Daily News columnist Errol Louis will serve as the Jack Newfield Professor
in the spring semester, offering a course in urban investigative journalism to
selected students in Film & Media and Integrated Media Arts.
In the course, titled “Crime, Punishment and the Inner-City: How to Stop
Spinning the Revolving Door Between the Street Corner and the Prison,” students
will examine two neighborhoods–the South Bronx and Central Harlem–and produce
a series of multi-media reports on how the policies of prison officials,
prosecutors and parole and probation departments have created an expensive
revolving door between low-income neighborhoods and New York’s jails and
prisons.
The class offers an extraordinary opportunity to work with an award-winning
journalist and to produce reporting that makes a difference. It will offer
students a crash-course in reporting and interviewing techniques designed to get
students up to professional standards quickly. The best completed work will be
published in local media such as the Mott Haven Herald The Hunts Point Express,
the Amsterdam News and the Black Star News. Audio reports suitable for broadcast
will air on WWRL radio, and video interviews and essays will publish to a blog
created for the class.
Admission is by department permission. Applications to join the class, which
will meet on Thursdays from 5 to 8 p.m., are being accepted now. Interested
students should send a brief statement of what they hope to gain from the class
to Prof. Bernard L. Stein at bstein@hunter.cuny.edu as soon as possible, and
should ask a teacher who knows their work to forward a recommendation to Prof.
Stein.
In his Daily News column, Errol Louis writes on a wide range of political
and social affairs. He also hosts The Morning Show on radio station AM 1600
WWRL, from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. every weekday. His guests have included Gov. David
Paterson, former President Jimmy Carter, filmmaker Michael Moore, and author
Cornel West. In addition to his newspaper and radio work, he made more than 100
appearances as a CNN Contributor during the 2008 election season. He was a
friend and colleague of Jack Newfield.
Inaugurated in 2006, the Jack Newfield professorship honors the legendary
reporter and Hunter graduate by bringing a distinguished journalist to teach at
Hunter each year.