The Intersection of Contemporary Media and Timeless Skills
Magazine writing, whether on the printed page or on-line, will always be for writers and readers who value artful storytelling and a deeper look at complex subjects. In the Magazine and Digital Storytelling program at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, our writers develop the skills to produce memorable stories as well as explore the unique opportunities of digital media. This program is designed for students with a wide array of interests who want to pursue versatile careers.
How to Inform, Illuminate and even Entertain
Whatever subject you hope to write about — such as arts and culture, lifestyles, politics or urban issues — it’s vital to immerse yourself in the journalistic tradition.
Our curriculum provides a foundation in feature writing and hard news plus video journalism, social media and photography. Our students report on New York Fashion Week, immigration, the criminal courts and everything in between. You will learn how to tell every kind of story: profiles, personal essays, breaking news, a Q&A, service journalism and arts criticism.
In the past year, our students have published class assignments in The New York Times, Brooklyn Magazine, Smithsonian Magazine, Salon and Los Angeles Magazine.
New York City: Where Magazines Are Made
From Condé Nast to the New York Times to adventurous start-ups in Brooklyn, many of the world’s most far-reaching media and news outlets are headquartered in New York City, and their writers and editors are our guest lecturers and faculty. Our students gain invaluable experience in editorial internships in the magazine capital of the country, often graduating with bylines and job offers. Our graduates are working at New York Magazine, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Cultured, The Baltimore Sun, The Hive, The Ringer, Time, Newsweek, Hello, Wondermind, Straus News, Bloomberg News, Hearst, Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, People, ABC, CBS, MSNBC.
Faculty
Meryl Gordon
Professor | Magazine and Digital Storytelling Director
Meryl Gordon is an award-winning journalist who has written for New York Magazine, Vanity Fair, The New York Times Book Review and Town & Country. She is the author of three bestselling biographies: “Bunny Mellon: The Life of An American Style Legend,” “The Phantom of Fifth Avenue: The Mysterious Life and Scandalous Death of Heiress Huguette Clark,” and “Mrs. Astor Regrets: The Hidden Betrayals of a Family Beyond Reproach.” Her biography on the diplomat/hostess Perle Mesta will be published in 2024.
She has written about true crime, politics, government, food, fashion, celebrities and the arts. Meryl has primarily worked for magazines and newspapers but has also held jobs in radio and television.
Robert S. Boynton
Professor | Associate Director, Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute | Lit Rep, Director
Robert S. Boynton is the director of NYU’s Literary Reportage concentration. He was graduated with honors in philosophy and religion from Haverford College, and received an MA in political science from Yale University. His book, The New New Journalism was published by Vintage Books in 2005, and he has written about culture and ideas for The New Yorker (where he has been a contributing editor) and Harper’s (where he has been a senior editor). His byline has also appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, Lingua Franca, Bookforum, Columbia Journalism Review, The New Republic, The Nation, The Village Voice, Rolling Stone and many other publications. The Invitation Only Zone, his forthcoming book about North Korea’s Japanese abduction project, will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. For a selection of his work, go to robertboynton.com. Information about The New New Journalism can be found at newnewjournalism.com.
Meredith Broussard
Associate Professor
Meredith Broussard is an associate professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University and 2018 Reynolds Journalism Institute Fellow. She is the author of two books: Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World (2019), and More than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech (2023). Artificial Unintelligence won the 2019 Prose Award in the Computing and Information Sciences category and the 2019 Hacker Prize from the Society for the History of Technology. Her research focuses on artificial intelligence in investigative reporting, with a particular interest in using data analysis for social good.
Her newest project explores how future historians will read today’s news on tomorrow’s computers. A former features editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, she has also worked as a software developer at AT&T Bell Labs and the MIT Media Lab. Her features and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Harper’s, Slate, and other outlets. Follow her on Twitter @merbroussard or contact her via meredithbroussard.com.
Ted Conover
Professor
Perri Klass
Professor | NYU Florence, Co-Director
Perri Klass, M.D. has been writing as a medical journalist dating back to her years as a student at Harvard Medical School in the 1980s, when she published a series of essays, reflections on medical training, in the Hers column of The New York Times. Since that time she has published her medical journalism in many newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times Science Section, The New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, Harpers, The Atlantic, Smithsonian, The New England Journal of Medicine, Esquire, Parenting, and Vogue. She has written regular columns about medicine for Discover Magazine, American Health, Massachusetts Medicine, and Diversion. Her most recent books are A Good Time to Be Born: How Science and Public Health Gave Children a Future (2020), and the revised edition of Quirky Kids: Understanding and Supporting Your Child With Developmental Differences (coauthored with Eileen Costello, MD, 2003; revised 2021). Her essays about medicine and medical training have been collected in the books A Not Entirely Benign Procedure: Four Years as a Medical Student (1987), Baby Doctor: A Pediatrician’s Training (1992), and Treatment Kind and Fair: Letters To a Young Doctor (2007). At NYU, Dr. Klass is a professor both in Journalism and in Pediatrics.
Suketu Mehta
Associate Professor
Author, Journalist, Full Time Faculty
Suketu Mehta is the New York-based author of ‘Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found,’ which won the Kiriyama Prize and the Hutch Crossword Award, and was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize, the Lettre Ulysses Prize, the BBC4 Samuel Johnson Prize, and the Guardian First Book Award. He has won the Whiting Writers’ Award, the O. Henry Prize, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for his fiction. Mehta’s work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Granta, Harper’s Magazine, Time, and Newsweek, and has been featured on NPR’s ‘Fresh Air’ and ‘All Things Considered.’
Mehta is an Associate Professor of Journalism at New York University. He is currently working on a nonfiction book about immigrants in contemporary New York, for which he was awarded a 2007 Guggenheim fellowship. He has also written original screenplays for films, including ‘New York, I Love You.’ Mehta was born in Calcutta and raised in Bombay and New York. He is a graduate of New York University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
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.
Jane Stone
Professor | NewsDoc
Jane Stone specializes in legal affairs journalism and investigative reporting. She has worked for NBC Dateline, CBS’s 60 Minutes, Walter Cronkite’s documentary company, CNN, and PBS’s Frontline. Her journalism has been recognized with several journalism awards, including a national Emmy for investigative reporting. She was awarded NYU’s Golden Dozen Award for excellence in teaching.
Rachel L. Swarns
Associate Professor
Rachel L. Swarns is a journalist, author and associate professor of journalism at New York University, who writes about race and race relations as a contributing writer for The New York Times. Her articles about Georgetown University’s roots in slavery touched off a national conversation about American universities and their ties to this painful period of history. Her work has been recognized and supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ford Foundation, the Leon Levy Center for Biography, the Biographers International Organization, the MacDowell artist residency program and others. Her latest book, The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to build the American Catholic Church, was published by Random House. In 2023, she was elected to the Society of American Historians. In 2024, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Eliza Griswold
Distinguished Journalist in Residence
Eliza Griswold is a contributing writer to the New Yorker and the author of 2019 Pulitzer Prize-winning Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America, a 2018 New York Times Notable Book and a New York Times Critics’ Pick, and The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam, which won the 2011 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize. Her translations of Afghan women’s folk poems, I Am the Beggar of the World, was awarded the 2015 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, and her original poetry won the 2010 Rome Prize from the American Academy of Art and Letters in Rome. She has held fellowships from the New America Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, Harvard University and the Harvard Divinity School. Her second book of poems, If Men, Then, will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, in 2020. Griswold is a contributing writer at the New Yorker and a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.
(Photo by Kathy Ryan)
Recent Published Work
Our students, faculty, and alumni are frequent contributors to top magazines and news outlets. For the very latest bylines, head to our Facebook page.
