History

For over a century City College has been the home of a vibrant student press and an incubator for award-winning journalists.

These include Pulitzer Prize winners Upton Sinclair and former New York Times Executive Editor A.M. Rosenthal. Former editor of New York Magazine, Esquire and Newsweek Edward Kosner learned journalism at CCNY, as did longtime CBS News foreign correspondent Bernard Kalb and former Business Week editor Stephen B. Shepard, who became the founding dean of CUNY’s Craig Newmark School of Journalism. Former New York Times award winning reporters Ralph Blumenthal and Joseph Berger got their journalism training at City College and so did their colleagues former New York Times editors Ann Mancuso and Stuart Kampel. 

Other CCNY graduates include Joel Dreyfuss, co-founder of the National Association of Black Journalists, Emmy winning documentarian Stanley Nelson, American Book Award winner Jill Nelson, critic Vivian Gornick, and legendary sports writers Vic Ziegel, Maury Allen and Gerald Eskenazai.

Television and radio reporters learned journalism at City College. They include Emmy award winning local news reporters Barbara Nevins Taylor, now a distinguished lecturer and journalism program director, and David Diaz who also returned to teach as a distinguished lecturer. Award winning radio reporters and producers Jane Tillman Irving and Stan Brooks developed their interest in journalism at City College as well. 

More recent graduates are becoming award winning television reporters, producers, editors and documentarians including Today Show producer Lourdes Guillen.

Our contemporary students graduate and intern or work at major news and media outlets including The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, CNN, ABC, NBC Universal, Telemundo, Univision, Warner Media, HBO, The Nation, NPR, and other outstanding organizations. Others choose graduate school. In 2023, five of our graduates were accepted at the Craig Newmark School of Journalism, and several were accepted at the journalism programs at NYU and Columbia.

The Communications Hall of Fame has a roster of outstanding graduates who got their start in journalism at City College.