Some Personal News, as They Say

I will be joining Montclair State University this fall

I am thrilled to share that this fall I will be taking on a new role as an associate professor of journalism at Montclair State University in the School of Communication and Media.

Community engagement is central to MSU’s mission, making it a great place to teach and practice participatory journalism. It is committed to finding ways to leverage university resources to work with neighboring cities and towns on issues that community members have identified as important, such as the Paterson One Square Mile Initiative. I look forward to working with my accomplished new colleagues in the journalism department and bringing all I have learned about the principles and skills of engagement journalism to my teaching, service and research there.

As a resident of nearby Maplewood, NJ, I am eager to contribute to strengthening the news ecosystem where I live. Montclair State is home to the Center for Cooperative Media, an important force in supporting statewide, regional, and local reporting, and I hope to find ways to partner with its brilliant director Stefanie Murray; its associate director, one of my alumni and good friends Joe Amditis, and its staff and partners to create more opportunities for students and support local news in NJ.

Serving as the founding director of the engagement journalism program at the Newmark Journalism School at CUNY has been a highlight of my career; it’s hard to believe that it has been nearly 10 years since we went from a basic plan to a fully-formed MA program with ~15 students in less than four months. It has been a wild and rewarding ride, and I have learned so much. I am forever grateful to Jeff Jarvis for recruiting me and for his friendship and mentorship along the way; none of it would have been possible without him. I am also thankful to former Dean Sarah Bartlett for bringing me on board. The support of funders like the Knight Foundation, Reid Hoffman, the News Integrity Initiative, and of course, our school’s greatest benefactor, Craig Newmark, were crucial in supporting this work, especially in its early days.

I will miss my faculty colleagues, and I hope to continue to find ways to collaborate with you — I am not far away! I have also relied heavily on our many talented staff members to run the engagement journalism program; huge thanks to friends in admissions, career services, student affairs, marketing/events, IT, alumni affairs, and more for all of your help over the past 10 years.

I also had the great fortune of working with the most incredible group of adjunct faculty anyone could ask for, many of whom became friends and co-conspirators. Beyond teaching, they often helped me navigate difficult decisions and continue to evolve our curriculum to meet current needs. Their dedication to the program and our students was above and beyond. Terry Parris Jr, Luis Miguel Echegaray, Meredith Bennett-Smith, Beena Raghavendran, Kelsey Arendt, Karim Doumar, Emma Carew Grovum, Michaela Roman, Rachel Glickhouse, Alyxaundria Sandford, Kristine Villaneuava, Thomas Page McBee, Kathryn Lurie, Anjali Tsui, John Keefe, Jan Schaffer, Lam Thuy Vo, Miguel Paz, Geanne Belton, Barry Paddock, and more through the years, thank you all.

Most of all, our engagement journalism alumni continue to inspire me every single day. I can’t wait to continue watching you grow and transform the industry. Your success in the field, humor, creative ideas, willingness to push traditional boundaries and come up with creative solutions, and more make you incredibly important agents of change in journalism. I will always be available to all of you in any way that you need me. Our engagement journalism alumni have now been part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize and have won two of the school’s top reporting awards. A recent analysis of my records showed that as of December 2023, approximately 76 percent of you are working in journalism and at least 91 percent are in a role in which you are utilizing the degree in a clear way. Approximately 52 percent of our graduates are journalists of color, and 18 percent identify as part of the LGTBQ+ community. Our engagement graduates work at large national organizations like the New York Times, The Washington Post and ESPN; major metropolitan news outlets like the Kansas City Star and the Miami Herald; and newer, innovative organizations pushing change like City Bureau and the Solutions Journalism Network, to name just a few. Many of you are now rising to positions of leadership or influence and bringing the principles of engagement journalism not only to your daily work but to your organization or team, which is one of the few things giving me hope in this dark time for journalism.

Indeed, journalism is an industry in crisis; the drumbeat of layoffs in recent months has been gutting, even for those of us unfortunately long accustomed to a tumultuous and contracting business. The only way in good conscience I can continue teaching journalism is to vigorously recommit to finding new paths forward that build meaningful relationships with communities, and that is what I hope to do at Montclair. I have heard plenty of times in my career that engagement journalism isn’t “real journalism” and that the way forward is to double down on the same traditional forms and tired norms that reinforce the status quo. I believe that the arrogance of simply dismissing engagement journalism as advocacy, or as lacking in rigor, ignores a growing body of research showing its trust-building potential at a time in which journalism and democracy itself is in peril. I look forward to working with students and local reporters and editors to test different approaches to engagement journalism, combating misinformation, and systems change in New Jersey.

You can find me at carrielisabrown AT gmail for now!