Rommel Ojeda began working for the immigration news site Documented as an intern in 2021, while attending classes in the bilingual journalism program at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. He helped inform immigrants who had lost their jobs that they qualified for pandemic funds, which were a lifeline that many in those communities were unaware of. Today he’s an award-winning reporter at Documented, continuing to cover stories for New York’s immigrant and Latinx communities.
“I listened to the needs of the community and wrote with the intention of answering those needs,” he explained to the school’s class of 2025 at their commencement ceremony, where he served as the alumni speaker.
His successes speak to the mission that has driven the Newmark J-School since its founding 20 years ago, creating a workforce of reporters who understand the needs of the communities who read their work. This legacy is key to the milestone anniversary that the school is celebrating this fall.
The City University of New York brought together journalism faculty from across the system to create the journalism school in 2006. The school had two goals: making newsrooms more representative of the communities they serve and filling the need for an affordable graduate-level journalism school in the New York City metropolitan area, the media capital of the world.
Over the past two decades, the school continued to innovate while never losing sight of this mission. With support from the Tow Foundation and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the school in 2010 established the Tow-Knight Center for Journalism Futures; today, the center focuses on reimagining the industry as artificial intelligence affects how people consume news.
In 2016, the J-School launched the nation’s first bilingual master’s journalism program in English and Spanish and brought in Graciela Mochkofsky to lead it; she today heads the entire school as its third dean.
Its alumni have gone on to make great impacts across the industry, earning 16 Pulitzer Prizes for their reporting; producing reporters who broke the news on the water crisis in Flint, Michigan; led coverage on the racial inequities in health care faced by Black Americans; and launched community-focused outlets across the country.
Newmark also remains committed to the highest standards of excellence. Today, it is New York City’s only graduate journalism program to hold accreditation by the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications, an independent validation of its effectiveness in supporting students and preparing them for successful careers.
As the Newmark J-School commemorates two decades since its doors first opened, it looks to work even harder to remove financial barriers to access the journalism industry. In January 2024, the school began a campaign to become the first journalism school in the nation to offer free tuition to all of its students, starting with a generous $10 million gift from Craig Newmark Philanthropies. Already, almost three-quarters of the students who began this semester are attending with a full scholarship.
This effort is essential to allow the J-School to welcome more students like Rommel, whose perspectives are critical to ensure that all communities are kept informed and see their stories told in the media.
That purpose has guided CUNY’s Newmark J-School for the past 20 years, and it will continue to do so for decades to come.
Matos Rodríguez is the chancellor of The City University of New York (CUNY), the largest urban public university system in the United States.