CUNY Graduate School of Journalism

Our Mission Statement

The CUNY Graduate School of Journalism prepares students from a broad range of economic, racial and ethnic backgrounds to produce high-quality journalism at a time of rapid change. We are rooted in the core skills and ethics of journalism: strong reporting and writing, critical thinking, fairness, and accuracy. We teach new technologies and storytelling tools across media platforms to engage audiences and promote a broader democratic dialogue. We serve our local and global news communities by sharing our reporting, research, and facilities. We serve our profession by graduating skilled journalists, diversifying the voices in the media and encouraging innovation and entrepreneurship to help build a sustainable future for journalism. The City University of New York’s CUNY Graduate School of Journalism offers a top-notch, affordable education teaching traditional journalism values while preparing students to thrive in a rapidly changing media landscape. As the profession reinvents itself for the digital age, the CUNY J-School is at the forefront of equipping the next generation of journalists with the tools to find stories and tell them effectively — using print, broadcast, visual, interactive, and social media. Just as importantly, our faculty of seasoned, award-winning journalists are preparing students to re-imagine how journalism is practiced so they can help lead the changes underway. The School offers three master’s degree programs: a Masters of Arts in Journalism, the nation’s first M.A. in Entrepreneurial Journalism, and a one-year, cutting-edge M.A. in Social Journalism, which launched in January 2015. The more traditional M.A. in Journalism features a rigorous three-semester curriculum that teaches the eternal verities of the profession — reporting, writing, critical thinking, and ethics — alongside the digital media skills every journalism needs today. This full-time program offers study in five subject concentrations that allow students to delve more deeply into a beat or content area. Every student also graduates with on-the-job experience, through a unique required summer internship that the School guarantees will be paid. The four-semester M.A. in Entrepreneurial Journalism program aims to help its graduates bring much-needed innovation to the news business. Students pursuing this degree study the fundamentals of reporting, writing, and multimedia for three semesters and, in their fourth semester, participate in a comprehensive course of study that focuses on innovative approaches to journalism, business fundamentals, contemporary technology skills, and new business models for news. By the end of the term, each student will develop his or her own startup project, in close consultation with faculty advisers and expert mentors. The new M.A. in Social Journalism is aimed at helping future leaders in news recast journalism as a service that helps communities meet their goals and solve problems, using a wide range of new tools and skills involving relationship-building, data, social media, and business. Our students reflect the ethnic, economic, and international diversity of the world, and they take pride in digging out stories about people and neighborhoods in New York City often overlooked in the media. In our state-of-the-art facility just off Times Square, the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism is learning and teaching change.

Ten Reasons To Choose CUNY J-School

1. We were born in the digital age.
   Our school opened its doors in 2006 when the Internet was profoundly disrupting our profession. We understand – and embrace – the idea that constantly revising our curriculum is essential to our success. Our faculty embodies that startup spirit. We have not had to navigate academic fiefdoms or battle entrenched ideas.
2. Our program is innovative and rigorous.
   Our Master of Arts in Journalism curriculum features a combination of traditional and multimedia journalism training, along with subject specializations and a unique paid summer internship. This is all packed into 16 tightly-scripted months. We also offer an M.A. in Entrepreneurial Journalism and an M.A. in Social Journalism, the first degrees of their kind in the nation.
3. We are at the center of the media universe.
   Our midtown Manhattan location can’t be beaten. We’re right next door to The New York Times, an easy walk to many other major media companies and a short subway ride from a bevy of new media startups. Our New York home makes it easy for us to recruit top-notch faculty and guest speakers and gives our students the opportunity to interact regularly with major, high profile news outlets.
4. Our faculty is outstanding.
   Thanks to our New York base, we have the opportunity to recruit exceptional working journalists as professors, adjuncts, and coaches. Many of them are award-winning professionals who are in great demand for their expertise. Yet nurturing the next generation is what they often say they find most rewarding about their CUNY J-School affiliation. They will teach you, mentor you and reach out to colleagues in the profession to help you find jobs, internships, and freelance opportunities.
5. We are a small, intimate community.
   The annual cohort for our M.A. in Journalism is small (typically, about 100 students), and we like it that way. It allows us to remain highly selective in our admissions process, and to tailor our academic program to specific student needs. Our class size averages 10 to 15 students, and you will frequently have more than one teacher in the room. Everyone gets personal attention from faculty, staff, and classmates. You won’t get lost in the crowd.
6. We are public.
   The fact that we are the only publicly supported graduate school of journalism in the entire Northeast infuses us with a clear identity. It allows us to keep our tuition affordable, ensures that our student body is diverse, focuses our journalistic efforts on underserved communities and opens our professional training and events to New York’s wider journalism community.
7. We prize diversity.
   We don’t just talk about a diversity agenda, we act on it. We actively recruit at CUNY, SUNY, historically black colleges and Hispanic-serving institutions, and do outreach through a variety of professional journalism associations. In a typical cohort, more than 40 percent are students of color. Our roster of faculty is highly diverse and we work hard to ensure that diversity issues are actively incorporated into our curriculum. We are also home to the Center for Community and Ethnic Media, which provides training and research for the region’s immigrant-based media outlets.
8. We offer great value.
   Our tuition is one of the lowest in the country – and we have an aggressive student scholarship program to ensure that our diversity encompasses not just race and ethnicity but also economic class. For those in our M.A in Journalism program with its required summer internship, we provide a $3,000 stipend to students whose internships are unpaid. We do this because we want to ensure that all students are on a level playing field when choosing their internships. We know of no other J-School that makes that commitment.
9. Our graduates get jobs.
   Just six months after they graduate, 85 percent of our students are typically working full-time in the profession; after a year, the number rises to about 92 percent. Some are working at major media organizations such as ABC News, The New York Times, Bloomberg News, WNYC and Sports Illustrated. Others have chosen to work for younger organizations, such as BuzzFeed, VICE Media, Mic, Cir.ca, and DNAInfo. Many students started working at these outlets as interns and returned as full-time hires after they graduated.
10. Our alumni are passionate and proud.
    It takes guts to choose a relatively new school over those with more gold-plated names, so our alumni tend to exhibit a certain pride in the choice they have made. They have an active network, pass on tips about job opportunities and celebrate each other’s professional achievements. Although many don’t stay in the NY area after graduation, they often come back for events, homecoming or simply to visit their favorite faculty or staff. They have also found that their CUNY affiliation opens doors, whether they are reporting stories or seeking employment. The City University of New York is the largest metropolitan university in the country, with hundreds of thousands of alumni, including dozens of working journalists who attended one of CUNY’s undergraduate schools.