Professor Eric Umansky teaches how to “stand up against bullies” as he leads this semester’s Social Justice Journalism course.
Umansky, who has nearly 30 years of professional writing experience, is currently ProPublica’s editor-at-large. With his contribution to criminal justice reporting, he knows exactly how to pinpoint a problem for his audience.
Umansky teaches a class of 15 students how to identify and report social justice issues, such as the importance of having underlying receipts–proof or evidence to support a claim.
Similar to his predecessor, Professor David Alm, Umansky runs the course as a workshop for students to help one another through heavy feedback.
“It’s important for people to know that there’s a lot of human guesswork involved,” said Umansky as he explained the value of gathering different perspectives when writing articles.
Umansky’s path in news reporting started after he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1995 when he was offered a spot in the Ben Bagdikian Fellowship Program at Mother Jones magazine. While there, he was given a crash course in investigative journalism–such as covering breaking news, supporting and leading investigations, guaranteeing precision and influence and gaining firsthand insight into the award-winning process.
From 1996 to 1999, Umansky wrote for Mother Jones as editor, but he continued to contribute until 2021, when he wrote about the abuse of protestors by the NYPD during the Black Lives Matter movement.
Before leaving, Umansky also worked as a senior associate editor at the since-departed Brill’s Content. Planning to renovate Brill’s content site, he and others attempted to lift the publication before its peril, but it wasn’t a permanent fix.
For four years, Umansky was the “Today’s Papers” columnist for Slate, writing on national and global politics, such as his perspective on where Bin Laden’s “real cave fortress might be.” He has written a lengthy list of articles there, with his most recent contribution being from 2020.
After leaving Slate, Umansky attended Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in 2006 as a Gordon Grey fellow, studying Arabic in Damascus, Syria, for six months.
In March 2008, Umansky came to ProPublica as a senior writer and continued up the editorial ladder, to his current post as full-time editor-at-large.
Along the way, Umansky also co-founded DocumentCloud, using the Knight News Challenge Grant fund to create a decentralized archive of journalistic source documents equipped with tools for annotation, organization, and discovering connections. The site has continued to help newsrooms and independent journalists since its launch.
Umansky’s work can be found on an array of news sites, such as Slate, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic and others. Although he’s written different beats–focused subjects in journalism, he is more interested in highlighting injustices and demanding change.
His successes include a DuPont Award for overseeing the “Trump, Inc.” podcast with WNYC, the John Jay College/Harry Frank Guggenheim Award for Excellence in Criminal Justice Reporting, and the Al Nakkula Award for Police Reporting along with his colleagues on the NYPD’s accountability.
Umansky first arrived at Hunter College in 2018 as a guest speaker in Sissel Mcarthy’s News Literacy class to discuss the importance of fact checking. He returned as a guest speaker a year later, and this time, he asked Mcarthy if a position was available.
For one semester, Umansky taught the News Literacy course but found that he was less interested in teaching the “ethical” aspect of journalism. Instead, he wanted a focused course that would allow him to educate students “to be journalists.”
Alexis Profeta, a student in Umansky’s class, said, “He isn’t throwing a ton of assignments or pressure on us. He’s getting each student acclimated to this style of writing.”
With his extensive background and success overseeing two Pulitzer Prize-winning projects, Profeta felt honored to be under Umansky’s tutelage.
Outside the classroom, he intends to work on one more article about the NYPD’s conduct before contributing to more coverage of the Trump administration.
