Professor Sam Freedman on New York City

New York City skyline
Photo/Eileen Barroso

New York City — the metropolis that has captivated journalists, authors and creative artists for generations — is the living laboratory for Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism students. Perhaps the essential experience of being a student here, in fact, is plunging into the fascinating maelstrom that is Gotham and covering the same issues, institutions and events as professional reporters do.

You will move in the tradition of such legendary New York journalists as Meyer Berger and Anna Quindlen, Joseph Mitchell and Jimmy Breslin, David Gonzalez and Jim Dwyer. You will move in the tradition of cultural figures from Walt Whitman to Dorothy Parker to Sonny Rollins to Woody Allen to Spike Lee, all of them inspired by the vigor, anguish and exultation of life in New York.

All you need for the journey is subway fare and a limitless supply of curiosity. We expect you to learn New York City from the Dominican bodegas of Manhattan’s Washington Heights to the Hasidic synagogues of Brooklyn’s Borough Park, from the Irish soccer leagues of Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx to the Guyanese chutney clubs of Richmond Hill, Queens. And you’ll find out soon enough that in Richmond Hill chutney means not a condiment but a throbbing music of the immigrant experience.

No city in the world that I know of displays a vaster range of economic classes than does New York City, and we expect you to climb to the heights of the social pyramid and to burrow beneath its foundations. You will find yourself in homeless shelters and squatters’ hovels, at opening-night parties on Broadway and amid the frenzy of the financial exchanges. You will become intimate with emergency rooms, police stationhouses, classrooms, courtrooms, and every other setting for the human pageant.

You will explore life at ground level, meeting New Yorkers on their stoops and in their shops, in their living rooms and laundromats. You will see an Islamic congregation bow for its Friday juma prayer, a Baptist congregation testify to God’s grace, and children from Uzbekistan learning Torah in a second floor yeshiva.

From City Hall to the New York State offices to the federal buildings to the United Nations, you will watch and describe the doings of government — speeches, hearings, votes, arraignments, verdicts. You will become skilled in calibrating the promises politicians make against the performances they deliver. You will keep an alert eye for government’s successes as well as its failures.

It is likely that for your core M.S. course, Reporting and Writing I, you will cover one particular neighborhood as a beat. Like any professional reporter, you will become an expert on that beat, telling the professors and adjuncts who are, in effect, your editors what is the news of the day. Your dispatches from the field will concern all the major issues with which any urban reporter must be conversant — race, business, politics, religion, immigration, culture, sports, law enforcement, criminal justice, education, health care.

Along the way, your professors will bring in guest speakers, many of them the city’s finest working journalists, to add to your knowledge both of the key issues and of the craft of reporting on them. It is your job to draw all the learning you can from these guests. For no other city could possibly present a journalism school with a greater reservoir of talent and wisdom.

Beyond RWI, as the core M.S. course is routinely known, you will be able to take courses that specialize in a wide array of topics. You will be able to produce published or broadcast work in courses that encompass magazines, a news service, a weekly newspaper, a Web site and radio and television segments.

You will work harder than you have ever worked before. But you will love your work more than you have loved any work you have ever done. You will leave Columbia not simply equipped with superior abilities and a respected diploma but carrying on the tradition of New York City’s chroniclers. Your mission is nothing less.

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Samuel Freedman's faculty bio