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Reporting the Nation & New York in Multimedia

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Shaping Agile Reporters for the Future of Journalism

Our reporters cut through the noise and gain the trust of audiences through accurate, responsive multimedia reporting. In the Reporting the Nation and New York program at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, New York City—with all of its energy, history, and resources—is your laboratory. Journalists in our program learn by doing, creating multifaceted pieces in the city, and then they take their skills on the road to report the stories of the nation.

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Produce Multimedia Journalism from Day One

Video, audio, and print. Social media, data visualization, and photography. The Reporting the Nation and New York curriculum is designed to help you build a broad base of skills and prepare you to innovate and evolve ahead of the field. It also breaks down the walls of your discomfort, getting you out into the city and nation to produce clips from the very beginning, until conducting interviews with strangers becomes second nature. And national reporting is a crucial piece of the experience: previous cohorts have traveled to Puerto Rico to cover the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, New Hampshire to cover its primary, and more.

Our Curriculum

RTN/RNY student Bessie Liu at work in the TV Studio
 

Faculty

David Dent

David Dent

Associate Professor | New York/Nation, Director


New York/Nation Director, Author, Journalist, Full time Faculty 

David J. Dent, an Associate Professor of Journalism and Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, is author of In Search of Black America: Discovering the African-American Dream. He has lectured on the “invisible black majority” at universities across the country and has twice won NYU’s College of Arts and Sciences Golden Dozen Award for Excellence in Teaching. He contributes regularly to Vice.com on politics and has written for many publications including The New York Times Magazine, Book Review and Education Life sections, PBS Newshour.com, Psychology Today,, Inc. Fortune Small Business, GQ, Playboy, Essence and The Washington Post. He and his wife, Valerie, are founders of Write for the Future, an organization committed to using the tools of journalism to help high school students improve their writing skills. He has also led nonfiction writing workshops across the country. He is a graduate of Morehouse College and Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Mary Quigly

Mary W. Quigley

Clinical Professor


Mary W. Quigley is a journalist who writes about millennials as well as women and work issues. She writes two blogs, AARP’s Parenting 2.0 and www.mothering21.com, both which tackle parenting emerging adults and beyond. She contributed a chapter on millennials for Understanding Y (Wiley 2014). Her other books include Going Back to Work: A Survival Guide (St. Martin’s Press, 2004). She is also the co-author of And What Do You Do? When Women Chose to Stay Home. (Wildcat Canyon press, 2000). She has freelanced for numerous magazines and newspapers, ranging from More magazine to Newsday. She teaches research, reporting and writing courses on both the graduate and undergraduate levels.

Rachel L. Swarns

Rachel L. Swarns

Associate Professor


Author, Journalist, Full time Faculty

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. In 2023, she was elected to the Society of American Historians. Her latest book, The 272: The Families who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church, was published by Random House in June.

At the Times, Swarns served as a full-time reporter and correspondent for 22 years. She has reported from Russia, Cuba, Guatemala and southern Africa, where she served as the Times’ Johannesburg bureau chief. She has covered immigration, presidential politics and Michelle Obama and her role in the Obama White House. She also served as a Metro columnist in New York City. As a senior writer for the paper, she helped to lead and innovate on coverage of issues of race and ethnicity. In 2018, she joined NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, where she focuses on American slavery and its contemporary legacies.

She is the author of American Tapestry: The Story of the Black, White and Multiracial Ancestors of Michelle Obama, published by Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, which traced the journey of Mrs. Obama’s forbears from slavery to the White House in five generations. American Tapestry was ranked as one of the 100 Notable Books of 2012 by the New York Times Book Review and as one of the year’s best biographies by Booklist.

She is also a co-author of Unseen: Unpublished Black History from The New York Times Photo Archives, published by Black Dog & Leventhal in 2017, which explores the history of hundreds of images that languished for decades in the New York Times archives. Her latest book, The 272, emerged from her reporting at the Times and focuses on Georgetown and the Catholic Church and their roots in slavery. The 272 was one of 24 books selected for the longlist for the 2024 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction.

Swarns also serves as an academic adviser to the African American Civil War Museum in Washington, D.C., which is launching an exhibit based on her book about Michelle Obama’s ancestors.

Photo by Lisa Guillard.

Eliza Griswold (Photo by Kathy Ryan)

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)

 
Washington Square Park in fall from aerial view

Graduate with a Portfolio and the Skills for Success

Our journalism students contribute to Pavement Pieces throughout their time in the program, graduating with an impressive array of clips and an ideal spread of skills they honed along the way. Our curriculum also requires you to complete at least one—and up to three—internships, which means you will finish the program with on-the-job experience in addition to your portfolio. For these reasons, Reporting the Nation and New York journalism students are in demand in the industry. Recent graduates have landed full-time jobs at NBC News, Vice Media, the New York Daily News, and more.

Internships & Jobs

 

Recent Published Work

In addition to Pavement Pieces and our special reports and travel pieces, our students, faculty, and alumni are frequent contributors to podcasts, magazines and news outlets. Check out our latest pieces to learn more about how we report.