Media with a message.

That’s the key component of Fordham’s one-year, 30-credit graduate public media master’s program, according to director Beth Knobel, Ph.D.

“There are other programs that are here in the media capital of the world, but none of them are in a Jesuit school that brings an emphasis on ethics and on serving the world through communication,” said Knobel, associate professor of communication and media studies. “We designed a program that really takes advantage of our location in New York and really speaks to Fordham’s Jesuit mission of creating people for others.”

The program, now in its fourth year, has continued to grow, both in the number of students it serves and the number of partnerships it has formed.

The current cohort includes 30 full-time graduate students and eight accelerated students, who are Fordham undergraduates taking a few graduate-level courses, Knobel said.

Students in the program choose one of two tracks to pursue—multiplatform journalism or strategic communications—and they also can take a class or two as an elective outside of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Despite the separate tracks, all students get exposure to the many aspects of “media in the public interest,” said Garrett Broad, Ph.D., former director of the program and associate professor of communication and media studies.

“[We want them to] think about how can we use these basic principles of storytelling, of understanding contemporary digital media technologies, of understanding basic human psychology and persuasion?” said Broad. “And how do we kind of bring that together?”

Public Media Partners

One of the things that makes the program unique, according to its faculty, is the growing number of partnerships it has with public media companies, nonprofits, and NGOs in New York City and beyond.

All of the major public media organizations in New York City, including WNET, WNYC, and Fordham’s own WFUV, partner with the program. Prior to the pandemic, the audio narrative class was held at WNYC studios, while the video narrative class was taught at WNET. George Bodarky, FCRH ’91, the news and public affairs director at WFUV, also teaches in the program.

This year, WNET—parent company of Channel 13—is supplying two adjunct faculty members: Dana Roberson, executive producer of PBS NewsHour’s Weekend Edition, and Kellie Castruita Specter, chief marketing and engagement officer for WNET.

“[WNET has been] incredibly wonderful to us from the get-go, because they understand that we are trying to create the journalists and the strategic communicators that they and other public television stations need for the future,” Knobel said.

Neal Shapiro, president and chief executive officer at WNET, said Fordham and WNET share “common values” that have led to a natural partnership.

“The idea about how important the mission is, how important working with the community is…we think about who we serve,” he said. “And that’s what makes public media kind of unique.”

Amy Aronson, Ph.D., chair of the communication and media studies department, said that she would like to see the program continue to increase its community impact.

“The public media really seeks to report on a kind of local level, the kind of community stories, the kind of democratic spirit and the democratic values that go back to the earliest traditions in journalism, but aren’t always achieved in our commercial journalism landscape,” she said.

Strategic Communications for Partner Charities in Mississippi

On the strategic communications side, Tim Wood, Ph.D., assistant professor of communication and media studies, was looking for hands-on opportunities for students just as the COVID-19 pandemic hit New York City. Some of the nonprofits and organizations in the city that he usually worked with were too overwhelmed to work with students, he said.

He reached out to Fordham’s Center for Community Engaged Learning, who put him in touch with a few charity organizations in Vardaman, Mississippi, all of which needed help with strategic communications.

“The aim at the end of the year is to hand them a plan with step-by-step instructions that they can take and use going forward, and then to do as much of the on-the-ground prep work for that as we can,” Wood said.

One of those was the Catholic Charities’ tutoring program. Graduate students Julia Werner, Anne-Sophie Neumeister, Sajani Mantri, and Morgan Thweatt met with the local organizers who at first told the group they needed a website. But after learning more about the community, the team suggested a different approach.

“We learned that they don’t have people that would be able to maintain that website, and maintaining a website and Facebook page can be quite difficult,” Neumeister said, but they liked the idea of a brochure. “It would be easy for them to maintain. They’re already stretched so thin; we didn’t want to add any stress to their plates.”

The group is working on designing a brochure and newsletter template to give to the group, who can update it regularly and print it. Werner said that listening to what the group needed allowed them to provide the right product for them.

“The organization leaders [wanted to]keep parents up to date on what their children are learning, what kind of fun they’re having at the program,” she said. “A lot of them are immigrants and their main language is Spanish. So [we’re] able to give them a piece of paper to show pictures and have English on the front, Spanish on the back. That the parents feel involved with their child’s academic curriculum is really important.”

Thweatt said that experience helped teach her that sometimes scaling back ideas can be beneficial to the client if it fits their needs.

“When we went into it, all of our ideas were huge,” she said. “And as we started doing our research, and talking with them, we realized that our huge ideas, as great as they were, they’re not good for an organization like this.”

Meeting the Moment

Not only is it important to meet organizations where they are, said faculty, it is also important to meet the public where it is. With a growing distrust of media organizations across the country, but also a growing need for information, Knobel and others said that this program is even more essential.

“We see a need to create the next generation of public communicators who act in the public interest, who act in accord with the highest ethical values. So if anything, the media ecosystem today has just made the need for our program more acute and more visible,” Knobel said.

Shapiro said that he sees public media, and in particular the students who go through this program, as essential to restoring trust in both democracy and each other.

“Public media is a place that believes that it’s all about light, not heat—a place where it’s important to understand things in context and take the time to understand them,” he said. “I feel like our job is to try to make sure people understand everything, understand all points of view, without worrying if it’s not necessarily going to be a great 30-second exchange.”

The program is currently accepting applications for its next cohort, which will start in August 2021. For more information, visit their website.

Eastman was a central figure committed to a wide variety of causes, which proved problematic for forging a clean heroic narrative, said Aronson. Eastman co-founded the National Woman’s Party and the Women’s Peace Party, an antiwar group, and in 1917 she engineered the founding of the National Civil Liberties Bureau, which eventually became the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). She co-published the socialist magazine The Liberator with her brother Max Eastman and is credited with co-authoring the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). Yet, her story was largely lost to history because her interests and causes remained so diverse.

“I think her problem involves more than sexism, although that’s certainly part of it. I believe it was Eastman’s intersectionality—her multiple movement identifications—that destabilized her image and her status,” said Aronson. “It complicated her connection to what scholars identify as the mainstays on which historical recognition and remembrance are built.”

Aronson said that Eastman envisioned herself as “one of those circus chariot ladies” with one hand “driving a tandem of the arts and the law,” and “the other hand holding aloft two streaming banners—love and liberty.”

“Although some of her politics were compatible with other progressive activists at the time, most activists eventually evolved and prioritized and chose one major organization to be affiliated with. Eastman never did,” said Aronson.

“The challenge with a complicated narrative is to try to find a way to create some coherence out of it. As scholars, we have to become more conscious of that rather than take the easy ‘role model’ narrative, leaving out the challenging voice, rather than embracing it.”

But Eastman’s forward-thinking philosophy proved hard for Aronson to resist. For example, Eastman refused alimony after divorcing her first husband for infidelity in 1916, saying “no self-respecting feminist would accept alimony—it is a relic of the past.” By her second marriage, she had taken on feminist dilemmas in family life.

“She led debates on issues still pressing today: reproductive rights, paid parental leave, economic partnership within marriage, wages for housework, shared housekeeping and childcare, single motherhood by choice, and work-family balance,” said Aronson.

In an unpublished manuscript written sometime after 1917, she proposed a newspaper column about the silenced longing of married mothers for substantive work outside the home, a yearning that anticipates Betty Friedan’s “problem that has no name”—nearly half a century before the breakthrough of The Feminine Mystique in 1963.

“And I want to emphasize that this was a woman born before the invention of the fly swatter, the zipper, the ice cream scoop,” Aronson said.

Passing the Torch

As faculty day kicked off, Aronson and her husband Michael Kimmel, Ph.D., mingled with fellow faculty. She spoke of her book launch held last month in a Tribeca loft. There, more than 20 members of Eastman’s family showed up, many of whom Aronson interviewed for the book. Several of them had never met and others hadn’t seen each other in years. After the event, family members continued to socialize and celebrate their ancestor at another locale.

The anecdote provided a glimpse into Aronson’s research methods that include a penchant for interviewing primary sources. It’s a method fostered by her journalist background, yet steeped in academic rigor. More than a quarter of the book is filled with footnotes, which she described as “fragments and whispers of her from disparate sources.”

“My hope is for someone else to take up the research and get Eastman back into the conversations,” she said. “I want to see someone pick it up where I left off and make it better. This is a foundation to enter the story.”

Following her talk, Aronson and the rest of the faculty retired to the Law School for cocktails and dinner. There, awards were given for graduate mentoring, as well as for teaching in STEM, social sciences, and humanities. Sarit Kattan, Ph.D., assistant professor of theology, was honored for graduate mentoring and teaching. Christine Breiner, Ph.D., associate professor of mathematics took home the STEM award. Tom McCourt, Ph.D., associate professor of communication and media studies, was recognized for social sciences. Andrew Clark, Ph.D., professor of French, received the humanities award.

Q: Who is Crystal Eastman?
A: She is one of the most conspicuous reformers in America—an original co-author of the Equal Rights Amendment and a co-founder of antiwar groups like the Women’s Peace Party, which became the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. She co-organized the National Civil Liberties Bureau, which eventually became the American Civil Liberties Union. She and her brother Max Eastman also co-founded the socialist magazine, The Liberator. And yet, even though she left several institutional legacies, she’s relatively obscure today.

Q. Why do you think her story was lost in popular memory?
Eastman has been largely lost to us because of what we now call her “intersectionality.” She believed you can’t fix one social problem without fixing the others.  She targeted exploitation in the class system, sexism, militarism, and war as linked and mutually reinforcing social maladies.  What’s more, she wanted to be a mother even more than to have a career. She was one of a very few prominent movement women who tried to balance work and family at this time.

Yet her life and her work generally asked her choose: one single-issue campaign, one vision of a better world, and one identity—either activist or mother.  It was her effort to marry multiple identities that I think led to her marginalization in organizations she’d helped to found and movements she’d helped to lead.

Q: Describe her worldview.
A: Eastman lived through World War I and believed a world federation could be achieved—a “United States of the world”—that would transcend national boundaries and international rivalries, ensuring democracy, equality, and human rights to everyone, as well a bringing an end to poverty and war. There were a lot of organizations in the early 20th century that had utopian strains. At the time it wasn’t unusual to think that nations could work together.

However, when the progressives weren’t able to lead the other nations toward a negotiated peace before World War I, Eastman became disillusioned. The Russian Revolution led her to new hopes for world democracy as well as an almost immediate peace treaty between Russia and Germany. She became increasingly radicalized. Following her original vision—democracy, equality, world peace—after 1917 she moved further to the Left. She was one of only a few anti-war activists who continued to protest the world war after U.S. intervention. She supported conscientious objectors in their resistance to the draft, and continued to speak and write and organize against U.S. policy and participation. It was government suppression of these efforts that led to the founding of the ACLU.

Q. Did she embrace communism and revolution?
A. Like many on the Left, Eastman supported the Russian Revolution, and she did so with characteristic enthusiasm. The newsletter of Eastman’s Woman’s Peace Party probably articulated her point of view when it greeted the revolution “with mad, glad joy.” But Eastman never abandoned her intersectional perspective and multi-issue allegiances. In a two-part series she wrote for the Liberator from inside Communist Hungary, she celebrates the abolition of private property while she also bemoans the hypocrisy and human cost of revolution. Despite her support for Revolutionary transformation, she struggled with what she termed the dilemma of the “pacifist revolutionary,” – that is, she viewed Revolutionary action as a Leftist as well as a pacifist and feminist. And she admitted she had no real answer for how to bring these positions into alignment.

Q. What was The Liberator magazine like?
A. Crystal and Max founded The Liberator in 1918 as a successor to The Masses, a socialist magazine that was suppressed by the federal government. As The Masses editor, Max and several other editors were tried twice for treason. Although they were never convicted, both trials resulted in hung juries. By the time the cases were resolved, the magazine was finished. Similarly, The Liberator was meant to track revolutions around the world, but it was also a literary and artistic magazine that published the radical artists and thinkers of the day—John Reed, e.e. cummings, Dorothy Day.

Q. What would she think of today’s progressive movements in New York City and beyond?
Eastman’s ideas remain so relevant that she speaks to readers across a century. She would see all the progress we have made—progress for the working class, for women, for gay rights, and for racial equality. But at the same time there is still rancid racism and homophobia. Some of the basics like wage equality for women are still an issue. We have made enormous strides that make me as hopeful as Crystal, but I think she’d agree we still have a ways to go.

Fordham’s recently offered New Media and Digital Design Program will get a proper rollout this week when the Department of Communication and Media Studies launches an inaugural lecture series celebrating people in the program’s field.

The program and new major are a joint effort between the communication department and the departments of Computer and Information Science, Visual Arts, English, and the Gabelli School of Business. There are three tracks: commerce, information, and text and design.

“We wanted to bring some people to campus to get students familiar with the real world dimensions of this degree,” said Amy Aronson, the program’s director.

The nature of the new media landscape lends itself to collaboration among the departments, she said, adding that she and her colleagues are scholar practitioners with media industry chops alongside their academic credentials.

“On the professional level right now there’s much that’s unsettled in the media,” she said. “Students need to be able innovate, to reform, and have versatility in their thinking. They also have to think in multiple directions. If you have a critical background and you understand the technology, you’re in a position to promote creativity.”

The first lecture will take place this Thurs., Feb. 12 at 4 p.m. at Lowenstein Center’s South Lounge. Former White House Deputy Chief Technology Officer Beth Noveck will deliver a talk titled, “Government With the People: Digital Media and Re/Designing Government.”

Noveck has been named one of the “Foreign Policy 100” by Foreign Policy, one of the “100 Most Creative People in Business” by Fast Company, and one of the “Top Women in Technology” by the Huffington Post. She also is the author of Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger and Citizens More Powerful.

On Mon., Feb. 23 at 4 p.m., documentary filmmaker Elaine McMillion and art director Jeff Soyk will present “Connecting to Rural America from All Over the World: Hollow: An Interactive Documentary,” in Lowenstein Hall’s South Lounge. The two will discuss the potential for new kinds of documentaries presented by new media, films that “constantly update themselves with breaking information, are shaped by users [and]engage communities through social media collaboration.”

On Thurs., March 12 at 3 p.m., Mary Flanagan, Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities at Dartmouth College, will deliver “Humanist Games.” Flanagan is an artist, educator, and designer whose works have included game-inspired art and commercial games that seek to shift people’s thinking about biases and stereotypes. In 2003, Flanagan established the game research laboratory Titlfactor Game Research Lab to invent “humanist” games and take on social issues through gaming.

The series will wrap on Mon., April 27, with Amy O’Leary, FCLC ‘2000. O’Leary recently left The New York Times to become editorial director at Upworthy.com. She will deliver “Digital Media with a Mission” at 4 p.m. in Lowenstein Hall’s South Lounge. O’Leary is a multimedia storyteller who began her career at This American Life where she worked as a journalist and editor in text and in data and wireframes. She has covered social issues, such as sexism in the videogame industry, and continues to do so at Upworthy.

“The world needs as much attention as possible on the stories that matter most,” she said. “Whether that’s climate change, income inequality, health or immigration, today we have to be willing to get out there, into the street fight for human attention that is the Internet, and be willing to deploy our strengths as storytellers to make sure the most impactful ideas reach real people, where they’re at.”