Ysabella Escalona, GSAS ’22, a recent graduate, and Viviana Villalva, a current student in the master of public media program, currently work at the station’s state-of-the-art facility, located at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

A Full-Time Associate Producer Position

A native of Venezuela, Escalona started in the public media program in 2022, interning for HITN for a year as an assistant producer. After she graduated, she was hired by the station as an associate producer for Estudio DC, the station’s political affairs show. The job entails everything from booking guests to writing summaries of episodes to tracking down video footage. Sometimes she gets to work on a podcast—a skill she learned at Fordham.

“At Fordham, I did a podcast for my capstone, and now I sometimes work on the podcast for Estudio DC. When they need someone to cut a video clip or do a small promo, I know how to do that because of the audio and video production classes,” she said.

In addition to the sound and video editing skills she learned at Fordham, Escalona, who is fluent in Spanish, credits the advanced writing class she took with helping make her a better multi-media journalist.

“It really helped me with my storytelling in terms of thinking through the order of everything,” she said.

The opportunity to work at place like HITN, which reaches 40 million homes across the U.S., was the biggest draw though for her to enroll.

“The experience has been just very enriching. I feel like I’ve grown so much.”

Media with a Mission

Villalva, a native of Queens who is also fluent in Spanish, and is interning in the HITN’s government affairs and community relations office, came to the program from John Jay College, where she graduated in 2018 with a bachelor’s degree in English.

“What stuck out to me was the public media master’s motto, ‘Media with a Mission,’” she said.

“Other programs sounded great but were more focused on the technical aspects. I liked this idea that we’re going to tell stories that matter.”

Working on the government and community affairs team has shown Villalva how important it is to nurture relationships between elected officials and community leaders. Her department is also responsible for organizing events and programs that educate and advance the Latino community.

“Learning about the disparities and the challenges that communities face when they lack resources has been eye-opening for me,” she said.

Because it’s a small organization, she has also worked with Escalona’s team in the master control room, focusing on things like the structure of a show.

Beth Knobel, Ph.D., associate professor of communication and media studies and director of the master’s program said she knew HITN would be a great opportunity for students after her first visit to the station.

“Their studios were stunning, and we found out we were really on the same page about what media is supposed to do to serve its audience,” she said.

The public media master’s program-—run by Fordham’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences—will graduate its sixth cohort this year, and Knobel said partnerships have always been a key component of it, including those with public television station powerhouse The WNET Group and Fordham’s own WFUV.

“It’s easy when you’re in a classroom to forget what it’s like in the real world. Our partners keep us grounded on how public media is evolving so that we’re able to give our students the cutting-edge skills they need,” she said.

Helping Media Outlets Appeal to a Younger Audience

Michael Nieves, president, and CEO of HITN, noted that the internship program has long been an important part of the station’s recruitment process. Four current members of the staff, including Escalona, started out as interns. In Fordham, he said, the station gets access to students who are bilingual, experienced, and driven.

“Right now, our audience is in the 45 to 65, age group, and we want to appeal to the 25 to 35 group as well, so these college-age kids become our own little mini focus groups,” he said.

“It’s a successful partnership. And a lot has to do with the preparation they get before they come here.”

“I’ve always been intrigued to find out more about communities,” she said. She’s also always wanted to work in New York City. So she applied to Fordham’s public media master’s program in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

“New York City has always been the goal for me,” she said. “I think the fact that New York has such a rich diversity to it definitely helps when you’re in public media.”

Journalism and Strategic Communication

The one-year master’s program offers two tracks for students: a multi-platform journalism track, which Sargent is on, that focuses on reporting using audio, video, web content, and more; and a strategic communication track that focuses on areas such as social media marketing, public relations, and fundraising for nonprofits. The program’s evening schedule allows for daytime employment as well as fellowships and internships, which advisers help students to secure.

After getting accepted to the program, she applied for and received a fellowship with WFUV, a NPR-affiliate public media station on the Rose Hill campus, where she works as a reporter, host, and news editor. She hosts the station’s weekly news podcast and hosts the daily news podcast What’s What one day each week.

WFUV Podcast Earns Gracie Award

For the daily podcast, she did a piece in the fall on maternal health care in New York City, for which she interviewed Mayor Eric Adams, city council members, and a doula service that the city partnered with.

“Coming from the U.K., and being able to see what maternal health care is [like]here, obviously in the wake of Roe v. Wade being overturned as well, it felt like a very important time to be talking about that,” she said.

Sargent also created and launched a new podcast for the station called Urban Tales, which explores the impact of operating a business in New York City and how it influences the personal and professional lives of young entrepreneurs. Urban Tales also led to national recognition as she received a Gracie Award from the Alliance for Women in Media for her work on the podcast.

“I’ve been collaborating with so many different founders of businesses across New York City, specifically people who moved from outside the city to New York,” she said. “I feel like New York’s always where you go to achieve your professional dreams, so I was hearing about those experiences and their successes, but also about the trials and tribulations of being a founder and how young people are navigating that space.”

Learning Reporting Skills in the ‘Epicenter of Cultural Engagement’

Working at WFUV has also allowed her to put the skills she’s learning in class into practice, particularly lessons from her cross-platform journalism class. The course teaches students how to report and create content for traditional outlets, like broadcast television, as well as social media. And she said the reverse is also true–her work at WFUV is informing her studies.

“I think the best thing about WFUV is I’ve gotten so much support, but I also was thrown into audio and production—it’s so hands-on,” she said. “You really do learn how to find your own way and navigate through it. Being able to take the skills that I’ve learned here in a working environment and apply them to my studies has just enhanced my education massively.”

Sargent said getting to tell the stories of people from different backgrounds that have come together in New York City is one of her favorite parts of the master’s program.

“New York kind of feels like the epicenter of cultural engagement,” she said. “And I think that really injects a lot of life into the media that we produce.”

She was passionate about movies and TV, having earned her bachelor’s degree in journalism and film and television at Fordham College at Lincoln Center in 2020 and pursuing the accelerated public media master’s program as an undergraduate.

During the height of the pandemic, Borca-Carrillo said she and her partner watched a lot of romantic comedies, better known as rom-coms.

“I became a big fan of rom-coms during the pandemic because everything was awful. But what we both figured out pretty quickly—and she had kind of grown up on rom-coms and I hadn’t—was that there really weren’t many lesbian rom-coms” said Borca-Carrillo, who graduated from the master’s program, part of Fordham’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, in 2021.

That’s how the idea behind her capstone project for Fordham’s Master of Arts in Public Media Program, a podcast called Looking for Violet, was born. The four-part series examines why queer love stories are so scarcely told in American film comedies, while also exploring the fundamental aspects of these films and showing how those aspects relate to the niche of the lesbian rom-com.

The podcast and Borca-Carrillo have won three major awards—a Mark of Excellence Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, a Gracie Award from the Alliance for Women in Media, and a first place award in narrative/produced podcast from the independent division from the Public Media Journalists Association. Borca-Carrillo was also a finalist for an award from the Deadline Club.

The Importance of Representation

“We always say representation in media is important, and I hope that [listeners]take away from it a little bit more of the concrete examples of why it’s important,” Borca-Carrillo said. “It’s really harmful to see yourself represented only in a negative light … A genre like a rom-com—that’s supposed to be funny and exciting and about finding true love—there’s really just not that much representation for queer women in it.”

One of the things Borca-Carrillo noticed when she was starting to formulate the idea for the piece is that many rom-coms are based on the trope of men and women being different from each other.

“And a lot of these rom-coms that we were watching were just based on this kind of battle of the sexes back and forth—that men-and-women-will-never-understand-each-other kind of feeling,” she said. “And so I decided to kind of look into that and see what it would be like to have a lesbian rom-com, to have something that you felt represented by.”

But that initially proved to be difficult because Borca-Carrillo noted that there aren’t many rom-coms featuring lesbians, particularly ones that “that didn’t end terribly for the lesbians either, which is kind of another trope that I talked about in the podcast,” she said.

“A lot of the lesbian media that you will see nowadays—there’s more—but it usually ends pretty badly for the people in it,” she said.

The title of her series comes from Édouard Bourdet’s 1926 play, La Prisonnière, where one of the main characters, Mme. D’Aiguines, “uses bouquets of violets to signify her forbidden love for a housewife trapped by marriage.” Throughout the podcast, Borca-Carrillo uses a character, Violet, to explore the different aspects of rom-coms—the “meet cute,” the obstacle, the proclamation of love, and the happily ever after.

Borca-Carrillo said she aimed to use Violet to “represent a past/present/future of women/women love, one that uses its layered history to create richer meanings in future works.”

Prominent Guests

As a part of her reporting, she interviewed people like Christin Marie Baker, the founder and CEO of Tello Films, a streaming and production company that has a lesbian focus, and author Camille Perri, who wrote a book on rom-coms called When Katie Met Cassidy that is in the process of being turned into a movie. Both of these creators have been working to produce content that has been scarce, she said.

Borca-Carrillo was surprised at first that these successful creators would agree to be guests on her show.

“These were kind of shots in the dark, but what I’ve learned is that people in this community are really interested in having more things come out about it,” Borca-Carrillo said. “So a New York Times best-selling author, and the founder of lesbian film service, and countless other really cool people were really excited to talk to me because this is a really small community.”

A Wild Ride

Borca-Carrillo said their participation, along with the awards, has been amazing.

“It’s been pretty wild,” she said with a smile. “Being recognized alongside a Bloomberg podcast at the Deadline awards, where we had a speaker who was a prize-winning journalist—it was really overwhelming. I think it’s really encouraging to know that a story that is created with a lot of personal attachment to it [can be so successful]. All the guests that I interviewed really put their heart and soul into their work that they do.”

Beth Knobel, Ph.D., who serves as the director of the public media program and an informal adviser to Borca-Carrillo, said that it’s been “thrilling” to see her recognized “over and over” for this podcast.

“I am so incredibly proud of her. She’s really talented, and it’s an important time for representation. A couple of years ago, I don’t know if people would have reacted to this podcast series the way they did. People have become, thankfully, much more aware and open to a wider array of voices in journalism. And it’s crucially important that this podcast bring visibility to the LGBTQ+ community and help people see it more clearly.”

Expert Editing

Borca-Carrillo also said that her mentor, George Bodarky, an adjunct professor at Fordham and former news director at WFUV, who is now the community partnerships and training editor for WNYC, was instrumental in helping her put this piece together.

“George helped me finesse all the different parts of the podcast so I’m eternally grateful to him and his guidance,” she said. “And I really do give the credit to the people that I interviewed, and to George and to Fordham for giving me the platform to put all of this together. … It was really formative to learn from people and to learn how much better projects can be when you really care about what you’re doing.”

Borca-Carrillo is now working as a junior producer at Wonder Media Network, which is a podcasting, women-led startup company that she said is “dedicated to lifting up underrepresented voices.” She got the job after interning at the company during the pandemic.

“It’s been really great to get better at podcasting while using all the communication skills I picked up at Fordham along the way,” she said.

But Mejia said she couldn’t choose art as a career. A degree in the fine arts was too costly, especially for a first-generation college student with limited financial resources like herself. 

After exploring different options across the world, Mejia found a home at Fordham. Last February, she earned a bachelor’s degree in political science, magna cum laude, from the School of Professional and Continuing Studies. This summer, she will complete her master’s degree in public media from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. 

“I’ve always been interested in media, especially since I started studying political science. This is public media, which is even better because I’ll be working for a good cause,” Mejia said. “And I can find a way to integrate the arts.” 

‘Art Was My Escape From Reality’ 

Mejia was born in Medellín, Colombia, in the early ’90s—one of the most dangerous periods in the country’s history. Her city was recovering from many years of internal conflict, especially drug trafficking, and it wasn’t easy to find jobs, said Mejia. When Mejia was a toddler, her mother made a difficult decision. 

“My mother, whom I deeply admire for her bravery, moved to the U.S. with her sister in the hopes of providing a brighter future for me and my sister. She worked several jobs, including as a waitress. She saw that this was the only way for her to support us,” said Mejia, who left her father, aunts, and grandparents in Colombia as a teenager to join her mother, whom she had lived apart from for most of her childhood. 

Mejia said she struggled to adjust to her new life. 

“We imagine New York as that little piece of Times Square that’s so brilliant, beautiful, and perfect, like Disneyland. Then you realize that there’s so much more. I first lived in the Bronx, which did not look exactly like what I had seen in the movies. I liked living in The Bronx, but it was a big cultural change for me,” Mejia said. “I would sit with my sketchbook and paint and draw. Art was my escape from reality.”

Her temporary escape became a permanent passion. As a student at Manhattan Comprehensive Night and Day High School, she won a scholarship to study at the Art Students League of New York, one of the oldest independent art schools in the U.S. For two consecutive summers, she also participated in a program at the Museum of Modern Art, which featured her artwork. In addition, one of her paintings was selected as a first runner-up in a national high school art competition. 

“My painting was inspired by the Beatles song ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.’ That song just made me so happy,” said Mejia, who submitted a painting of a woman with flowers in her hair to the 2011 Congressional Art Competition. “My painting reflected this moment in high school when I was starting to learn English, make friends in New York, and feel like I was finally part of a community.”

A Reality Check 

But Mejia said she realized that a career in the arts wasn’t feasible. Everything about it was expensive, including fine arts school tuition and supplies, and she couldn’t afford the long-term investment. Instead, she spent years working in retail, saved money, and then returned to school. In 2018, she earned an associate’s degree in communication studies from the Borough of Manhattan Community College, while working a full-time job. 

“Communications studies is so broad that I thought it could lead back to the arts,” Mejia said.  

Over the next two years, her personal life took her across the world: to Sweden, where she studied political science at Stockholm University, and to Paris, where she continued her education at the Paris Institute of Political Studies until the pandemic. She returned to New York, where she found Fordham and completed her bachelor’s degree in political science. 

Mejia is now pursuing her master’s degree in public media so she can become the person she wishes she had when she was a young artist, she said. 

“What I’ve realized after living in New York City, Colombia, and around the world is there are so many scholarships and opportunities for artists, but so little information about them unless you are well-connected. There’s a lot of aid out there that’s not being marketed effectively. But people who work in public media can spread the word about these opportunities,” Mejia said. 

Mejia said she is considering becoming an immigration lawyer. Although she was able to become an American citizen, she saw many immigrants struggle to have a brighter future. She said she wants to be able to assist those who are chasing their dreams through academics, especially Dreamers. 

“It’s not about the diploma. It’s about the challenge and fulfillment that you feel along your journey,” Mejia said. “You are not alone. There are many students like you who are paving the road for others.”

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.