalism School, where she graduated at the top of the 2020 class, receiving some of the institution's highest awards, including the Pulitzer Prizes’ Traveling Fellowship, the Lynton Foundation Award in Book Writing and the Bill Campbell Award. During her time at the Journalism School, she served as co-president of the African Student Association, which spotlighted the intersection of journalism, press freedom and the African diaspora. Omokha previously worked in digital media for CNN, NBC and Viacom and served in AmeriCorps in 2013.

Contact

Email:

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Classes taught

Reporting

In this core class, which begins in August and continues through the end of October, you'll explore the methods journalists use to gather and evaluate information. You'll learn how to think and behave as a journalist, how to conceive of journalistic story assignments, and how to report them quickly and accurately on deadline. You’ll learn how to gather original information first-hand and to combine it with contextual information that can be found online and elsewhere. You will be taught how to ensure that a story is true, both in the sense of getting the facts right and also by stating the implications fairly.

You’ll also get some basic training in digital technologies such as mobile photo, video and audio that are essential parts of a modern journalist’s toolkit, and you’ll begin using them in service of journalism, while thinking about ways to use social media to engage an audience for your work.

Multiple instructors teach sections of this class.