2025 Year in Review
Looking back at the achievements of our students, alumni, faculty, and staff.
The Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute had another great year!
During another big news year, our students and faculty covered the New York, U.S. and international news. Our faculty and staff published books and launched major projects and initiatives. Our students received numerous awards — the Student Academy Award, Student Emmys, and Overseas Press Club Scholar Awards. Our students were also published in nearly 75 different publications. Take a look!
Our students were published more than 70 times in the past year at a wide range of publications — including local New York papers, audio programs, NYU publications, and international newspapers and magazines.
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Students were published more than 72 times this year.
Alpinist
amNY
Astoria Post
Audubon
Autre
Brooklyn Paper
Bustle
City Limits
Cosmopolitan
Dialogue Earth
Earth Island Journal
Efiko Magazine
Gay Times Magazine
Go Mag
Grist
GrubStreet
Foreign Policy
Hana Hou!
Hell Gate
Inside Climate News
Los Angeles Times
Live Science
Longreads
Mongabay
Minnesota Spokesman Recorder
National Catholic Report
NPR
Office
Palabra
Pass Blue
Paste
Planet Money
Public Health Watch
QNS
Queens Post
Radio Catskill
Remezcla
Rolling Stone
Salon
Science
Scientific American
Sentient
Shreveport Times
Smithsonian
SoJourner
Southlands
Slate
Teen Vogue
The Texas Signal Media Foundation
The Austin Chronicle
The Cooper Square
The Cut
The Examination
The Guardian
The Markaz Review
The Nation
The New Arab
The New York Times
The Village View
The World
TimeOut New York
Uncloseted
Washington Square News
Wired
WNYU
Our students and alumni won prestigious awards.
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Emmy: Mona El-Naggar (NewsDoc 2013) won an Emmy for her New York Times story, “She Survived an Airstrike that Killed Her Entire Family in Gaza.”
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National Academies / Schmidt Awards for Excellence in Science Communications: Calli McMurray (SHERP 2023) and Joss Fong (SHERP 2013) each won $40,000 first-place prizes.
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NewsDoc students have won Student Academy Awards since 2007. Jane Deng (NewsDoc 2024) won a bronze medal for her documentary “I Remember,” about her experiences in Wuhan, China, during the pandemic.
More Awards
Suha Musa (GloJo 2025) won first place in NYU’s 2025 Threesis Academic Challenge.
Randi Richardson (Reporting the Nation 2025) was awarded a 2025 Salute to Excellence award by the National Association of Black Journalists.
Isabela Fleischmann (BER 2025) and Rambo Talabong (SHERP 2025) were 2025 Overseas Press Club Foundation Scholar Award Winners.
Calli McMurray (SHERP 2023) was awarded first place in the small-outlet category of the AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Awards for her story in The Transmitter.
Paulina Ruiz Leycegui (NewsDoc 2024) was nominated for a College Television Award for her thesis documentary “Unbroken Spirits.”
Pau Torres Pagès (GloJo 2026) and Elena Lecun Xiang (NewsDoc 2025) were awarded GSAS Thesis Research Summer Fellowships.
Bijal Trivedi (SHERP 1998) was named a Guggenheim Fellow to support her current book project, a cultural and scientific history of sickle cell disease.
Joss Fong (SHERP 2013) won an inaugural News Creator Award for Excellence in Independent Video Journalism, sponsored by the International Center for Journalists.
Rishabh Jain (NewsDoc 2024) won a College Television Award for his thesis documentary “A Dream Called Khushi.”
Shehzad Hameed Ahmad’s (NewsDoc 2014) documentary series “Addicted” won the Best Documentary Series award at the Asian Academy Creative Awards 2025 in Singapore.
Anne-Marcelle Ngabirano (Undergrad 2017) served as a co-producer on the series “World Eats Bread, “which won the 2025 James Beard Award for best docu–series visual media.
Lori Youmshajekian (SHERP 2023) was named a Logan Science Journalism Fellow.
Chi Tian (Undergrad 2025) and Angela (Elle) Liu’s (Undergrad 2024) video story “Saving Chinatown’s roots” won a 2025 Asian American Journalists Association Award for Student Excellence in Video Storytelling.
Rachel Nuwer (SHERP 2011) and Jonathan Moens (SHERP 2020) were awarded grants from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.
Bohao Liu (NewsDoc 2020) was nominated for an IDA Award for his documentary short “If a Walnut Falls.”
Samantha Donndelinger (Undergrad 2024) won an ASBPE Award for her Uncloseted Media story.
Charlie Wood (SHERP 2018) shared a 2025 National Magazine Award for Best Single-Topic Issue. He wrote five of the nine stories in Quanta Magazine’s winning entry: The Unraveling of Space-Time.
Maria Cestero (NewsDoc 2024) won Best Documentary in Lusca Fantastic Film Festival for her thesis documentary “La Esperanza.”
… Just to name a few. Congratulations to all our Alumni who won awards for their work this year!
From Tulsa to Greenland, our students traveled across the world to cover stories on the ground, in real time.
- Reporting the Nation & New York students traveled to Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Portland, Maine, to cover a variety of stories.
- Our Global Beat class, led by Professor Jason Maloney traveled to Argentina in March where they reported on a range of topics from climate change, religion, Indigenous land rights and the country’s political climate.
- Business and Economic Reporting students went to London, where they spoke with people about the evolving media landscape and the political climate.
- GloJo students reported from Greenland, Kyrgyzstan, Senegal, Lebanon.
The 7th Floor Commons was home to events featuring some of the top voices in the industry.
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Discussions and workshops featuring journalists from The News York Times, New York Magazine, The Drift, Grist, Time, and more.
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Career events: Three networking events with 100+ attendees each, 15 info sessions with recruiters from top media organizations, and five workshops with editors focused on pitching and freelancing.
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Student events, including graduation parties, film screenings, thesis presentations, student showcases, and mixers.
Our faculty made significant contributions to their respective fields this year.
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Faculty work was published in 25+ top publications. Faculty also made appearances on television, podcasts, and were quoted in the work of their colleagues.
Cambridge University Press
Columbia Journalism Review
Oxford University Press
LOLWE
New York Magazine
NPR
PBS
Quillette
San Francisco Chronicle
The Atlantic
The Boston Globe
The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Common
The Economist
The Guardian
The New York Times
The New York Times Magazine
The New Republic
The Washington Post
Faculty Awards & Accomplishments
Mohamad Bazzi
- Professor Bazzi won second place in “Crisis Commentary” for his Guardian columns on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East by the National Society of Newspaper Columnists.
Dan Fagin
- Professor Fagin wrote a New York Times feature about groundbreaking science involving monarch butterflies.
Meryl Gordon
- Professor Gordon’s book The Woman Who Knew Everyone was published this year.
Ellen Horne
- Professor Horne went to China for a project that fosters collaboration and innovation between U.S. and Chinese podcasters.
Chenjerai Kumanyika
- Professor Chenjerai Kumanyika won an Ambie award for Best History Podcast for his audio series “Empire City: The Untold Origin Story of the NYPD.”
- Empire City was also named a finalist for the 60th annual National Magazine Awards and received three Signal Award nominations.
Jason Maloney
- Professor Maloney produced, filmed and edited the PBS News Weekend segment “How Sanctions Imposed by Trump Are Taking a Toll on the International Criminal Court,” which aired November 15.
Jason Samuels
- Professor Samuels’s primetime news special, “The BET Black Men’s Summit,” received a 2025 NAACP Image Award Nomination.
Hilke Schellman
- Professor Schellman’s work “Are AI Hiring Tools any Good?” was featured on NPR’s TED Radio Hour. She also received tenure this year.
Rachel Swarns
- Professor Swarns’s digital initiatives Lynchings in the North, was featured at a national conference this summer hosted by Northeastern University.
Nanfu Wang
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Professor Wang won a Peabody for her new documentary “Night Is Not Eternal.”
… And many more! We extend a warm congratulations to all our faculty and teaching professionals whose accomplishments this year could cover a whole review in itself.
Carter Institute 2025 Highlights
Initiatives
- Professor Samuels led the second-annual Ed Bradley Fellowship, a program for elite college journalists that aims to identify and rectify the under-representation of African-American males in newsrooms across the country.
- First Amendment Watch released The SLAPP Back Initiative, a first-of-its-kind database tracking alleged SLAPPs – strategic lawsuits against public participation – potentially meritless or malicious legal actions that chill speech and deter scrutiny.
- The Institute re-launced its internal news publication as “The Cooper Square,” led by Whitney Dangerfield, Donna Borak and an editorial team of undergraduate students. The publication’s mission is to collaborate and work with NYU students at various stages of reporting and career development to become published journalists prior to graduation.
- Our Global Journalism program partnered with PassBlue to cover UN General Assembly Week.
- Scienceline, the publication of our SHERP program launched “Gold Standard Science,” a collection of stories chronicling the ripple effects of the second Trump administration’s attitude toward science.
- Our Business and Economic Reporting and News and Documentary programs both celebrated their 25th anniversary.
- In July, the Institute hosted the Urban Journalism Workshop, which aims to equip high school students in the tri-state area with essential journalistic skills.
Fellowships & Awards
- The Ethics and Journalism Initiative hosted the first annual Collier Award, intended for “student and professional journalists that meet the highest ethical standards in the face of pressure or incentives to do otherwise. The Washington Post, Mississippi Today, and University of Florida senior Garrett Shanley took home the top prize.
- Lauren Williams, a journalist and audio producer, was the recipient of the 11th Matthew Power Literary Reporting Award. Katie Thornton, a print and audio journalist who covers media, infrastructure, and history, as the award’s runner-up.
- Shayla Love, the recipient of the 2024 Matthew Power Literary Award published her-grant funded piece “The Island Where People Go to Cheat Death” in The New Republic.
- Four alumni, Pooja Salhotra (LitRep ‘22), Kailyn Rhone (BER ‘23), Alexa Robles-Gil (SHERP ‘24), and Owen Berg (Studio 20 ‘23) were selected as 2025-2026 New York Times Fellows.