Journalism is not just about reporting on individual "news events." More and more, it's about getting a handle on the complicated reality that frames those events - the ever-shifting patterns of culture that determine how we live and what we make of our lives. As the mainstream media expand their cultural coverage and alternative publications and websites proliferate, there has never been more need for engaging, knowledgeable cultural reporting and analysis.
In 1995, cultural critic and longtime Village Voice writer Ellen Willis responded to the rapid growth of this field by launching a concentration in Cultural Reporting and Criticism within the Institute's M.A. program. CRC is unique: the only graduate journalism program in the country specifically designed to prepare the next generation of cultural reporters and critics.
The arts and popular culture; the immense variety of social groups, from gay families to Pakistani cabdrivers to obsessive gamers; the explosion of social controversies, from the role of identity politics in the Obama presidential campaign to Dominique Strauss-Kahn rape case; the rise of religious fundamentalism, at home and abroad; the changing nature of war; the role of the critic in the age of the Internet: all this is fodder for the cultural journalist. Cultural journalism is for writers with an itch to understand connections—between news event and context, present and past, art and society, public and private. Over the last tumultuous decade, the need for such explorations has only intensified.
The CRC concentration is unique, too, in its emphasis on criticism. We are inspired not by the turgid academic criticism that is taught at some universities, but by the Partisan Review/New Yorker tradition: that is, well-informed, thought-provoking criticism that addresses a wide, non-specialized audience and that can intervene in a broader cultural conversation. The critics and journalists we study (pictured to the right) include James Agee, Hannah Arendt, Martha Gellhorn, George Orwell, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Greil Marcus, Laura Kipnis, Salman Rushdie, Philip Gourevitch, Henry Louis Gates, Joan Acocella, David Remnick, and Pauline Kael.
CRC students are trained to write in a variety of formats, including the critical essay, the profile, the review, the long-form narrative, the op/ed piece, and even the blog post. Graduates of the program work in every form of media, from traditional print journalism to radio, television and the web. We publish in, and work at, a wide range of publications, from the Washington Post to Bookforum, The Revealer and The Forward to Bust and the AV Club. CRC graduates are currently working as fulltime reporters, critics, or editors at publications such as the New York Review of Books (senior editor), the New York Times (reporter, Los Angeles bureau), the Wall Street Journal (senior editor), the New Yorker (writer, "Book Blog"), Harper's (assistant editor), New York magazine (deputy culture editor, website), Slate (contributing writer), Salon (deputy culture editor), NPR (producer), CBS (producer, news division), the Nation (chief copy editor and assistant editor), Saveur (associate editor), Artforum (assistant editor), Spin (senior editor and writer), Bloomberg BusinessWeek (reporter), New York Daily News, Fader, the Forward, and the Huffington Post (women's editor).
If you are drawn to the big picture—if you suspect that neither conventional journalism training nor academic specialization is right for you—CRC may be what you're looking for. Our curriculum emphasizes the integration of journalistic skills with a distinctive individual writer's voice. The CRC program is deeply collaborative, and stresses close working relationships between professors and students and the creation of a supportive intellectual community.
NEWS:
CRC director Susie Linfield's book "The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence" is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism and for the Infinity Writing Award from the International Center of Photography. Click here to see select reviews.
Dennis Lim was hired as the director of programming at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.
Kathryn Joyce, CRC 2003, has published her second book, "The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking and the New Gospel of Adoption."
Cultural Reporting and Criticism Bylines
Faculty
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Farai Chideya
Farai Chideya is an award-winning journalist and professor who has worked in print, television, radio, and digital media. Over the years, Chideya was a producer for MTV News; an on-air political analyst for CNN; a reporter and guest host at...
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Shimon Dotan
Shimon Dotan is an award-winning filmmaker with twelve feature films to his credit. He was born in Romania and in 1959 moved to Israel where he grew up in an agricultural cooperative, served five years in the Israeli military and...
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Ruth Franklin
Ruth Franklin is a book critic and contributing editor at The New Republic. She has written for many publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, Bookforum, Granta, and Salmagundi, to which...
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Dennis Lim
Dennis Lim writes about film and popular culture for various publications including The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. He is currently Editorial Director at the Museum of the Moving Image and was formerly the film editor of...
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Susie Linfield
Susie Linfield is the author of "The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence" (University of Chicago Press, 2010). She writes about culture and politics for a variety of publications including The Washington Post Book World, The New Republic, The Boston...
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Suketu Mehta
Suketu Mehta is a journalist and fiction writer. His nonfiction book "Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found" won the Kiriyama Prize and the Hutch Crossword Award, and was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize, the Lettre Ulysses Prize, the...
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Ben Ratliff
Ben Ratliff is a staff critic at The New York Times, where he has been writing about jazz and pop music since 1996. He is the author of three books, including "Coltrane: The Story of a Sound" (FSG, 2007), which...
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Mark Schone
Mark Schone is the digital managing editor of the investigative unit at ABC News. Previously, he was the executive news editor at Salon.com and a senior contributing writer at SPIN magazine.
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Jennifer Szalai
Jennifer Szalai has written for The Nation, the London Review of Books, The Economist, and the New York Times Book Review, among other publications. She was a senior editor at Harper’s Magazine until 2010 and is currently a member of...
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Charles Taylor
Charles Taylor has written on movies, books, popular culture and politics for a variety of publications including the New York Times, Salon.com, the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, Dissent, The Nation, the New Yorker, the New York Observer, Lapham's Quarterly and others.
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Amy Waldman
Amy Waldman is a novelist and journalist. Her first novel, The Submission (FSG, 2011) won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for Fiction; was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Foundation Debut Fiction Award; and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award.
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Lawrence Weschler
Lawrence Weschler, a graduate of Cowell College of the University of California, Santa Cruz, has been, since the early '80s, a staff writer for The New Yorker, where his work has shuttled between political tragedies and cultural comedies.
