Reporting in NYC

Nine students spent three weeks of their winter vacations learning to cover news in Manhattan. Working with two Stony Brook professors, former Newsday reporter Barbara Selvin and CBS News producer Steven Reiner, the students spent four solid days a week in this intensive urban-reporting program, offered for the first time in 2008. On Day One, they were scattered to different neighborhoods and told to find stories, and they came back with work ranging from Rockefeller Center's efforts to "go green" to the slow death of Manhattan's Flower Market as the fashionable Chelsea neighborhood encroaches. They toured two television newsrooms and an all-news radio station and spent a morning learning about the court system with an assistant district attorney for New York County. For their second stories, the students produced either print and broadcast pieces on topics as diverse as Harlem's political elite choosing between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, a former cocaine addict who became a leader at the Bowery Mission, a strike against a major food-service company, and how the Pakistani emigres in Midtown's Curry Hill neighborhood are dealing with the turmoil in their distant homeland.

Student Work
Cafeteria Workers Strike
Local Pakistanis React to Bhutto Assassination
The Man With The Golden Tongue
Video: Manhattan's Flower District Struggles To Survive

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