The WORD Blog

“I was offered a position yesterday afternoon, took it and start Monday [July 14]. I am now an Editorial Assistant at First30Days.com, a start-up website at Hearst. I’m a Hearst employee and working in their beautiful tower – I am very excited! I love that it is a start-up because they really made it seem like I would be able to have a lot of say in what goes on the site and now I will be able to witness firsthand how something takes off (or flops) and what works and what doesn’t.”

Charlotte Cusmano

 

Charlotte Cusmano majored in media studies at Hunter College, was the features editor then managing editor at the Hunter Envoy, which she was trying to help revive from a deep, deep slumber (I’m talking lots of years) so that it could live up to its claim of being the student-run, independent newspaper at the College. She did this while also holding several internship positions and taking classes full time. She graduated in June.

Hunter’s student journalists like Cusmano do the remarkable regularly and one would expect an up tempo joie de vivre to be resonating fiercely about their accomplishments, yet … so, I post snippets about student successes on Hunter-L, the College’s main community network for information (i.e., listserv), on other lists, like my department’s listserv, fm-l, and on hunterword.com  to let other students know about their peers’ successes because I believe success can be infectious.

And I plan to do it here on this blog.

So, I end this ode about Cusmano with one of my favorite refrains: I’ve encountered more exceptional students here at Hunter than I did teaching in the journalism program at Rutgers University (New Brunswick campus) and the journalism program at the Brooklyn campus of Long Island University.

More of this later.

Since Hunter’s Department of Film and Media is revising its journalism curriculum – should I say struggling to revise – colleagues and students might consider the following from a blog – Outposts – by Timothy Egan of the NYT online, July 3, 2008:

“Last week, almost 1,000 jobs were eliminated in the American newspaper industry, perhaps the bloodiest week yet of a year where many papers are fighting for their lives.”

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