The faculty at New York University reflects in its own make-up a view of journalism. First and always, we treat journalism as a professional practice, with its own skills, pressures, thrills and demands. That means we teach people how to do the work of a journalist in real world settings. Next, we think serious journalism is a public service of special importance in a democracy; and so we try to understand it as a personal calling and social good. That means we must be critical and question how journalism operates, asking also how it could be better.

Third, we think journalism has its own tradition, a record of great work by talented people who have proven the higher possibilities of the form, adding their voices to human knowledge and their observations to the literature of modern life. We teach this tradition, which means we offer students a place within it—an intellectual starting point for the working journalist and thinking professional. Finally, we know that the demands on a journalist touch at many points on knowledge central to other, more traditionally academic disciplines. That means infusing journalism with the arts and sciences, and vice versa.

In these four central aims—teaching the skills of craft, the social importance of journalism, the great achievements of the form, and the connection to other knowledge, other disciplines—the NYU faculty is unusually qualified. Its members have substantial professional experience at the higher levels of the profession. Prior to joining the Department, most were full-time correspondents, writers, producers, or editors for major news organizations. Today they continue to operate as journalists, authors, critics and documentarians, doing exemplary work in the tradition they teach to others.

The faculty’s own journalism appears regularly in national newspapers and magazines, leading journals of opinion, the broadcast networks, and, in book form, from major publishers. Taking advantage of NYU’s location in the media and publishing capital of the world, faculty members frequently make their voices heard in public debate and on urgent issues in journalism. They also maintain extensive professional contacts in the city and around the nation. Among the faculty’s current strengths are science writing, business and technology reporting, labor journalism, social and political commentary, media and press criticism, the journalism of ideas, cultural analysis, book length reportage, long form documentary and press history. See the individual bios of faculty members for more detail.

In addition to a full-time faculty, NYU calls on its outstanding body teaching professionals, drawn from all corners of the journalism world in New York (and abroad). Typically, they are employed full-time elsewhere in the city, or have substantial free-lance careers. They leave their offices and assignments and come to Washington Square to teach because they want the satisfaction of guiding the next generation into journalism. Our teaching professionals (also called adjunct professors) represent a substantial asset to the university and an invaluable aid to students hoping to enter the field.