Director’s Note to Prospective Students
Our graduate students are audio journalism’s version of the triple-threat: the accomplished reporter, resourceful producer, and sonically creative audio engineer. However, don’t be intimidated, none arrived at NYU with a complete set of all of these abilities.
If you’d like to study this craft, and refine the skills to place you at the forefront of audiojournalism, consider applying to our three semester program. Applications are due January 6, 2025 for the cohort, which will graduate in December 2026. Questions? Email audiojournalism@nyu.edu
I look forward to hearing from you.
~ Ellen Horne, Associate Professor and Director, Podcasting and Audio Reportage
About Audio Reportage
Over the past decade, we’ve witnessed tremendous growth globally in podcast listening. Yet, until now, there have been no audio-first journalism programs specifically designed to train the next generation of audio professionals.
We are seeking students who wish to become fearless and creative practitioners of audio journalism by honing their reporting, editorial, and production skills, to develop their unique voices. Working under the guidance of award-winning producers and respected industry leaders, students will develop deep fluency with research, interviewing and reporting, writing, technical recording, digital editing and sound design. Participants are welcome at every level of journalism and technical experience. Students will be trained in the practical elements that will allow them to realize their own projects and work in a variety of creative jobs. As a result, this program aims to produce an alumni network of visionary audio artists who have expanded the creative frontiers of the medium. Regardless of their choice of subject matter, this medium centers human voices and the spectrum of human experience, and demands that students critically engage questions of identity and power in both the content and journalism process.
Podcasting has created remarkable opportunities in journalism and media. While audio documentary and radio reporting have a significant history, the accessibility of both new digital audio editing technology and direct distribution to audiences have opened new frontiers for exploration in investigative and nonfiction narrative storytelling. This includes vast audiences for works of deep reporting, beautifully written and performed, featuring creative production and the highest quality documentary recording and editing. All of this has led to an explosion of journalistic and creative organizations, and an environment ripe with job opportunities. NYU Journalism’s new MA audio concentration will prepare students to lead creatively in this expanding journalistic landscape.
Curriculum
The Podcasting & Audio Reportage concentration is a 36-credit program which allows students to acquire deep skills in the audio medium, within NYU’s Journalism offerings. Beyond the requirements of the concentration, which cover the primary skills for the audio journalist, students have 12 elective credits. Students may take advantage of the many strengths of the NYU Journalism Faculty, taking courses across a diverse range of topics from investigative reporting to writing about food.
One of the highlights of the program is an opportunity to meet and learn from luminaries in the audio field. As part of the course of study, students are given ample opportunities for one-on-one interactions with some of today’s most creative and inspiring audio producers. NYU’s Audio Journalism courses frequently feature guest lecturers, such as Nadia Reiman of This American Life, B.A. Parker of NPR’s Code Switch, Yowei Shaw of Invisibilia, Sean Rameswaram of Vox’s Today Explained, Ryan Kailath of WNYC, Kaitlin Prest of The Heart, Nick Van Der Kolk of Love + Radio, Rahsaan Thomas from Ear Hustle and many more.
After completing the first semester of the program, students can take an internship for credit. Internships are not required, but as New York City is a hub for the podcasting industry it is an ideal location for students to make connections and learn from working professionals. The program’s faculty advisors will help students match with internships-for-credits.
The final semester of the program, students will complete a capstone podcast lab course, resulting in portfolio-quality audio work. Students should anticipate working in production teams, and experiencing many roles, from behind-the-scenes to behind-the-microphone, writing and interviewing, editing script and recordings, and working with sound design and the tools of digital sound engineering. Through working in a variety of roles, students gain strengths in collaboration and a keen sense of the mechanics of audio production workflow, key to success in a broadcast environment. This program is designed to give students a comprehensive foundation in the production skills necessary to produce the highest quality podcast work, while at the same time building the expertise necessary to conduct rigorous and ethical journalism.
Faculty
Ellen Horne
Associate Professor | Podcasting and Audio Reportage, Director
Ellen Horne is the director of the Podcasting and Audio Reportage concentration in the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. Her research is focused on performance, documentation, the perception of authority in voice, labor and production in audio and podcasting. In 2020, she was host, reporter, and producer for Luminary’s Lies We Tell. For WNYC’s Radiolab, Ellen published stories from 2003-2015, reporting stories like ‘Deaf Comedy Jam’ about the role of sign language interpretation in live comedy performance and ‘Hope’ about the trail of trauma behind fraud. She is the founder and editorial director at Story Mechanics, where she is currently in production on a slate of audio projects including a queer history project for Audible, an investigative journalism podcast series about evidence in criminal justice, a science-history theatrical stage show, and an audio installation project.
Horne was an executive producer at Audible and an executive producer for WNYC’s Radiolab, where she won numerous honors including George Foster Peabody Awards, Third Coast Awards, and the Kavli Science Journalism Award.
She has a BA in theater and religion from Cornell College and has taught audio journalism at NYU and Columbia University.
Dr. Chenjerai Kumanyika
Assistant Professor
Alongside his scholarship and teaching, disciplinary service on the intersections of social justice and media, Kumanyika specializes in using narrative non-fiction audio journalism to critique the ideology of American historical myths about issues such as race, the Civil War, and policing. He has written in scholarly venues such as Popular Music & Society, Popular Communication, The Routledge Companion to Advertising and Promotional Culture, as well as public venues such as The Intercept, Transom, NPR Codeswitch, All Things Considered, Invisibilia, and VICE. Kumanyika is also the co-creator, co-executive producer and co-host of Uncivil, Gimlet Media’s podcast on the Civil War and he is the collaborator for Scene on Radio’s influential Season 2 “Seeing White,” and Season 4 on the history of American democracy.
Kumanyika’s work has been recognized with several prestigious honors including the George Foster Peabody Award (2018) for Uncivil and The Media Literate Media Award (NAMLE) for Scene on Radio (2021). In 2021, he received the Union of Democratic Communications’ Dallas Smythe Award for his career accomplishments and advocacy.
Kumanyika studied mass communication and critical media studies at The Pennsylvania State University’s Donald Bellisario College of Communication where he earned his Ph.D.
Sarah Kramer
Adjunct Faculty
Sarah Kate Kramer is an award-winning radio producer and editor. As the Senior Producer at Radio Diaries, she has produced audio diaries with teenagers, the formerly incarcerated, and a young woman in Saudi Arabia. She has also produced non-narrated historical documentaries for NPR, on subjects including a forgotten uprising of African American soldiers during the Vietnam War; audio love letters sent through the postal service during WWII; and the controversial story of Grace Halsell, a white journalist who in 1968 darkened her skin in order to “report on the black experience.”
In addition to her work at Radio Diaries, Sarah works as a freelance podcast editor. In 2019, she also produced an audio tour for the historic Essex Market in New York City’s Lower East Side.
Sarah initially got hooked on audio storytelling as a producer for StoryCorps, then she traveled the world with a microphone for a few years before settling down in her hometown of New York City. She was a Fulbright Fellow in Morocco, where she produced radio stories and an oral history project. Before joining Radio Diaries, she was the editor of Feet in 2 Worlds, a project that amplifies immigrant-produced journalism, and a freelance reporter for New York Public Radio, PRI’s The World, and other media outlets.
Hannis Brown
Adjunct Faculty
Hilke Schellmann
Assistant Professor
Author, Journalist, Full time Faculty
Hilke Schellmann is an Emmy award winning investigative reporter and assistant professor of journalism at New York University.
As a contributor to The Wall Street Journal and The Guardian, Schellmann writes about holding artificial intelligence (AI) accountable. In her book, The Algorithm: How AI Decides Who Gets Hired, Monitored, Promoted, and Fired, And Why We Need To Fight Back (Hachette), she investigates the rise of AI in the world of work. Drawing on exclusive information from whistleblowers, internal documents and real‑world tests, Schellmann discovers that many of the algorithms making high‑stakes decisions are biased, racist, and do more harm than good.
Sayre Quevedo
Adjunct Faculty
Sayre Quevedo is an artist and journalist. He works across mediums to tell stories about intimacy, identity, and human relationships. Quevedo began as a reporter with Youth Radio in Oakland, California at the age of 15 in 2008. Since then his work has been featured on NPR, Marketplace, BBC Short Cuts, Love Me on the CBC, McSweeney’s and Radio Atlas.
In 2018 his piece ‘Espera’ received the Third Coast/RHDF Directors’ Choice Award and his other piece ‘The Quevedos’ was nominated for a Best Audio Documentary award by the International Documentary Association (IDA). The following year he won the 2019 Third Coast/RHDF Gold Award for Best Documentary for ‘The Return’ . It was also nominated for a Best Audio Documentary award by the IDA, his second nomination two years in a row. Quevedo was the Fall 2019 Podcaster-In-Residence for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and an Associate Producer for The Daily at The New York Times and NPR’s Latino USA and a Producer for VICE News.
Audrey Quinn
Adjunct Faculty
Audrey Quinn is a Pulitzer Prize-winning podcast editor and audio reporter. She created NYU Journalism’s first narrative audio reporting course in 2015. She’s story edited for Futuro Media, LAist Studios, Frontline, Crooked Media, Spotify, KCRW, and more. She’s reported and produced for WNYC, Planet Money, Gimlet, Radiolab, 99 Percent Invisible, Nancy, Reveal and Marketplace. Audrey produced and hosted Aftereffect from WNYC Studios, which won a Newswomen’s Club of New York Award and was a Third Coast finalist. Her investigative work has been recognized by PRNDI and Deadline Club awards, the Fund for Investigative Journalism, Type Investigations, and published in the New York Times. In 2017 she was a Rosalynn Carter Mental Health Reporting Fellow.
