Faculty

Howard Schneider
Howard Schneider is the founding dean of the School of Journalism at Stony Brook University, spearheading the team that developed the proposal for the new School of Journalism. For more than 35 years. Schneider was a reporter and editor at Newsday. For nearly 18 of those years, he was managing editor and then editor.

Under his tenure, the paper won eight Pulitzer Prizes in categories including investigative reporting deadline reporting, arts criticism, specialized beat reporting and foreign affairs reporting. Under his leadership, Newsday was among the first newspapers in the country to create news Web sites; he also led efforts to introduce TV and radio into what had been an all-print newsroom.

Schneider began his teaching career at Stony Brook as an adjunct professor of journalism from 1980-1982. Previously, he had been an adjunct professor of journalism at Queens College in 1979. In 2003 Schneider was the recipient of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism Alumnus Award (M.S.'67). He earned his B.A at Syracuse University in psychology and journalism ('66). He has been a member of the Pulitzer Prize judging panel three times. He also serves on the Science Journalism Advisory Board of the Woods Hole Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass.

Marcy McGinnis
Marcy McGinnis was named associate dean at Stony Brook University's School of Journalism on Sept. 1, 2007. As associate dean, McGinnis oversees development of the video curriculum, recruitment of faculty, fundraising, student recruitment, strategic planning and development of satellite campuses for the journalism program. She also continues as director of the broadcast journalism program, a position she's held since joining the journalism school in September 2006.

McGinnis joined the journalism faculty last year after a career at CBS News that spanned over three decades. McGinnis was Senior Vice President, News Coverage, at CBS News from June 2001 through December 2005 and Vice President, News Coverage from 1997-2001. She managed CBS News' worldwide newsgathering operation, hard news broadcasts, special events coverage and breaking news as well as the operation and staffing of all domestic and overseas bureaus. McGinnis was at the helm of the newsgathering operation during coverage of 9/11, the war in Afghanistan and Hurricane Katrina. She was one of the primary architects of CBS News' award-winning coverage of the war in Iraq.

Prior to her appointment as Vice President, News Coverage, McGinnis was Vice President, Europe and London Bureau Chief for CBS News (1995-97), running its day-to-day newsgathering and news coverage in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. She received three Emmys Awards for coverage of the death of Princess Diana in 1997. She was Deputy London Bureau Chief and Director, Newspath Europe, from 1992-1995. While in Europe, she formed and managed CBS News' newsgathering consortium of international news broadcasters.

Before she was assigned to London, McGinnis held a variety of positions with CBS News including executive producer (1989-92), senior producer (1986-89), producer (1983-86), associate producer (1977-83), assistant producer (1973-77) and administrative assistant (1970-73).

McGinnis is a native of Allenhurst, N.J. A graduate of Marymount University in Arlington, Va., she holds honorary doctorates from her alma mater and from Hofstra University's School of Communication. She serves on the boards of the International Center for Journalists, Louisiana State University's Manship School of Mass Communication, the Overseas Press Club and Women's eNews. She is on the Advisory Boards of the International Women in Media Foundation and Stony Brook University's School of Journalism.

---

Harvey Aronson
Harvey Aronson is the author of seven books, both fiction and non-fiction. They include alternate selections of the Book-of-the-Month Club and the Literary Guild. He was a contributing editor of Cosmopolitan, and has written for New York Magazine, Sports Illustrated, Sport, Newsweek, Ladies Home Journal, and Good-Housekeeping. He was co-editor of the hoax "dirty" novel, Naked Came the Stranger, which has been translated into seven languages.

A graduate of Syracuse University, Aronson went from a town beat and general assignment reporter at Newsday to assistant chief copyeditor, feature writer, and columnist. He covered school integration in New Orleans and Birmingham, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Cuban exodus–he was held captive on a dock in Varadero Beach for two weeks–and the 1964 Presidential campaign. He was the founding editor of the paper’s Long Island Life section.

Before leaving Newsday in 2004, Aronson was a senior editor. He was the paper’s writing coach and an editor on both the news and feature desks, espousing narrative journalism before the term became popular. He directed two of the paper’s most ambitious projects–"Long Island: Our Story," a year-long look at the island’s past and present; and "Long Island: Our Natural World," a 13-month exploration of its woods and waters. Aronson is also the editor of five Newsday books, including American Lives, the story of men and women lost on September 11. He shepherded a special package on the Baby Jane Doe case that was the centerpiece of Newsday’s 1986 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting.

Elizabeth Bass
Elizabeth Bass is a veteran journalist with a specialty in medical writing and editing. At Newsday, where she worked for 20 years, she ran the features copy desk, served as deputy national editor and deputy foreign editor, and shaped special projects for the New York City edition.

During six years as science and health editor of Newsday, she supervised reporting that won the Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism, as well as other top science journalism awards. Bass has taught as an adjunct at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and Hofstra University, teaching courses in reporting, editing, feature writing, and the history of mass media. She is the co-author of two books, Bioterrorism: A Guide for Hospital Preparedness, and KidsHealth Guide for Parents: Pregnancy to Age 5. Bass got her start in newspapers at Cornell University, where she received a bachelor’s degree and was editor-in-chief of The Cornell Daily Sun.

Fred Bruning
At six daily newspapers, including the Miami Herald and Newsday, and at Newsweek magazine, Fred Bruning covered subjects ranging from the Contra revolution in Nicaragua and upheaval in the occupied Israeli territories to the death penalty and civil rights in the United States. But no reporter tackles only serious matters and Bruning often wrote about sociological trends, entertainment and, even, fashion: he once won a national prize for a story about Manolo Blahnik, the flamboyant fellow who designs shoes with heels — and prices — so high the wearer is apt to become woozy. Bruning graduated from the University of Missouri School of Journalism and earned a Master of Fine Arts in fiction writing at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, N.C. He taught at Stony Brook University and was coordinator of the journalism minor until 2004. In the same year, he retired from Newsday. Bruning now works as managing editor of a Washington, D.C.-based union newspaper, The Graphic Communicator.

Zachary R. Dowdy
Zachary R. Dowdy has been adjunct instructor in Stony Brook's journalism program since January 2003. The 1989 graduate of Stony Brook University has worked for The Boston Herald, where he covered breaking news and The Boston Globe, where he covered urban affairs, international issues and criminal justice with an emphasis on corrections. He reported and wrote investigative series for both newspapers.

Dowdy is currently a criminal justice reporter for Newsday, where he penned a news column about criminal justice and legal issues. He also has served as Newsday's state, national and foreign correspondent, filing stories from out-of-state, abroad or the United Nations. Dowdy has taught journalism and writing courses at both the University of Massachusetts-Boston and Roxbury Community College, in Boston. He also participated as a writing coach in Partners in Print, a journalism program for elementary, middle and high school students in Boston.

He served two terms as president of the Boston Association of Black Journalists and is currently vice president-print of the New York Association of Black Journalists. He continues to mentor students at the Columbia University journalism program and NYABJ's High School Journalism Workshop. He holds a bachelor's degree in English from Stony Brook, and master's degrees in English and journalism from Harvard and Columbia universities, respectively.

Aimée deChambeau
Aimée deChambeau joined Stony Brook University in September 2005 as Electronic Resources Acquisitions and Access Librarian. Prior to working for Stony Brook, deChambeau was an Associate Professor of Bibliography/Engineering Librarian at The University of Akron. She has extensive experience in working with subject faculty to integrate information literacy into undergraduate courses and is proud of her successes in building strong working relationships with departments served by the library. She is a graduate of Ohio Immersion 2000 (an ACRL Information Literacy Institute) as well as a 2004 Scholarship of Teaching, Assessment, and Learning Fellow at The University of Akron. She holds CAS and MLS degrees from the University of Pittsburgh, and a BS in Education (Library Science K-12) from Clarion University.

Cathrine Duffy
Cathrine Duffy teaches News Writing and Reporting (JRN 110) and News Editing (JRN 395). A graduate of Stony Brook University, she was an editor at Newsday for 10 years. She worked as news editor and layout editor on the copy desk and served as Sunday city editor. She also worked on the assigning desk as regional Long Island editor and obituaries editor.

She has worked as letters editor for Newsday and was coordinating editor for that paper’s Veteran’s Day magazine “Generations of Honor.” Her feature writing has appeared in Newsday.

George Giokas
George Giokas started his journalism career as a reporter in Westchester and then spent many years at Newsday as one of its top editors before launching his own business in 1995. Giokas is currently President/CEO of StaffWriters Plus, Inc. and Chairman of HealthDay, a consumer health news service which can be found on more than 6,000 web sites, including Yahoo!, MSN and Forbes.com. He is also a screenwriter and recent graduate of UCLA's School of Theater, Film and Television. Active in many local organizations, he serves on the board of the Long Island Software and Technology Network and the Strictly Students Film Festival. He also has been a columnist for Newsday and BusinessWeek Online.  

Charles Haddad
For 25 years, Charles Haddad worked as an award-winning editor and writer at many news organizations, including the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Business Week magazine. He has also taught nonfiction writing at Emory University and served as director of a Knight Fellowship that promoted excellence in medical and public health journalism. As part of that fellowship, he ran training programs for journalists from around the world, including conferences in India and China. He's a graduate of Harvard University and Sarah Lawrence College and has written three children's novels, all published by Random House.

Michele Ingrassia
Michele Ingrassia likes to joke that her career was defined by three P’s:  politics, princesses and the color pink.  In more than three decades at Newsday, Newsweek and the New York Daily News, she covered stories as far-flung as Presidential politics, Princess Diana (at a time when she was the biggest celebrity on the planet) and the New York and European ready-to-wear markets.  Though she began her career on news side, Ingrassia’s home was in features, where she wrote about social and cultural trends, from AIDS to abortion, date rape, the aging of the Baby Boom and the march of women into the workplace.  Fascinated with both the silly and the serious, she would segue from domestic violence (she once spent six months chronicling a woman living with an order of protection against her husband) to the cultural impact of the WonderBra, from sexual harassment to Hillary’s hair.  As a writer at Newsweek – years before Google – she famously uncovered a literary hoax involving an 11-year-old author who didn’t exist, but whose Dickensian tale of abuse, neglect and AIDS was so persuasive that “he” lured such notables as Oprah Winfrey and Keith Olbermann into his web. (Among other things, the story became the basis of an Armistad Maupin novel, a major motion picture and an episode of “Law & Order.”)  Ingrassia received a BA from the City College of New York and a Master’s from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She was a journalism instructor at the Fashion Institute of Technology , and launched “Covering Children’s Issues” at Columbia. She is also co-author of “The Ultimate Baby Catalog.”

Evonne Kaplan-Liss, MD, MPH
Dr. Evonne Kaplan-Liss is a Research Assistant Professor in the Graduate Programs in Public Health, Preventive Medicine, and Pediatrics, in the School of Medicine of the Health Sciences Center at Stony Brook University. Dr. Kaplan-Liss is the Director of the new Pediatric Environmental Center of Clinical Excellence at Stony Brook as well as a lecturer in the School of Journalism at Stony Brook. She combines a strong interest and background in medicine and journalism. Dr. Kaplan-liss' is managing editor of the prevention textbook titled, Health Promotion and Disease Prevention in Clinical Practice, 2nd Edition. Dr. Kaplan-Liss’ journalism career began when she graduated Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism in 1988 and landed her first job as a researcher for Ted Koppel’s Nightline for ABC News. She left Nightline to pursue her interest in medical journalism, working as an associate producer and then segment producer on medical news for syndicated programs Instant Recall and First Look. Dr. kaplan-Liss began her quest to combine her interests in journalism and medicine when she graduated from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. She completed residencies in both pediatrics and preventive medicine, while also receiving her Masters in Public Health from Columbia University's Mailmen School of Public Health. After working as a board-certified pediatrician in private practice, Dr. Kaplan-Liss joined the faculty of Stony Brook's School of Medicine and Journalism where she is able to apply her interest and experience in the fields of pediatrics, preventive medicine/public health and journalism.

James M. Klurfeld
James M. Klurfeld is a visiting professor of journalism and interim director of the journalism school’s new Center for News Literacy. He retired Nov. 1, 2007, as vice president and editor of the editorial pages of Newsday after nearly 40 years at the paper. Klurfeld started at Newsday as a local reporter in 1968, headed the paper’s Albany and Washington bureaus, and was appointed to his current position in December 1987 with responsibility for the Editorial and Viewpoints pages.

For the past 12 years, Klurfeld has been seen on "The Cutting Edge," a weekly half-hour television program on NY55. The show focuses on Newsday's Sunday editorials, as well as other national, international and local issues. Klurfeld was a member of the Newsday investigative team that won the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, as well as the New York State Publisher's Association and Deadline Club awards in the same category. The awards were given for a three-year effort that disclosed official and political party corruption in three townships on Long Island. He also won the Sigma Delta Chi National Reporting Award with other members of the Washington Bureau in 1982 and he was the recipient of the 1988 American Society of Newspaper Editors Distinguished Writing Award for editorials on the Iran-Contra hearings. He has traveled widely overseas and currently writes a weekly column for Newsday that often focuses on foreign affairs and national security issues. He plans to continue writing his column after he retires from the paper.

David J. Lopez
David J. Lopez joined the School of Journalism faculty in Fall 2008 as an instructor in the introductory reporting course. He is a deputy Long Island editor for Newsday, where he has worked for the past five years. Before that, he was a reporter and editor at The Advocate in Stamford, Conn., and the Greenwich Time in Greenwich, Conn. He's been a crime reporter, sports editor, page designer, news editor, columnist, slot editor and assigning editor. As supervisor of the breaking news desk at Newsday, his primary challenge is to quickly and accurately post stories to Newsday.com.

Jonathan McCarthy
Jonathan McCarthy is the assistant managing editor for cross media at Newsday. In this role, McCarthy oversees editorial newsgathering and multimedia production for Newsday and Newsday.com, one of the leading newspaper online sites in the nation. His leadership has been key in implementing major initiatives, including Newsday.com 's breaking news and updating program, the convergence between the online and print newsroom and the migration in publishing platforms.

He serves as a consultant to the School of Journalism at Stony Brook University, where he helped develop the online curriculum and the design of the newsroom of the future and has advised interns.

Previously, he was an adjunct professor of Online Journalism at Hofstra University, where he taught the basic principles of Internet journalism. A native of Huntington, N.Y., McCarthy is a graduate of Sacred Heart University with a B.A. in English and media studies. He lives in Commack with his wife, Deborah, and son, Matthew.

Julia Mead
Julia C. Mead teaches in both the Journalism School and the News Literacy program. Her journalism career began at community weeklies in the Caribbean and on Long Island, where she covered governmental affairs, politics, the environment and crime.

During nearly 20 years as a newspaper reporter and editor, she received many awards from the Long Island Press Club and the New York State Press Association. An interest in criminal justice brought her to a three-year stint as a reporter for The New York Law Journal. There she covered every level of the criminal and civil legal systems, from village courts to the U.S. Court of Appeals.

For four years, she was a regular contributor to The New York Times, reporting on crime, government, politics, and the arts. Mead has a B.A. from Columbia University. In 2006 and 2007, aided by a fellowship from the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing, she studied socio-medical sciences at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health and received an M.A. in science journalism from Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism. At graduation, she was the recipient of all three prizes available to her class: the Best Thesis Award, the Sevellon Brown Award for exceptional knowledge and understanding of the history of American journalism, and the Paul Rykoff Memorial Fellowship for exceptional health journalism. She is now an independent science writer whose coverage of international public health, molecular biology, neuroscience, and ecology appears in The Scientist magazine and Scientific American online.

In September 2008, she received the 2008 FOLIO gold medal for the best science magazine article. “Manna from Hell,” a feature that Mead reported from New York and Croatia, traces the discovery that a common plant is the cause of a fatal kidney disease that strikes wheat farmers on the Balkan Peninsula and consumers of some herbal supplements. The story was published November 2007 in The Scientist magazine. Mead, an alumni mentor at Columbia University, is also an advisor to the editorial board of the (Daniel) Pearl World Youth News Service, a news website produced by student journalists around the world, and to iEARN, the International Education and Resource Network. She is currently assisting PEARL and iEARN in developing a mentoring program for student journalists in the Persian Gulf.

Dean Miller
Dean Miller was named Director of the Center for News Literacy on August 25, 2009. The center, established in September 2007 and housed at Stony Brook University’s School of Journalism, is the nation’s first Center for News Literacy designed to educate current and future news consumers on how to judge the credibility and reliability of news.

For more than 25 years, Miller was a reporter and editor at newspapers in the Northern Rockies. For 14 of those years he was managing editor and then executive editor of the Post Register, the employee-owned daily in Idaho Falls, Idaho. During his tenure, the Post Register won numerous national journalism awards and grew readership against the national freefall in newspaper circulation.

Under Miller’s stewardship, the Post Register won the E.W. Scripps Distinguished Service to the First Amendment award in 2006 for its investigation of the Boy Scouts organization’s failure to drum out pedophile staffers. The Scout investigation was the subject of “In a Small Town,” a WNET documentary. For his first-person account of the organized backlash against the newspaper, Miller won the national Mirror Award for media writing.

Selected for a Nieman Fellowship in Journalism at Harvard in 2007, Miller advised student journalists while studying management and comparative religion. During his Nieman year, Miller also filmed and edited a documentary film about the Idaho songwriter whose hit tune Paul McCartney played to get into John Lennon’s Quarrymen.

Miller has taught at The Poynter Institute for Media Studies and in Poynter’s traveling National Writers Workshops since 1999 and has been an Ethics Fellow at the Poynter Institute since 2006. A First Amendment advocate, Miller taught workshops across Idaho on issues related to public records and open government. He also taught marketing, redesign and writing to corporate executives and staff.

Miller was a reporter on the Spokesman-Review team that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the FBI’s shooting of four citizens at Ruby Ridge. He also wrote in a freelance capacity for the Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, International Herald Tribune, High Country News and US News & World Report.

Miller earned his B.A. in English at Cornell where he was an editor of the Cornell Daily Sun. He is a member of the American Press Institute board of newsroom advisors and was co-founder of Idahoans for Openness in Government (IDOG). He lives in Stony Brook with his wife and two children.

Steven Reiner
Steven Reiner is an associate professor of broadcast journalism at Stony Brook University. He joined the Stony Brook faculty at the beginning of the 2008-09 academic year after working for more than a decade as a producer for the CBS News magazine program “60 Minutes.”

Reiner is the recipient of several national Emmy Awards. During his career at CBS News as a senior producer, producer and director, he traveled extensively in the United States and abroad, covering many of the major news events of the last two decades. Prior to joining CBS News, he worked at both NBC and ABC News. He has also served as an editor for The Atlantic magazine, and the senior editor and executive producer of National Public Radio’s evening news program “All Things Considered.” His professional career in journalism began as a staff reporter for The Record in Bergen County, N.J. Aside from teaching both the introductory and advanced broadcast journalism classes at Stony Brook, Reiner teaches courses in News Literacy, Reporting in New York City and Journalism 24/7. He is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He was editor in chief of the campus newspaper, The Daily Cardinal, during the politically tumultuous period of the late 1960s.

Carol Conyne Rescigno
Carol Conyne Rescigno is a veteran journalist who worked at Newsday for the better part of 30 years. Starting as a copy editor, she spent five years on the news desk before joining the national desk and, eventually, the foreign desk.

Rescigno helped to shape the stories of reporters filing from Africa, China, South America, Moscow, the Middle East and Bosnia and considers her participation on the war desk, created at the beginning of the Iraq War, to have been among the most interesting and satisfying of her projects at the newspaper. She came to Newsday from the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, where she was the metro editor. She has a journalism degree from the University of Florida.

Rick Ricioppo
Rick Ricioppo was named associate professor of electronic and video journalism in September 2007. Rick also serves as the manager of TV production for the journalism school.

Ricioppo was the production director of TV 10 at Illinois State University from 2002 to 2007. At Illinois State, he taught introductory and advanced television production classes and oversaw all technical aspects of the daily live student newscast. An experienced professional video photographer and editor, Ricioppo taught news and sports shooting and editing as well as studio and control room production. Additionally, he oversaw video production of sporting events both at the university and at the U.S. Cellular Coliseum in Bloomington, Ill.

Before joining Illinois State, Ricioppo held a variety of positions in electronic journalism. Most recently, he was a sports photographer and editor for the Empire Sports Network from 2000 to 2002. Previously, he was news photographer and editor, WGRZ-TV, Buffalo, NY(1994-2000); videographer, director and technician, C-Span (1988-94); promotions producer, Cablevision, Woodbury, N.Y (1987-88); and photographer, editor and director, Telicare, Rockville Centre, N.Y. (1986-87).

Ricioppo holds a master of science degree in communication from Illinois State University.

John Russell
John Russell has spent his entire 25-year career in media, beginning as a reporter in 1982 for a start-up that would become the nation’s largest business-to-business or consumer newspaper. He moved from reporter to editor-in-chief of CMP Media’s flagship, CRN, in 1987 and then to publisher in 1991.

During the 1990s, as the computer and Web revolution was taking hold, Russell played an important role in the expanding footprint of a global CMP. He became a prominent columnist and figure in the technology industry, serving on boards and speaking at myriad industry conferences. He launched a series of magazines, Web sites, research businesses, and events as group publisher, was on the management committee of CMP when it went public in 1997, and was a senior executive when the company was sold to London-based United Business Media in 1999. In late 1999, Russell was appointed president and chief operating officer of CMP. Russell retired from his full-time position in mid-2001. Since 2001, he has been involved in several entrepreneurial ventures, including developing a magazine tailored to the sports and fitness needs of Boomers, and has consulted to Fortune technology companies.

Paul Schreiber
Paul Schreiber, the School of Journalism’s Undergraduate Director, is a respected journalist and teacher who brings newsroom reality into the classroom. As a reporter and columnist during his 33 years at Newsday, Schreiber wrote about thousands of interesting people, from astronauts going to the moon, to rioters in Chicago, to the joys and terrors of being in business.

As an editor at Newsday, he oversaw the work of staff and freelance journalists spread all over the world. As a long-time instructor at Stony Brook University, he continues to help student journalists learn how to report and write clearly and effectively. After graduating from the University of Miami, Schreiber was hired as a reporter by the Miami Herald and became chief of its Kennedy Space Center bureau. As a metro reporter in Miami, his assignments included covering the mob and political corruption. He was one of five journalists the local prosecutor attempted to indict for investigating allegations of the prosecutor’s wrongdoing.

Schreiber joined Newsday in 1968 as a general assignment reporter. As Newsday grew into one of the country's biggest and best newspapers, he become a national desk reporter, copy editor, assistant national editor, night national editor, day national editor, chief of the copy desk, editorial writer, news editor and business columnist. In his last role at Newsday, Schreiber wrote more than 500 columns giving readers an inside look at "Doing Business," "Doing the Deal," "E-Biz" and "Tech Island." Between 1987 and 2000, Schreiber taught Feature Writing and Magazine Writing at Stony Brook and was director of the journalism minor. In 2002, he was named "Outstanding Long Island Journalist" by The Press Club of Long Island. He returned to Stony Brook in 2004 and again is teaching, advising students and helping develop the journalism program.

Barbara Selvin
Barbara Selvin became the first full-time professor in the School of Journalism in January 2007, following seven years as an adjunct in the university’s journalism minor program. She has also taught journalism at Queens College and Hofstra University.

At Stony Brook, Selvin teaches beat reporting and news writing. She created a grammar lab for the school’s introductory reporting class and is developing a quantitative literacy lab that will train journalism students to use numbers authoritatively. She inaugurated the school’s Journalism 24/7 course, which examines the impact of the digital revolution on journalism and journalists.

In 2005, Selvin was recognized as one of the university’s top teachers when she received the President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching as Part-Time Faculty.

For seven years, Selvin directed a high school summer journalism workshop in the City University of New York system that inspired dozens of students to pursue journalism in college and beyond.

Before she became a journalism educator, Selvin was a reporter for Newsday and New York Newsday. At the New York paper, she covered economic development, commercial real estate and housing and wrote a biweekly real estate column. She spent a year writing about health-care reform, medical research and sexuality for the paper’s health and science desk on Long Island.

After graduating from SUNY-Binghamton with a bachelor’s degree in English, Selvin began her reporting career at weekly newspapers on Long Island. She earned a master’s degree at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1983, where she received the Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship, and worked for a year at The Advocate in Stamford, Conn., before joining New York Newsday.

Her freelance work has been published in Newsday, The New York Times, Columbia Journalism Review and business and health-care magazines.

Andrew Smith
Andrew Smith teaches a class on In-Depth Reporting for upper-level journalism students. Smith, who is now a deputy Long Island editor for Newsday, was a reporter for 20 years at several newspapers, including Newsday and The Times-Picayune in New Orleans. He has covered courts, transportation, several troubled nuclear power plants, a nuclear weapons laboratory and politics and government. He and Earl Lane won the White House Correspondents Association award for national reporting for their series on nuclear waste disposal and he was part of Newsday's coverage of the Flight 800 disaster, which won the Pulitzer Prize.

Smith contributed a chapter to "Displacing Place: Mobile Communication in the 21st Century," a book on how mobile technologies are affecting the way people live and work. He also once wrote a story on deadline that rhymed, including the quotes.

Irene Virag
Pulitzer Prize winner Irene Virag recently left her job as Home and Garden Editor of Newsday to make her way in the freelance world. She continues to write her garden column for Newsday and does pieces for magazines such as Fine Gardening, Country Gardens, More and Better Homes & Gardens.

Virag has interviewed murderers and movies stars and traveled to Vietnam to bring a handicapped Amerasian street kid back to the land of the father who abandoned him. She’s written about women fighting breast cancer–and about her own breast cancer. She won a Pulitzer Prize as a member of the team that chronicled the story of Baby Jane Doe, an infant with spina bifida, and the political struggle over her treatment.

Virag has been a Pulitzer finalist in feature writing and explanatory journalism, and is a 10-time winner of the New York Newswomen’s Club Front Page Award. Her piece, "Chemo: The Slayer and The Savior," is included in the American Society of Newspaper Editors "Best Newspaper Writing of 1998." She was a lead writer for Newsday’s 13-month-long series "Long Island: Our Natural World." During her Newsday career, she wrote a nature column, a home column and the "Long Island Diary." Virag is a fellow of the Garden Writers of America. She received a bachelor’s degree from Boston University and a master’s from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. She studied at the University of London and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard. She’s the author of two books, We’re All in This Together–Families Facing Breast Cancer, and Gardening on Long Island with Irene Virag.

---

For more information, call the
School of Journalism Office at (631) 632-7403.