{"id":6790,"date":"2025-02-20T14:32:39","date_gmt":"2025-02-20T19:32:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fm.hunter.cuny.edu\/journalism\/?p=6790"},"modified":"2025-03-17T20:42:33","modified_gmt":"2025-03-18T00:42:33","slug":"faculty-spotlight-eric-umansky","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fm.hunter.cuny.edu\/journalism\/index.php\/2025\/02\/20\/faculty-spotlight-eric-umansky\/","title":{"rendered":"Faculty Spotlight: Eric Umansky"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Professor Eric Umansky teaches how to \u201cstand up against bullies\u201d as he leads this semester\u2019s Social Justice Journalism course.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Umansky, who has nearly 30 years of professional writing experience, is currently ProPublica\u2019s editor-at-large. With his contribution to criminal justice reporting, he knows exactly how to pinpoint a problem for his audience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Umansky teaches a class of 15 students how to identify and report social justice issues, such as the importance of having underlying receipts\u2013proof <\/em>or evidence to support a claim. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Similar to his predecessor, Professor David Alm, Umansky runs the course as a workshop for students to help one another through heavy feedback. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt’s important for people to know that there\u2019s a lot of human guesswork involved,\u201d said Umansky as he explained the value of gathering different perspectives when writing articles. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Umansky\u2019s 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 <\/em>magazine. While there, he was given a crash course in investigative journalism\u2013such as covering breaking news, supporting and leading investigations, guaranteeing precision and influence and gaining firsthand insight into the award-winning process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From 1996 to 1999, Umansky wrote for Mother Jones<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before leaving, Umansky also worked as a senior associate editor at the since-departed Brill\u2019s Content<\/em>. Planning to renovate Brill\u2019s content site, he and others attempted to lift the publication before its peril, but it wasn’t a permanent fix. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For four years, Umansky was the \u201cToday\u2019s Papers\u201d columnist for Slate, <\/em>writing on national and global politics, such as his perspective on where Bin Laden\u2019s \u201creal cave fortress might be.\u201d He has written a lengthy list of articles there, with his most recent contribution being from 2020<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

After leaving Slate<\/em>, Umansky attended Columbia University\u2019s Graduate School of Journalism in 2006 as a Gordon Grey fellow, studying Arabic in Damascus, Syria, for six months. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Umansky\u2019s work can be found on an array of news sites, such as Slate<\/em>, The New York Times<\/em>, The Washington Post<\/em>, The New Republic <\/em>and others. Although he\u2019s written different beats\u2013focused subjects in journalism, he is more interested in highlighting injustices and demanding change. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

His successes include a DuPont Award<\/a> for overseeing the \u201cTrump, Inc.\u201d podcast with WNYC, the John Jay College\/Harry Frank Guggenheim Award for Excellence in Criminal Justice Reporting,<\/a> and the Al Nakkula Award for Police Reporting<\/a> along with his colleagues on the NYPD\u2019s accountability. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Umansky first arrived at Hunter College in 2018 as a guest speaker in Sissel McCarthy<\/a>\u2019s News Literacy class to discuss the importance of fact checking. He returned as a guest speaker a year later, and this time, he asked McCarthy if a position was available.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For one semester, Umansky taught the News Literacy course but found that he was less interested in teaching the \u201cethical\u201d aspect of journalism. Instead, he wanted a focused course that would allow him to educate students \u201cto be journalists.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alexis Profeta, a student in Umansky\u2019s class, said, \u201cHe isn’t throwing a ton of assignments or pressure on us. He’s getting each student acclimated to this style of writing.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

With his extensive background and success overseeing two Pulitzer Prize-winning projects, Profeta felt honored to be under Umansky\u2019s tutelage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Outside the classroom, he intends to work on one more article about the NYPD\u2019s conduct before contributing to more coverage of the Trump administration.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Professor Eric Umansky teaches how to \u201cstand up against bullies\u201d as he leads this semester\u2019s Social Justice Journalism course. Umansky, who has nearly 30 years of professional writing experience, is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":6791,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,18,253],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6790","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-faculty-news","category-journalism-program-news","category-prof-profiles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fm.hunter.cuny.edu\/journalism\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6790","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fm.hunter.cuny.edu\/journalism\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fm.hunter.cuny.edu\/journalism\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fm.hunter.cuny.edu\/journalism\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fm.hunter.cuny.edu\/journalism\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6790"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/fm.hunter.cuny.edu\/journalism\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6790\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6838,"href":"https:\/\/fm.hunter.cuny.edu\/journalism\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6790\/revisions\/6838"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fm.hunter.cuny.edu\/journalism\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6791"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fm.hunter.cuny.edu\/journalism\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fm.hunter.cuny.edu\/journalism\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6790"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fm.hunter.cuny.edu\/journalism\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}