Errol Louis

Errol Louis was chosen for the Spring 2010 Jack Newfield Professorship at Hunter College. He was born in Harlem, New York in 1962. He currently works as a columnist for the New York Daily News and is on the editorial board. In addition to working at the Daily News he is also a host of the New York radio show WWRL and teaches college courses through out New York City. In the past he has worked for The New York Sun and Our Time Press.

Press Release

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.