This fall, adjunct professor Roxanne Scott continues the legacy of Neighborhood News, a journalism program staple for 20 years and counting.
Spearheaded by Pulitzer Prize winner and Professor emeritus Bernard “Buddy” Stein in 2005, Neighborhood News was created for Hunter students to cover news in the South Bronx neighborhood of Hunts Point. The concept was simple: student reporters would simulate a newsroom, pitch ideas, gather sources and cultivate articles for the publication, Hunts Point Express.
In 2014, Stein retired and Professor Pam Frederick took over the course. Frederick renamed the publication The Athenian, and rebranded its image as we know it today. “I switched it to a college newspaper,” says Frederick. “It went from covering the South Bronx to covering Hunter.”
This was a necessary change, she says. Despite Frederick’s best efforts to maintain the essence of Stein’s Neighborhood News, the inconvenient commute to the South Bronx led to low enrollment. Frederick, thinking of the time-pressed students, wondered if moving the focus to Hunter would revitalize the course. “A lot of you guys have jobs in addition to going to class and you have adult responsibilities,” she says of the Hunter population. “You’re not just going to school and doing nothing else.”
Frederick, who left Hunter in 2019 to launch the hyper-local news outlet The Tribeca Citizen, looks fondly on at her time teaching Neighborhood News. It wasn’t an easy decision to leave, though. “I loved teaching and I loved Hunter,” she says.
Beginning in 2020, Professor Katina Paron carried The Athenian for three years. During her time at Hunter, Paron also contributed to the wider CUNY community as the editor of Dateline: CUNY. A Ms. Magazine and Women eNews freelance editor, Paron taught her students the importance of good storytelling and the rigid discipline of writing.
Paron left Hunter in 2023 to pursue new opportunities, and the baton of Neighborhood News was passed once again, to Roxanne L. Scott, a freelance audio and print journalist, adjunct professor at Newmark J-school, and Alicia Patterson Journalism Fellow.
Outside of Hunter, Scott reports on climate and the environment, focusing on Black and brown communities in Queens. As a Queens native, Scott believes it’s important to report on one’s community, especially underserved areas like southeast Queens. “Even though these problems seem like quality-of-life problems that aren’t life or death, some of them do end up [becoming so],” she says.
As a journalist, Scott has dedicated a large sum of her career reporting on Queens and under-reported, everyday issues in urban life. She hopes her students develop a similar journalistic rigor. “I want my students to walk away with the importance of hyper-local news,” she says.