Podcasting & Audio Reportage

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Audio is the medium devoted to the human voice. We hear each others’ stories, words alive with breath and emotion, embodied in sound. For journalism podcasts, New York City has been the global center of innovation. The range of forms is an expanding universe, running the gambit from niche to mainstream, documentary or news to harder-to-classify forms of creative nonfiction.

 

About the Concentration

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.

Person working with microphone and laptop
Woman enjoying music in headphone in park

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.

The application deadline date is January 4, however, late applications may be accepted on a rolling basis, until the program has filled. Contact graduate.journalism@nyu.edu to check if there are still spots open in this program.

 

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.

Our Curriculum

Serious student writing answers of test in document
 

Faculty

Ellen Horne

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.

Chenjerai Kumanyika

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

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


Composer and sound designer Hannis Brown has created and mixed music for podcasts and radio programs including The Anthropocene ReviewedWill Be Wild, Last Day, Scattered, The 11th and The Paris Review Podcast.
Recent commissions and honors include a 2022 du-Pont Columbia award and NAACP Image Award for The History Channel and WNYC’s Blindspot: Tulsa Burning2019 du-Pont Columbia Awards for the New York Public Radio’s Trump, Inc and Caught, and a 2015 Peabody Award for production on the podcast Meet the Composer. Projects on the horizon include new collaborations with KCRW’s Bodies podcast, Crooked Media, and a collaboration between the BBC and CBC. He performs on 6 and 12-string guitar with the new-music collective Hotel Elefant.
Hannis holds an M.A. in music composition from NYU’s Steinhardt School.

Joanne “Josie” Carrero

Adjunct Professor


Joanne “Josie” Carrero started her audio career in the music industry, where she quickly garnered an impressive resume, including engineering projects for Sony, Universal, Interscope, EMI, and Atlantic, as well as working in studios such as Chung King, The Hit Factory, D & D, Unique and Sony Studios. She has been featured on Lady Beat Makers Vol. 1 on allhiphop.com as one of the top female engineers in the field.
Carrero is a studio maven and software expert with an extensive background in music software, such as Pro Tools, Ableton Live, Traktor Pro, Maschine and Logic Pro X. She currently is also an Adjunct Professor for the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music Program at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. She owns a Brooklyn production studio where she produces podcasts and records and engineers music.
Hilke Schellmann

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.

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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

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, Radiolab99 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.

 

NYU alum in the audio industry collage

NYU Journalism Alumni in the Audio Industry

Hear from NYU Journalism alumni on what makes our programs special, and how we help students prepare for a career in the audio industry.

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