Undergraduates Maricela Niola, Gary Hilborn, Craig Hunter, Susan Thorson and Jennifer Garcia earned SPJ recognition for their work in "Harlem View." Niola's "Tough Time for Brooklyn Street Vendors" won best News Videography.
“Harlem View,” a City College of New York student publication, is the winner of two 2022 Mark of Excellence Awards from the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) for the best collegiate journalism in the northeast region. Undergraduates Maricela Niola, Gary Hilborn, Craig Hunter, Susan Thorson and Jennifer Garcia from the Media and Communication Arts Department in CCNY’s Division of Humanities and the Arts earned SPJ recognition.
Niola’s “Tough time for Brooklyn Street vendors,” won in the News Videography category, as did Gary Hilborn’s “LGBTQ elders” in the Feature Videography category. Hunter was a finalist in Feature Videography category for “Ad Chief graduates more than 30 years later.” CCNY’s other standouts, Thorson, who is “Harlem View’s” managing editor, and assistant managing editor Garcia, were finalists in the Best Independent Online Student Publication category. “Harlem View” was also a finalist in in this category in 2021.
Niola reported on Latinx street vendors in Brooklyn trying to survive in a shaky post-pandemic economy; Hilborn’s story is about a Harlem group that helps LGBT elders; and Hunter covered the 2022 graduation of advertising executive Kirk McDonald, who returned to City College to get his degree after more than 30 years. This is the third year that CCNY dominated in the online videography category, having won in 2021 and 2022.
Other schools in the competition included Harvard, Columbia, Yale, Syracuse, the Craig Newmark School of Journalism at CUNY, NYU, Boston University, and University of Pennsylvania.
Winners will compete at the national level against the 11 other SPJ regions. National winners will be recognized at the SPJ’s 2023 convention in Las Vegas, Sept. 28-30.
About “Harlem View”
“Harlem View,” originally titled “Harlem Focus” when it launched in 2015, highlights often under-reported community issues in Harlem, Upper Manhattan, and communities throughout the city where City College students live, work and play. Most of the content is reported and created by students in CCNY’s Journalism Program. Conceived as a project for the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, on the content platform Medium, it was quickly recognized by the Online News Association as one of the Top 20 innovative journalism education ideas. “Harlem Focus” re-launched as “Harlem View” in Spring 2019.
About the City College of New York
Since 1847, The City College of New York has provided a high-quality and affordable education to generations of New Yorkers in a wide variety of disciplines. CCNY embraces its position at the forefront of social change. It is ranked #1 by the Harvard-based Opportunity Insights out of 369 selective public colleges in the United States on the overall mobility index. This measure reflects both access and outcomes, representing the likelihood that a student at CCNY can move up two or more income quintiles. Education research organization Degree Choices ranks CCNY #1 nationally among universities for economic return on investment. In addition, the Center for World University Rankings places CCNY in the top 1.8% of universities worldwide in terms of academic excellence. Labor analytics firm Emsi puts at $1.9 billion CCNY’s annual economic impact on the regional economy (5 boroughs and 5 adjacent counties) and quantifies the “for dollar” return on investment to students, taxpayers and society. At City College, more than 15,000 students pursue undergraduate and graduate degrees in eight schools and divisions, driven by significant funded research, creativity and scholarship. This year, CCNY launched its most expansive fundraising campaign, ever. The campaign, titled “Doing Remarkable Things Together” seeks to bring the College’s Foundation to more than $1 billion in total assets in support of the College mission. CCNY is as diverse, dynamic and visionary as New York City itself. View CCNY Media Kit.
Thea Klapwald
e:
tklapwald@ccny.cuny.edu