Below, take a look at some of Knobel’s most fascinating possessions in the first installment of our What’s on Your Desk? series, where we highlight interesting objects and keepsakes displayed by professors in their offices.

‘The Mets Deserve Their Little Corner of Fordham’

Knobel has a “Mets shrine” on her bookshelf, home to bobbleheads, a replica of Shea Stadium, and more. “The Bronx is Yankees country, but I feel like the Mets deserve their little corner of Fordham,” said Knobel. “I made my peace with the Yankees, thanks to people like Michael Kay, as well as Justin Shackil and Ryan Ruocco, who were in my very first class I taught at Fordham. I’m so happy for their success.”

(Future) Taekwondo Master Knobel

Knobel is a third-degree black belt in taekwondo who proudly displays her first and second degree black belts in her office. “I’m scheduled to go up for my fourth-degree black belt in June, which is the first rank of mastery. People at my taekwondo school will have to call me Master Knobel. I will be the first woman at my school to make master, so that’s super exciting,” she said.

An Autograph from the Last Leader of the Soviet Union

Knobel cherishes her autographed photo of Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union. “This was a 40th birthday present from a friend at CBS who knew that I admired Gorbachev greatly. I wrote my dissertation about Gorbachev and how he used the press as a strategic tool in governing. That’s why I started going to Russia. I actually fell in love with a Russian journalist on my first trip, and then eventually moved there,” said Knobel, who served as the Moscow bureau chief at CBS News for seven years.

Advice to an Afghan President on How Not to Get Assassinated

Pinned to a bulletin board behind her desk are press passes from her 20-year career as a journalist, including passes for the Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan and a U.S. presidential visit to Russia. Beside her own press passes are her son’s. “When I was a foreign correspondent, my son needed an accreditation card as a member of my family to enter the country,” she said. “You can see him growing up in those little cards.” 

There are also photos of Knobel with former colleagues, including Scott Pelley and Bill Owens from CBS News—and even well-known political figures. “That’s Hamid Karzai, back when he was president of Afghanistan, and our team interviewing him in 2002,” Knobel said, pointing to a group photo. “We gave him advice on how to not get assassinated.”

A Message from ‘The Most Trusted Man in America’

Knobel also has an autographed photo of revered American journalist Walter Cronkite. “It would be fascinating to talk with him today about the importance of objectivity,” she said. “In the Cronkite years, TV news didn’t tell people what to think—but what to think about. Not all news does that anymore.”

An Emmy for Covering a Hostage Crisis in Russia

Knobel earned an Emmy for her role as a producer in CBS News’s coverage of the 2002 Moscow theater siege, where nearly 1,000 people were taken hostage by terrorists. 

“As a producer, you’re aiding the correspondent, looking at the script and making suggestions, talking to the cameraman and editor to make sure they’re getting all the pictures that they need, and putting it together in a way that makes sense to a viewer who doesn’t know a lot about Russia or this hostage situation,” said Knobel. “I remember sitting in a car, two blocks away from where this was going on, and feeling so powerless to help those people inside, but trying to make sure that whatever we reported was accurate and fair.”

A Miniature Burqa for a Barbie Doll

At first glance, a blue cloth sitting atop a stack of plastic cups doesn’t seem unique. But it’s actually a burqa for Barbie dolls—a keepsake from Knobel’s reporting trip to Afghanistan. 

“It’s a reminder to me of how different our world is, yet the same. Everyone plays with dolls and dresses them in their native clothing,” said Knobel. “To me, all of my work as a teacher and a journalist has essentially been about bringing understanding to the world. It’s a representation of how journalism is the coolest job in the world.”

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Associate Professor of Communication and Media Studies Beth Knobel, Ph.D., director of the Sperber Prize, said almost 50 books with 2022 copyrights were considered for the award. “We agonized over the choice of finalists, as so many of the books published in 2022 were worthy of recognition,” she explained. “The finalist books are simply extraordinary. The three biographies all involve years of research, with the authors examining in some cases dozens of archives for original material. And the one memoir reads like a piece of history. These are all important and worthy works.”

The Sperber Prize is given in honor of the late Ann M. Sperber, the author of Murrow: His Life and Times, the critically acclaimed biography of journalist Edward R. Murrow. One edition of that work was published by Fordham University Press, connecting the Sperber family to the university. Through the generous support of Ann’s mother, Lisette, the $1,000 award was established to promote and encourage biographies and memoirs that focus on a professional in journalism. The award has been presented annually by Fordham University’s Department of Communication and Media Studies since 1999.

The four finalists, in alphabetical order:

Deborah Cohen, Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took on a World at War (Random House). Last Call at the Hotel Imperial is the story of journalists John Gunther, H. R. Knickerbocker, Vincent Sheean, and Dorothy Thompson. As cub reporters in the 1920s, they roamed across a war-ravaged world, chronicling how empires collapsed and fledgling democracies faltered. And as fighting engulfed the globe in the 1930s and 40s, they landed exclusive interviews with Hitler and Mussolini, Nehru and Gandhi, and helped shape what Americans knew about the world. Cohen, the Richard W. Leopold Professor of History at Northwestern University, brings these journalists to life and captures how global upheaval felt up close.

Mary Llewellyn McNeil, Century’s Witness: The Extraordinary Life of Journalist Wallace Carroll (Whaler Books). A United Press correspondent in Europe before and during World War II, Carroll was deputy director of the U.S. Office of War Information–charged with countering misinformation coming out of Germany–editor of the Washington Bureau of The New York Times, and finally editor and publisher of the Winston-Salem Journal and Sentinel. In a career that spanned 45 years, he embodied the gold standard of journalism, mentoring a generation of reporters, editors, and publishers. His story, captured by McNeil, a former student of Carroll’s, is especially relevant today as the world faces the war in Ukraine and continued attacks on the truth. What the West failed to understand, Carroll wrote more than 80 years ago, was the power of Hitler’s propaganda. Long-term exposure to such propaganda could cause a similar result elsewhere, warned Carroll: “[T]he Hitler legend would bear watching.”

Kathryn S. Olmsted, The Newspaper Axis: Six Press Barons Who Enabled Hitler (Yale University Press) As World War II approached, the six most powerful media moguls in America and Britain tried to pressure their countries to ignore the fascist threat. The media empires of Robert McCormick, Joseph and Eleanor Patterson, and William Randolph Hearst spanned the United States, reaching tens of millions of Americans in print and over the airwaves with their isolationist views. Meanwhile in England, Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail extolled Hitler’s leadership and Lord Beaverbrook’s Daily Express insisted that Britain had no interest in defending Hitler’s victims on the continent. Olmsted is a professor of history at the University of California, Davis.

Maria Ressa, How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future (HarperCollins) After working as a reporter for CNN, Maria Ressa transformed news coverage in her homeland, the Philippines, by creating the innovative online news organization Rappler. But by its fifth year of existence, Rappler had gone from being lauded for its ideas to being targeted by the new Philippine president. How to Stand Up to a Dictator is not only the story of Ressa and of Rappler, but shows how global social media companies are aiding and abetting disinformation. Maria Ressa remains the CEO and President of Rappler and is the recipient of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize.

Previous winners of the Sperber Prize include Working by Robert Caro, Fire Shut Up in My Bones by Charles M. Blow, Cronkite by Douglas Brinkley, Lives of Margaret Fuller by John Matteson, Reporter by Seymour M. Hersh, The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century by Alan Brinkley, Avid Reader: A Life by Robert Gottlieb, and All Governments Lie! The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I.F. Stone by Myra MacPherson.

In 2022, the Sperber Prize was awarded to Elizabeth Becker for You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War, published by PublicAffairs. The Sperber Prize jury also awarded former CBS and NBC News correspondent and professor Marvin Kalb with a certificate of appreciation in 2022 for his distinguished career in journalism and his two recent memoirs.

The winner of the 2023 Sperber Prize will be announced in September and awarded in November at a ceremony held at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus.

The second season of the Sperber Prize podcast will be launching shortly, including interviews with last year’s winner, Elizabeth Becker, and the authors of four books considered this year.  The first season in 2022 included interviews with the 2021 winners of the Sperber Prize, Kerri K. Greenidge, Ph.D., for Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter and Lesley M.M. Blume for Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World; Marvin Kalb; former 60 Minutes Producer Ira Rosen, author of Ticking Clock: Behind the Scenes at 60 Minutes; Lucy Rose Fischer on her book The Journalist: Life and Loss in America’s Secret War; and Dr. Alan Sperber, a member of the Sperber Prize jury and the brother of the late Ann M. Sperber. You can find the Sperber Prize podcast on your favorite podcast platform or via RSS.

More information about the award, its jury, and its history can be found at Sperberprize.com. With questions, please contact Beth Knobel at [email protected] or 718-817-5041.

Ysabella Escalona, GSAS ’22, a recent graduate, and Viviana Villalva, a current student in the master of public media program, currently work at the station’s state-of-the-art facility, located at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

A Full-Time Associate Producer Position

A native of Venezuela, Escalona started in the public media program in 2022, interning for HITN for a year as an assistant producer. After she graduated, she was hired by the station as an associate producer for Estudio DC, the station’s political affairs show. The job entails everything from booking guests to writing summaries of episodes to tracking down video footage. Sometimes she gets to work on a podcast—a skill she learned at Fordham.

“At Fordham, I did a podcast for my capstone, and now I sometimes work on the podcast for Estudio DC. When they need someone to cut a video clip or do a small promo, I know how to do that because of the audio and video production classes,” she said.

In addition to the sound and video editing skills she learned at Fordham, Escalona, who is fluent in Spanish, credits the advanced writing class she took with helping make her a better multi-media journalist.

“It really helped me with my storytelling in terms of thinking through the order of everything,” she said.

The opportunity to work at place like HITN, which reaches 40 million homes across the U.S., was the biggest draw though for her to enroll.

“The experience has been just very enriching. I feel like I’ve grown so much.”

Media with a Mission

Villalva, a native of Queens who is also fluent in Spanish, and is interning in the HITN’s government affairs and community relations office, came to the program from John Jay College, where she graduated in 2018 with a bachelor’s degree in English.

“What stuck out to me was the public media master’s motto, ‘Media with a Mission,’” she said.

“Other programs sounded great but were more focused on the technical aspects. I liked this idea that we’re going to tell stories that matter.”

Working on the government and community affairs team has shown Villalva how important it is to nurture relationships between elected officials and community leaders. Her department is also responsible for organizing events and programs that educate and advance the Latino community.

“Learning about the disparities and the challenges that communities face when they lack resources has been eye-opening for me,” she said.

Because it’s a small organization, she has also worked with Escalona’s team in the master control room, focusing on things like the structure of a show.

Beth Knobel, Ph.D., associate professor of communication and media studies and director of the master’s program said she knew HITN would be a great opportunity for students after her first visit to the station.

“Their studios were stunning, and we found out we were really on the same page about what media is supposed to do to serve its audience,” she said.

The public media master’s program-—run by Fordham’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences—will graduate its sixth cohort this year, and Knobel said partnerships have always been a key component of it, including those with public television station powerhouse The WNET Group and Fordham’s own WFUV.

“It’s easy when you’re in a classroom to forget what it’s like in the real world. Our partners keep us grounded on how public media is evolving so that we’re able to give our students the cutting-edge skills they need,” she said.

Helping Media Outlets Appeal to a Younger Audience

Michael Nieves, president, and CEO of HITN, noted that the internship program has long been an important part of the station’s recruitment process. Four current members of the staff, including Escalona, started out as interns. In Fordham, he said, the station gets access to students who are bilingual, experienced, and driven.

“Right now, our audience is in the 45 to 65, age group, and we want to appeal to the 25 to 35 group as well, so these college-age kids become our own little mini focus groups,” he said.

“It’s a successful partnership. And a lot has to do with the preparation they get before they come here.”

Published by PublicAffairs, Becker’s biography tells the long-buried story of three extraordinary female journalists who permanently shattered the barriers to women covering war—American Frances FitzGerald, Australian Kate Webb, and French national Catherine Leroy. The three women arrived in Vietnam with strikingly different life experiences, but one common goal: to shed light on what was actually happening in the conflict in Southeast Asia. “At a time when women were considered unfit to be foreign reporters, Frankie, Catherine and Kate paid their own way to war, arrived without jobs, challenged the rules imposed on them by the military, ignored the belittlement and resentment of their male peers and found new ways to explain the war through the people who lived through it,” as Becker’s website explains.

Elizabeth Becker began her career as a war correspondent for the Washington Post in Cambodia. She has been the Senior Foreign Editor for National Public Radio and a New York Times correspondent covering national security, economics and foreign policy. She has won accolades from the Overseas Press Club, DuPont Columbia’s Awards and was part of the Times team that won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for coverage of 9/11. She is previously the author of When the War was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution, the classic history that has been in print for 35 years; and Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism, an expose of the travel industry that was an Amazon book of the year. More about her work and career can be found at www.elizabethbecker.com.

Fordham Associate Professor of Communication and Media Studies Beth Knobel, director of the Sperber Prize, said that Becker’s book stood out, even among the excellent works that were finalists for the 2022 Sperber Prize.  “Our jurors had effusive praise for the research and writing of You Don’t Belong Here,” she explained.  “The book shed light on the work of three brilliant journalists, two of whom are little known in the United States. Becker not only did a wonderful job of bringing their stories to life, but she also contextualized Fitzgerald, Webb and Leroy’s accomplishments in the larger history of the Vietnam conflict. More importantly, Elizabeth Becker also managed to humanize all those caught up in the war. The book makes a huge contribution to both journalism studies and history.”

The Sperber Prize jury will also award a certificate of achievement to Marvin Kalb for his distinguished career in journalism and his two recent memoirs. Assignment Russia: Becoming a Foreign Correspondent in the Crucible of the Cold War, was a finalist for the 2022 Sperber Prize, and his previous memoir, The Year I Was Peter the Great, was also considered for the 2018 Sperber Prize. Both were published by the Brookings Institution Press.

Assignment Russia, Kalb’s second memoir of his years living in the Soviet Union, presents a personal journey through some of the darkest moments of the Cold War and the early days of television news. Kalb not only describes what it was like to try to manage his work and life under the Soviet system, but also gives new insights into the work of CBS News in the US during the late 1950s. Kalb’s distinguished journalism career spans more than 30 years and includes award-winning reporting for both CBS and NBC News as chief diplomatic correspondent, Moscow bureau chief, and anchor of NBC’s Meet the Press. He is professor emeritus at Harvard University and hosts The Kalb Report at the National Press Club. He is also  a nonresident senior fellow with the Foreign Policy program at Brookings.

Kalb was the last person hired by famed journalist Edward R. Murrow at CBS News, creating a special connection to the Sperber Prize—which is given in honor of the late Ann M. Sperber, the author of the critically acclaimed biography Murrow: His Life and Times.  One edition of that work was published by Fordham University Press, connecting the Sperber family to the university. Through the generous support of Ann’s mother Lisette, the $1,000 award was established to promote and encourage biographies and memoirs that focus on a professional in journalism. The award has been presented annually by Fordham University’s Department of Communication and Media Studies since 1999.

Five biographies and one memoir were chosen as the finalists for the Sperber Prize, including the books by Becker and Kalb. More than 60 works with 2021 copyrights were considered.

The other finalists for this year’s prize, in alphabetical order, were:

• Melanie Kirkpatrick’s Lady Editor: Sarah Josepha Hale and the Making of the Modern American Woman, published by Encounter Books.
• Judith Mackrell’s The Correspondents: Six Women Writers on the Front Lines of World War II, published by Doubleday.
• Lisa Napoli’s Susan, Linda, Nina and Cokie: The Extraordinary Story of the Founding Mothers of NPR, published by Abrams.
• Donald A. Ritchie’s The Columnist: Leaks, Lies, and Libel in Drew Pearson’s Washington, published by Oxford University Press.

Previous winners of the Sperber Prize include Working by Robert Caro, Fire Shut Up in My Bones by Charles M. Blow, Cronkite by Douglas Brinkley, Lives of Margaret Fuller by John Matteson, Reporter by Seymour M. Hersh, The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century by Alan Brinkley, Avid Reader: A Life by Robert Gottlieb, and All Governments Lie! The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I.F. Stone by Myra MacPherson.  In 2021, the Sperber Prize was awarded to two biographies, Kerri K. Greenidge’s biography Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter and Lesley M. M. Blume’s FALLOUT: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World about war correspondent John Hersey.

More information about the award, its jury, and its history can be found at Sperberprize.com. With questions, please contact Dr. Beth Knobel at [email protected] or 718-817-5041.

She was passionate about movies and TV, having earned her bachelor’s degree in journalism and film and television at Fordham College at Lincoln Center in 2020 and pursuing the accelerated public media master’s program as an undergraduate.

During the height of the pandemic, Borca-Carrillo said she and her partner watched a lot of romantic comedies, better known as rom-coms.

“I became a big fan of rom-coms during the pandemic because everything was awful. But what we both figured out pretty quickly—and she had kind of grown up on rom-coms and I hadn’t—was that there really weren’t many lesbian rom-coms” said Borca-Carrillo, who graduated from the master’s program, part of Fordham’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, in 2021.

That’s how the idea behind her capstone project for Fordham’s Master of Arts in Public Media Program, a podcast called Looking for Violet, was born. The four-part series examines why queer love stories are so scarcely told in American film comedies, while also exploring the fundamental aspects of these films and showing how those aspects relate to the niche of the lesbian rom-com.

The podcast and Borca-Carrillo have won three major awards—a Mark of Excellence Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, a Gracie Award from the Alliance for Women in Media, and a first place award in narrative/produced podcast from the independent division from the Public Media Journalists Association. Borca-Carrillo was also a finalist for an award from the Deadline Club.

The Importance of Representation

“We always say representation in media is important, and I hope that [listeners]take away from it a little bit more of the concrete examples of why it’s important,” Borca-Carrillo said. “It’s really harmful to see yourself represented only in a negative light … A genre like a rom-com—that’s supposed to be funny and exciting and about finding true love—there’s really just not that much representation for queer women in it.”

One of the things Borca-Carrillo noticed when she was starting to formulate the idea for the piece is that many rom-coms are based on the trope of men and women being different from each other.

“And a lot of these rom-coms that we were watching were just based on this kind of battle of the sexes back and forth—that men-and-women-will-never-understand-each-other kind of feeling,” she said. “And so I decided to kind of look into that and see what it would be like to have a lesbian rom-com, to have something that you felt represented by.”

But that initially proved to be difficult because Borca-Carrillo noted that there aren’t many rom-coms featuring lesbians, particularly ones that “that didn’t end terribly for the lesbians either, which is kind of another trope that I talked about in the podcast,” she said.

“A lot of the lesbian media that you will see nowadays—there’s more—but it usually ends pretty badly for the people in it,” she said.

The title of her series comes from Édouard Bourdet’s 1926 play, La Prisonnière, where one of the main characters, Mme. D’Aiguines, “uses bouquets of violets to signify her forbidden love for a housewife trapped by marriage.” Throughout the podcast, Borca-Carrillo uses a character, Violet, to explore the different aspects of rom-coms—the “meet cute,” the obstacle, the proclamation of love, and the happily ever after.

Borca-Carrillo said she aimed to use Violet to “represent a past/present/future of women/women love, one that uses its layered history to create richer meanings in future works.”

Prominent Guests

As a part of her reporting, she interviewed people like Christin Marie Baker, the founder and CEO of Tello Films, a streaming and production company that has a lesbian focus, and author Camille Perri, who wrote a book on rom-coms called When Katie Met Cassidy that is in the process of being turned into a movie. Both of these creators have been working to produce content that has been scarce, she said.

Borca-Carrillo was surprised at first that these successful creators would agree to be guests on her show.

“These were kind of shots in the dark, but what I’ve learned is that people in this community are really interested in having more things come out about it,” Borca-Carrillo said. “So a New York Times best-selling author, and the founder of lesbian film service, and countless other really cool people were really excited to talk to me because this is a really small community.”

A Wild Ride

Borca-Carrillo said their participation, along with the awards, has been amazing.

“It’s been pretty wild,” she said with a smile. “Being recognized alongside a Bloomberg podcast at the Deadline awards, where we had a speaker who was a prize-winning journalist—it was really overwhelming. I think it’s really encouraging to know that a story that is created with a lot of personal attachment to it [can be so successful]. All the guests that I interviewed really put their heart and soul into their work that they do.”

Beth Knobel, Ph.D., who serves as the director of the public media program and an informal adviser to Borca-Carrillo, said that it’s been “thrilling” to see her recognized “over and over” for this podcast.

“I am so incredibly proud of her. She’s really talented, and it’s an important time for representation. A couple of years ago, I don’t know if people would have reacted to this podcast series the way they did. People have become, thankfully, much more aware and open to a wider array of voices in journalism. And it’s crucially important that this podcast bring visibility to the LGBTQ+ community and help people see it more clearly.”

Expert Editing

Borca-Carrillo also said that her mentor, George Bodarky, an adjunct professor at Fordham and former news director at WFUV, who is now the community partnerships and training editor for WNYC, was instrumental in helping her put this piece together.

“George helped me finesse all the different parts of the podcast so I’m eternally grateful to him and his guidance,” she said. “And I really do give the credit to the people that I interviewed, and to George and to Fordham for giving me the platform to put all of this together. … It was really formative to learn from people and to learn how much better projects can be when you really care about what you’re doing.”

Borca-Carrillo is now working as a junior producer at Wonder Media Network, which is a podcasting, women-led startup company that she said is “dedicated to lifting up underrepresented voices.” She got the job after interning at the company during the pandemic.

“It’s been really great to get better at podcasting while using all the communication skills I picked up at Fordham along the way,” she said.

The Sperber Prize is given in honor of the late Ann M. Sperber, the author of Murrow: His Life and Times, the critically acclaimed biography of journalist Edward R. Murrow. One edition of that work was published by Fordham University Press, connecting the Sperber family to the University. Through the generous support of Ann’s mother, Lisette, the $1,000 award was established to promote and encourage biographies and memoirs that focus on a professional in journalism. The award has been presented annually by Fordham’s Department of Communication and Media Studies since 1999. 

Associate Professor of Communication and Media Studies Beth Knobel, Ph.D., director of the Sperber Prize, said that nearly 60 books with 2021 copyrights were considered for the award. 

“This year, there were so many wonderful biographies and memoirs that we found it difficult to pick the finalists,” said Knobel. “The seven members of the jury found a great many of the books nominated to be well-written, well-researched, and absolutely fascinating.”  

Here are the six finalists:

• Elizabeth Becker’s You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War, published by Public Affairs. This work tells the long-buried story of three extraordinary female journalists who permanently shattered the barriers to women covering war.  Becker, an award-winning author and journalist, has covered national and international affairs as a Washington correspondent at The New York Times, a senior foreign editor at National Public Radio, and a correspondent at The Washington Post. 
• Marvin Kalb’s Assignment Russia: Becoming a Foreign Correspondent in the Crucible of the Cold War, published by Brookings. This book, Kalb’s second memoir of his years living in the Soviet Union, presents a personal journey through some of the darkest moments of the Cold War and the early days of television news. Kalb’s distinguished journalism career spans more than 30 years and includes award-winning reporting for both CBS and NBC News as chief diplomatic correspondent, Moscow bureau chief, and anchor of NBC’s Meet the Press. He is professor emeritus at Harvard University and hosts The Kalb Report at the National Press Club.
• Melanie Kirkpatrick’s Lady Editor: Sarah Josepha Hale and the Making of the Modern American Woman, published by Encounter Books. For half a century, Sarah Josepha Hale was the most influential woman in America. As editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, Hale was the leading cultural arbiter for the growing nation, a powerful advocate for educational and professional opportunities for women, and the godmother of our national Thanksgiving Day. Melanie Kirkpatrick is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. She spent 30 years at The Wall Street Journal, where she began as a copy editor on the overnight desk in Hong Kong and rose to become op-ed editor, editorial writer, and deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal editorial page.
• Judith Mackrell’s The Correspondents: Six Women Writers on the Front Lines of World War II, published by Doubleday. The Correspondents presents the untold history of a group of heroic women reporters who revolutionized the narrative of World War II—from Martha Gellhorn, who out-scooped her husband, Ernest Hemingway, to Lee Miller, a Vogue cover model turned war correspondent. Mackrell is the critically acclaimed author of The Unfinished Palazzo and Flappers. She is also a celebrated dance critic, and her biography of the ballerina Lydia Lopokova, Bloomsbury Ballerina, was short-listed for the Costa Biography Award.
• Lisa Napoli’s Susan, Linda, Nina and Cokie: The Extraordinary Story of the Founding Mothers of NPR, published by Abrams. This group biography profiles four beloved women who fought sexism, covered decades of American news, and whose voices defined National Public Radio. Napoli has had a long career in print, radio, TV, and online journalism. She has worked at The New York Times, Marketplace, MSNBC, and KCRW. She is the author of three previous books, Radio Shangri-La, Ray & Joan, and Up All Night: Ted Turner, CNN, and the Birth of 24-Hour News.
• Donald A. Ritchie’s The Columnist: Leaks, Lies, and Libel in Drew Pearson’s Washington, published by Oxford University Press. In the “Washington Merry-Go-Round,” a nationally syndicated newspaper column that appeared in hundreds of papers from 1932 to 1969, as well as on weekly radio and television programs, the investigative journalist Drew Pearson revealed news that public officials tried to suppress. The Columnist examines how Pearson managed to uncover secrets so successfully and why government efforts to find his sources proved so unsuccessful. Ritchie, the author or editor of more than one dozen books, is the Historian Emeritus of the U.S. Senate.

Previous winners of the Sperber Prize include Working by Robert Caro, Fire Shut Up in My Bones by Charles M. Blow, Cronkite by Douglas Brinkley, Lives of Margaret Fuller by John Matteson, Reporter by Seymour M. Hersh, The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century by Alan Brinkley, Avid Reader: A Life by Robert Gottlieb, and All Governments Lie! The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I.F. Stone by Myra MacPherson. In 2021, the Sperber Prize was awarded to two biographies, Kerri K. Greenidge’s biography Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter and Lesley M. M. Blume’s FALLOUT: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World about war correspondent John Hersey.  

The winner of the 2022 Sperber Prize will be announced in September and awarded in November at a ceremony held at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus.

More information about the award, its jury, and its history can be found at Sperberprize.com. If you have any questions, please contact Beth Knobel at [email protected] or 718-817-5041.

“It’s a historic year, the first time in our history that we had two authors honored, and the first time we’ve had two women honored,” said Father McShane, who presented the award to Kerri K. Greenidge, Ph.D., for her biography Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter and Lesley M. M. Blume, Ph.D.,  for FALLOUT: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World, about war correspondent John Hersey.

The award ceremony for The Sperber Prize, given in honor of the late Ann M. Sperber, the author of Murrow: His Life and Times, a critically acclaimed biography of journalist Edward R. Murrow, took place via Zoom on Wednesday night. Through the generous support of Ann’s mother Lisette, the prize and its $1,000 award were established to promote and encourage biographies and memoirs that focus on a media professional; it has been presented annually by Fordham’s Department of Communication and Media Studies since 1999.

Beth Knobel. Ph.D., associate professor of communication and media studies and director of the Sperber Prize, said this year’s winning biographies were so well written and researched that the award had to be given to both authors. The winners will each receive $500 as prize money. 

Both winners were asked about their inspirations and the research behind the behind writing their books. Both shared that they wanted to write the hidden stories of investigative journalists who documented atrocities happening in their communities and in their country. 

“Black stories are always far more complex than we believe. Stories like Trotter’s ought to be as analyzed, discussed, and studied as Dubois, Garvey, King, and Malcolm X,” said Greenidge. 

“It has been my hope, with Black Radical, to reorient the scholarship toward these stories, not as a form of hagiography or racial exceptionalism, but as a way to challenge ourselves to more completely reckon with our complicated and often painful racial history,” she said.

Blume explained how the attack on journalists during the Trump era influenced her motivations for writing Hersey’s biography.

“My research coincided with the Trump era. Suddenly and shockingly, America’s best journalists were dubbed enemies of the people by Trump his followers, and journalists began to be threatened,” said Blume. “My entire life, without exaggeration, has been centered on newsrooms and my extended community of reporter colleagues is like family and then suddenly in the Trump era, my family was on a hit list,” she said.

Prompted by Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, both authors discussed journalists as vital figures in enforcing freedom of the press and how journalists are very important documenters of history.

“Trotter was warning about, responding to, protesting, and organizing [to protect]one of his goals as a journalist– to be able to hold a mirror up to nature. The press should be used this way to critique and question power,” said Greenidge.

Blume said that the subject of her book made it impossible to ignore the brutal realities of Hiroshima.

“After Hersey’s report came out, the only way that you could be oblivious to what nuclear warfare portended for humanity and what the Americans have done to win the war was through willful ignorance,” said Blume.

Father McShane shared that he was amazed that he recently discovered the hidden history of the Tulsa Massacre, written about in Black Radical. 

“You help us to see the importance and power of journalism, but also the harm of national amnesia,” said Father McShane. 

Ann’s brother, Alan Sperber, M.D., and his wife Betty offered their congratulations to the 2021 award recipients and detailed the history of the Sperber family’s close association with Fordham University since Ann’s book was published by the Fordham University Press. 

“Throughout his presidency, Father McShane has been an enthusiastic supporter of the Sperber Prize and a close friend of the Sperber family,” said Alan Sperber. 

Knobel said that they had considered over 25 books for the prize, including one from Fordham faculty. 

“Another book we considered was written by one of our own, our department chair in communication and media studies at Fordham, Amy Aronson. Her book was on the founder of the ACLU, Crystal Eastman, who also did some time as a writer, journalist, and founder of a publication. That is an astoundingly beautifully written and researched book,” said Knobel.

Father McShane said the Sperber Prize has become known for its acknowledgment and support of important biographers. 

“This has become one of the coveted prizes in the world of journalism, publishing, and research,” he said.

The Sperber Prize is given in honor of the late Ann M. Sperber, the author of Murrow: His Life and Times, the critically acclaimed biography of journalist Edward R. Murrow. One edition of that work was published by Fordham University Press, connecting the Sperber family to the University. Through the generous support of Ann’s mother Lisette, the $1,000 award was established to promote and encourage biographies and memoirs that focus on a media professional; it has been presented annually by Fordham’s Department of Communication and Media Studies since 1999.

Associate Professor of Communication and Media Studies Beth Knobel, Ph.D., director of the Sperber Prize, said that the jury decided to present the award to two books this year, as each was so deserving of the prize. The two winners will receive $500 each and are invited to speak about their works at a virtual Fordham award ceremony on November 3.

Knobel praised Black Radical for bringing the work of the Boston newspaper editor and civil rights activist William Monroe Trotter to light. “Black Radical is a revelation,” Knobel said. “William Monroe Trotter was truly a seminal figure in the civil rights movement, but his extraordinary life story had been little known by the wider public until Kerri Greenidge brought it to prominence through this book.” Trotter, a Harvard graduate, founded the Boston Guardian newspaper and used it as a platform to call for racial justice in early 20th-century America. “Black Radical is exhaustively researched, beautifully written, and extremely timely. In telling Trotter’s story, Greenidge deftly sheds new light on the entire civil rights movement from Reconstruction into the 1930s,” Knobel said. The book was published in 2020 by Liveright Books, a division of W.W. Norton.

The second winning book, FALLOUT: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World, explores how reporter John Hersey came to expose the U.S. government cover-up of the consequences of the Hiroshima nuclear explosion for The New Yorker in 1946. “FALLOUT cuts to the very core of what makes journalism a valuable public service: watchdog journalism,” Knobel explained. “Blume’s gripping narrative explains how Hersey showed that the U.S. government was lying when it said there were no ill effects from the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima at the end of World War II. Blume’s archival research, done around the world, puts the reader in Hersey’s shoes and in those of his editors at The New Yorker, trying to face down systemic hypocrisy.” The book was published in 2020 by Simon & Schuster.

Kerri K. Greenidge, Ph.D., is Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora and director of the American Studies program at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. Greenidge received her doctorate in American Studies from Boston University, where her specialty included African-American history, American political history, and African-American and African diasporic literature in the post-emancipation and early modern era. Her research explores the role of African-American literature in the creation of radical Black political consciousness, particularly as it relates to local elections and democratic populism during the Progressive Era. Her work includes historical research for the Wiley-Blackwell Anthology of African-American Literature, the Oxford African American Studies Center, and PBS. For nine years she worked as a historian for the Boston African American National Historic Site in Boston, through which she published her first book, Boston Abolitionists (2006).

Lesley M. M. Blume is a Los Angeles-based journalist, author, and biographer. Her work has appeared in Vanity Fair, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Paris Review, among many other publications. Her last nonfiction book, Everybody Behaves Badly, was a New York Times bestseller.

Previous winners of the Sperber Prize include Working by Robert Caro, Fire Shut Up in My Bones by Charles M. Blow, Cronkite by Douglas Brinkley, Lives of Margaret Fuller by John Matteson, Reporter by Seymour M. Hersh, The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century by Alan Brinkley, Avid Reader: A Life by Robert Gottlieb, and All Governments Lie! The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I.F. Stone by Myra MacPherson.  More information about the prize can be found at Sperberprize.com.

The Sperber Prize will be awarded on November 3 at 6 p.m. in a Fordham virtual ceremony that will be open to the public.

For more information, please contact Beth Knobel at [email protected] or 718-817-5041.

“She was just so vibrant—if you knew her, she just had this wonderful energy about her,” WFUV news director George Bodarky, FCRH ’91, said of White, who spent more than two decades as a producer and, later, director of creative services for BronxNet, a cable network that specializes in public affairs programming by and for the people of the Bronx.

For the past few years, Bodarky worked closely with White on Bronx Connections, a collaboration between BronxNet and WFUV, as well as Norwood News, that allows Fordham students to get experience in TV news production and helps WFUV—Fordham’s public radio station—reach new audience members in the Bronx. Through the show, students have produced reports on gun violence, the legalization of marijuana, and the 2020 election.

Bodarky said that White exhibited “such a strong commitment to educating students.” She also helped him when BronxNet turned his weekly WFUV program, Cityscape, into a television show.

“She worked really hard to set people up for success, including myself,” he said. “I’m a longtime radio person, but Marisa came out on a shoot with me and she gave me tips and advice about being in front of the camera and making it natural. She wanted to help people be the best that they could be.”

‘An Absolute Powerhouse’

White, who grew up in the Bronx, graduated from Fordham College at Rose Hill in 1988. She began working at Cablevision while still in school, working her way up as a videographer and production coordinator. She joined BronxNet in 1994, soon after the network’s inception in 1993. She earned a New York Emmy award for her work as a producer of the video series Best of the Bronx, and served as the network’s intern coordinator before being named director of creative services in 2015.

In that role, she oversaw BronxNet’s signature shows, such as BronxTalk and Bronx Live! She also was a lecturer in media studies at Lehman College, where BronxNet is headquartered. In all of her roles, one of her main passions was working with young journalists, including high schoolers.

“We want these kids to go to college. We want these kids to have professional careers. We want these kids to say, ‘I grew up in the Bronx, I went to school in the Bronx, I got trained in the Bronx, and look at what I accomplished,’” White once said in testimony to city leaders.

Beth Knobel, Ph.D., associate professor and director of the public media master’s program at Fordham, said that she first met White in 2007 or so, when she went to BronxNet to talk about internship opportunities for Fordham students.

“I just remember my first impression of Marisa was that she was an absolute powerhouse,” Knobel said. “BronxNet is an absolutely amazing organization—it’s a huge team, and there’s just so many people doing so many things that, I think, it would overwhelm most people. But Marisa was like this island of calm in this incredibly active and slightly chaotic world.”

Bodarky said that all of the students who worked with White were able to not only gain experience in television but also take away some of her energy.

“I think what she really did for them—beyond what we could afford them at WFUV—was give them an opportunity to learn the ins and outs of television news, reporting, television show production,” he said. “Also, her enthusiasm and excitement for the industry—I think it’s something else that was infectious and, I think, hopefully also spurred them to be more excited about what they were doing.”

Knobel said that White helped teach students about loving their work and the community where they do it.

“She did so much to get our students excited about doing television, and to help them do it better,” she said. “She made her students fall in love not just with television but with the Bronx.”

A Legacy of Giving Back and Caring

Knobel and Bodarky said that White was committed to Fordham and saw working with WFUV students as a way of giving back to the University.

“I think that her experience as a student at Fordham was deeply influential to her,” Knobel said. “And she seemed to leave the University with a feeling that she wanted to give back and she did give back, and that’s a beautiful thing to emulate.”

Bodarky said that he will miss her expertise and her passion for providing “more in-depth coverage of an underrepresented community.”

“And her smile,” he said. “She always would greet you with a huge smile and a great sense of [being]so happy to see you. She really made you feel valued.”

White is survived by her husband, Raymond White, and two daughters, Amelia and Tessa.

If you’re worried you’ve exhausted all your Netflix options, look no further. Fordham News asked faculty and staff members for updated suggestions on the best things to read, watch, and listen to for the upcoming winter months. (In case you missed it, check out our last list of faculty recommendations here.)

Films

Jennifer Moorman, Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication & Media Studies

Vampires vs. The Bronx (2020), directed by Osmany Rodriguez
I know Halloween is over, but it’s always horror season for me! This one was actually recommended to me by a student in my Horror Film class, and I found it moving as well as fun. A horror-comedy focused on three boys battling vampires while simultaneously fighting off gentrification in their Bronx neighborhood (an issue that should concern all of us at Fordham), this film has so much heart. It has its share of cheesy moments and clichés, but overall it entertains while reminding us that Black lives matter, our communities are worth saving, and we are stronger together.
Available on Netflix

Bacurau (2019), directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho & Juliano Dornelles
This Brazilian riff on The Most Dangerous Game is a thrilling, powerful, anticolonial tour de force. Warning: It gets pretty graphic. But its messages about the dangers of globalization, imperialism, and white supremacy are as urgent as ever, and will hopefully inspire you to organize in your own community to fight the power. Its meditation on the ways that advanced technologies invade our lives and can hurt as much as they help is particularly relevant in this moment of ever-increasing dependency on digital (and specifically remote-learning) tech.
Available on Amazon

Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), directed by Céline Sciamma
Arguably the greatest queer love story (or any love story, for that matter) of the 21st century thus far. Exquisitely shot, each frame is a painting. The compositions are breathtaking, the characters written and portrayed with unusual depth, and the story is incredibly moving and all too relatable for anyone who has a “one that got away.”
Available on Hulu

The Lighthouse (2019), directed by Robert Eggers
This is a great companion piece to Robert Eggers’ previous feature, The Witch (which I also highly recommend). It’s darker and more challenging, but also funnier. Its exploration of the horrors of isolation feels all the more relevant now than at the time of its release, and if you look beneath the surface, you’ll find a biting critique of capitalism and toxic masculinity (and some would say, also a homoerotic love story).
Available on Amazon

Beth Knobel, Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Media Studies

Broadcast News (1987), directed by James L. Brooks
This is one of my favorite films about television news. It’s also filled with classic moments that speak to the nature of friendship, success, and love. I’ve shown it numerous times to my Fordham students to illustrate the power and limitations of broadcast journalism.
Available on Amazon

Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years 1954-1965 (1987)
Eyes on the Prize II: America at the Racial Crossroads 1965-1985 (1990)
Produced by Henry Hampton
Everyone who wants to understand the roots of the American civil rights movement should spend the time to watch Henry Hampton’s monumental, prize-winning documentary series Eyes on the Prize. Its 14 parts, produced as two series, explore the major moments of the movement, from school desegregation, to the fight for voting rights, to the elections of Black politicians in major cities like Chicago. It’s engrossing and important.
Available on Amazon

Brandy Monk-Payton, Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Media Studies

Time (2020), directed by Garrett Bradley
This award-winning experimental documentary by Garrett Bradley is a beautiful and intimate portrait of a Black family that follows Sybil “Fox Rich” Richardson as she fights for over 20 years to free her husband from his prison sentence. Using interviews as well as Rich’s own homemade videos, the film is a brilliant love story in an era of mass incarceration.
Available on Amazon

Television Shows

Brandy Monk-Payton

The Queen’s Gambit (2020)
Based on a 1983 novel of the same name, this limited series is a coming-of-age story about Beth Harmon, an orphan who also happens to be a chess prodigy. Set during the Cold War, Beth defies the odds as a female player who gains widespread public attention winning in a male-dominated sport, while also privately battling addiction. Watch for the mesmerizing scenes of chess play.
Available on Netflix

Grand Army (2020)
This gritty young adult drama series is set in Brooklyn and follows a multicultural ensemble of teenagers as they confront issues of identity at their prestigious public high school. At times difficult to watch due to its themes, the film has vivid characters and stellar performances by the young cast.
Available on Netflix

Jacqueline Reich, Professor in the Department of Communication and Media Studies

My Brilliant Friend (2018-present)
There are two seasons available of this amazing adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s four novel series set in Naples beginning in 1945. Most of the actors are non-professional, and there are wonderful echoes to Italian neorealism and other film traditions. It is compelling storytelling at its best, and when we can’t travel to Italy, the series transports us there.
Available on HBO

Borgen (2010-2013)
Borgen is probably one of the most highly praised international television series in recent memory, and Netflix subscribers can now see it for the first time. It revolves around the first Danish female prime minister and her family as she adapts to her new role. You will be riveted. Also along these lines on Netflix is The Crown, with Season 4 having just been released.
Available on Netflix

The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-1977)
One of the pioneering television series of the 1970s, Mary Tyler Moore plays Mary Richards, a single career woman living in Minneapolis. It was one of the first shows to feature work life and home life (modeled after The Dick Van Dyke Show, also starring Moore), and spawned several spinoffs (Rhoda, Phyllis, Lou Grant). I watched all seven seasons during the worst of the quarantine, and Mary’s sunny disposition and optimism were just what I needed. For a great companion read, I recommend the book Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted by Jennifer Kieshin Armstrong, which tells the background story behind the scenes.
Available on Hulu

Clint Ramos, Assistant Professor of Design and Head of Design and Production

Alone (2015-present)I love it because it shows you how we really need socialization.
Available on Netflix

Street Food (2019)
It’s set both in Asia and Latin America. I love it because it’s not about the food, it’s about the people who make the food.
Available on Netflix: Asia and Latin America

Beth Knobel

Occupied (2015-2017)
This multilingual Norwegian three-season television series revolves around a Russian invasion of Norway over energy resources. As someone who spent 14 years living in Moscow, working as a journalist, I was glued to the edge of my seat by the portrayal of the Russians and the twists and turns in this biting political thriller.
Available on Netflix

Books

Heather Dubrow, Professor of English; John D. Boyd, S.J. Chair in the Poetic Imagination; and Director, Reading Series, Poets Out Loud

Detective fiction and crime fiction in general! Long-standing favorites include Sherlock Holmes and Ed McBain, especially the ones about the 87th precinct, which I enjoy not least because they are set in New York. 

Michael Connelly has been another favorite for some years—partly because of how the values of the detective are represented (he repeatedly evokes police work as a “mission”) and also because of how the relationship with his daughter has developed in the course of the series. But OK, I’ll let the cat out of the bag: I’m writing a critical article on Connelly, which demonstrates that I need to try harder to follow the advice I give my students about getting away completely from academic work occasionally. 

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
What an extraordinary eye and ear he has for English culture.

Seamus Heaney
Not surprisingly, I keep returning to Heaney, virtually any of his poetry books and prose too. 

Why I Am Not a Toddler by Cooper Bennett Burt
Given our troubled times I’d recommend for light reading, especially to people who enjoy some of the originals, the parodies of golden oldie poems Stephanie Burt claims were written by her infant son. One of my favorites there is in fact a riff on the Bishop poem that is itself one of my favorites, “One Art.” [Bishop’s compelling lament, “The art of losing isn’t hard to master” becomes the kid’s “The art of mouthing isn’t hard to master . . . And look! my last, or / next to last, of three big crayons…”] 

Art Deco Chicago: Designing Modern America by Robert Bruegmann (Editor)
I love reopening and flipping through art books, including catalogues of exhibits to which I’ve gone. Art deco means a lot to me, and right now that bedside table also includes a book on deco mailboxes, a sub-sub genre of art deco design no doubt. And I often revisit a couple of books I have on the lacquer creations and other work of Zeshin—wow.

Music

Chuck Singleton, General Manager, WFUV

WFUV’s The Joni Project, which features artists covering songs by iconic singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell

Our Stress-Free Soundtrack pandemic playlist

The EQFM “Album ReCue” series, on landmark albums from women, which includes Spotify playlists of every album and Alisa Ali’s conversation with WFUV DJs

George Bodarky, News Director, WFUV

Everyone should have Nina Simone’s “O-o-h Child” on their playlist, especially now.

But really tapping into ’70s R&B has been uplifting, including “Shining Star” from Earth, Wind & Fire. 

Anne Fernald, Professor of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Every summer, my family and I make a summer playlist. The rule is that it has to be brief enough to fit on a CD (so 100 minutes or so) and that it should capture the mood of the summer. We spend our summers up on the New York side of the Canadian border, listening to a lot of CBC 2. Their smooth-voiced nighttime DJ is a musician called Odario Williams, and his “Low Light (In This Space)” is a song that captures the hopes and aspirations coming out of #BlackLivesMatter.

Also on that playlist was Phoebe Bridgers’ “Kyoto,” which is both heart-breaking and inspiring and just grows and grows on me. 

And I am always charmed by the Swedish song “Snooza” by Säkert! It’s (apparently) about urging your lover to hang out and snooze a little longer. It’s a very cheerful pop song in a language I don’t speak and one of those gifts from the algorithm: a “you might like” song that I love. 

Media with a message.

That’s the key component of Fordham’s one-year, 30-credit graduate public media master’s program, according to director Beth Knobel, Ph.D.

“There are other programs that are here in the media capital of the world, but none of them are in a Jesuit school that brings an emphasis on ethics and on serving the world through communication,” said Knobel, associate professor of communication and media studies. “We designed a program that really takes advantage of our location in New York and really speaks to Fordham’s Jesuit mission of creating people for others.”

The program, now in its fourth year, has continued to grow, both in the number of students it serves and the number of partnerships it has formed.

The current cohort includes 30 full-time graduate students and eight accelerated students, who are Fordham undergraduates taking a few graduate-level courses, Knobel said.

Students in the program choose one of two tracks to pursue—multiplatform journalism or strategic communications—and they also can take a class or two as an elective outside of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Despite the separate tracks, all students get exposure to the many aspects of “media in the public interest,” said Garrett Broad, Ph.D., former director of the program and associate professor of communication and media studies.

“[We want them to] think about how can we use these basic principles of storytelling, of understanding contemporary digital media technologies, of understanding basic human psychology and persuasion?” said Broad. “And how do we kind of bring that together?”

Public Media Partners

One of the things that makes the program unique, according to its faculty, is the growing number of partnerships it has with public media companies, nonprofits, and NGOs in New York City and beyond.

All of the major public media organizations in New York City, including WNET, WNYC, and Fordham’s own WFUV, partner with the program. Prior to the pandemic, the audio narrative class was held at WNYC studios, while the video narrative class was taught at WNET. George Bodarky, FCRH ’91, the news and public affairs director at WFUV, also teaches in the program.

This year, WNET—parent company of Channel 13—is supplying two adjunct faculty members: Dana Roberson, executive producer of PBS NewsHour’s Weekend Edition, and Kellie Castruita Specter, chief marketing and engagement officer for WNET.

“[WNET has been] incredibly wonderful to us from the get-go, because they understand that we are trying to create the journalists and the strategic communicators that they and other public television stations need for the future,” Knobel said.

Neal Shapiro, president and chief executive officer at WNET, said Fordham and WNET share “common values” that have led to a natural partnership.

“The idea about how important the mission is, how important working with the community is…we think about who we serve,” he said. “And that’s what makes public media kind of unique.”

Amy Aronson, Ph.D., chair of the communication and media studies department, said that she would like to see the program continue to increase its community impact.

“The public media really seeks to report on a kind of local level, the kind of community stories, the kind of democratic spirit and the democratic values that go back to the earliest traditions in journalism, but aren’t always achieved in our commercial journalism landscape,” she said.

Strategic Communications for Partner Charities in Mississippi

On the strategic communications side, Tim Wood, Ph.D., assistant professor of communication and media studies, was looking for hands-on opportunities for students just as the COVID-19 pandemic hit New York City. Some of the nonprofits and organizations in the city that he usually worked with were too overwhelmed to work with students, he said.

He reached out to Fordham’s Center for Community Engaged Learning, who put him in touch with a few charity organizations in Vardaman, Mississippi, all of which needed help with strategic communications.

“The aim at the end of the year is to hand them a plan with step-by-step instructions that they can take and use going forward, and then to do as much of the on-the-ground prep work for that as we can,” Wood said.

One of those was the Catholic Charities’ tutoring program. Graduate students Julia Werner, Anne-Sophie Neumeister, Sajani Mantri, and Morgan Thweatt met with the local organizers who at first told the group they needed a website. But after learning more about the community, the team suggested a different approach.

“We learned that they don’t have people that would be able to maintain that website, and maintaining a website and Facebook page can be quite difficult,” Neumeister said, but they liked the idea of a brochure. “It would be easy for them to maintain. They’re already stretched so thin; we didn’t want to add any stress to their plates.”

The group is working on designing a brochure and newsletter template to give to the group, who can update it regularly and print it. Werner said that listening to what the group needed allowed them to provide the right product for them.

“The organization leaders [wanted to]keep parents up to date on what their children are learning, what kind of fun they’re having at the program,” she said. “A lot of them are immigrants and their main language is Spanish. So [we’re] able to give them a piece of paper to show pictures and have English on the front, Spanish on the back. That the parents feel involved with their child’s academic curriculum is really important.”

Thweatt said that experience helped teach her that sometimes scaling back ideas can be beneficial to the client if it fits their needs.

“When we went into it, all of our ideas were huge,” she said. “And as we started doing our research, and talking with them, we realized that our huge ideas, as great as they were, they’re not good for an organization like this.”

Meeting the Moment

Not only is it important to meet organizations where they are, said faculty, it is also important to meet the public where it is. With a growing distrust of media organizations across the country, but also a growing need for information, Knobel and others said that this program is even more essential.

“We see a need to create the next generation of public communicators who act in the public interest, who act in accord with the highest ethical values. So if anything, the media ecosystem today has just made the need for our program more acute and more visible,” Knobel said.

Shapiro said that he sees public media, and in particular the students who go through this program, as essential to restoring trust in both democracy and each other.

“Public media is a place that believes that it’s all about light, not heat—a place where it’s important to understand things in context and take the time to understand them,” he said. “I feel like our job is to try to make sure people understand everything, understand all points of view, without worrying if it’s not necessarily going to be a great 30-second exchange.”

The program is currently accepting applications for its next cohort, which will start in August 2021. For more information, visit their website.