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Jere Hester doesn’t think of the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY as a school — he calls it a “training ground.”

He doesn’t see himself as "a teacher," nor his students as such. He’s an editor, and they’re all reporters.

“From day one, you're working as a journalist — with all the responsibility that that entails,” he said. “This has never been about an academic exercise.”

Hester started as the news director of the graduate journalism school based in New York City during its first semester nearly two decades ago, in 2006. He founded , an award winning, student-driven wire service for news outlets across the city.

The program typically lasts three semesters. There are roughly 200 students enrolled in the fall, and about half that in spring, Hester said. The program typically lasts three semesters, and they graduate with a master's degree in either journalism or engagement journalism — a newer program developed in 2015 which focuses on engaging audiences and growing journalism, according to the .

And after a , students will soon leave the school debt free. After a $10 million donation from Craig Newmark Philanthropies, the school predicts by the 2025 academic year, tuition will be covered for half the student body. By 2026, it will be free for all.

“I would suspect we're one of the more diverse graduate schools of journalism in this country already,” Hester said. “And this is only going to help — not only our school — but, we hope, our profession.”

The student body is also diverse in experience, Hester said. They range from having never stepped foot in a newsroom to seasoned journalists trying to hone their craft. All are required to take the school’s core journalism course, the Craft of Journalism. The point of the course, Hester said, is to hit the ground running with high-level journalism.

“The bar is pretty high — we want professional level work,” he said. “When I came here, I would look at things and if this is something that I, as an editor, would not have published in one of the professional outlets I worked for, we weren't going to publish it here.”

Safiyah Riddle, who graduated from the Craig Newmark school this past fall, said she had never written an article before entering the program.

“For someone who had no experience, CUNY is such a great program because it really just kind of throws you into it,” Riddle said.

During the class on craft, each student is assigned a different — often undercovered — New York City neighborhood that functions as their geographical beat for the semester. The class, which counts for double credit, requires students to pitch and write stories for the community they cover.

“You have specific assignments, like some spot stories, a quick-turn story, but you also have longer enterprise stories,” Riddle said. She added the only real constraint is “the geography and the kind of scope and timeline.”

Riddle said her coverage mostly focused on housing and education, but she also got a spot election story published.

Student articles are edited and uploaded by professors who work as editors for the NYCity News Service. They notify partner outlets around the city who often run the stories, Hester said.

While he couldn’t put an exact number to the partners they’ve worked with, Hester listed a few outlets that like to run their stories, like ChalkBeat, City Limits, Hellgate, Queens Courier, The Brooklyn Paper and The City — a nonprofit newsroom that Hester, himself, was the founding editor-in-chief in 2019.

Along with the news service, the school runs , which airs on , and a couple podcasts. reports news from around the city, and tells documentary-style stories.

They also operate two outlets covering neighborhoods in the Bronx: , which serves Hunts Point and Longwood neighborhoods, and Mott Haven Herald, which covers , Melrose and Port Morris.

The NYCity News Service was a success story from the start and has only continued to grow, said Hester, who noted the rapid decline in the news industry has helped accelerate its expansion.

“This also coincided with a really kind of cutback in resources, unfortunately, for news organizations of all types and sizes, so our work became very, very popular,” he said. “We were getting stories, not only in some of the smaller community outlets, but in some of the larger publications in the city, including the New York Daily News where I had worked for 15 years as a reporter and editor.”

One of the school’s more notable expansions happened in 2016, when the school offered a program that trains students to write news stories in Spanish.

Students, who need to apply and be fluent to get into the program, take Spanish classes, Latinx community reporting classes and courses focused on investigation and identity, the program's said. The articles are published on the school’s Spanish-speaking news site, .

“I'm very, very happy and proud to say that it's been very fast out of the gate, and has started winning awards like our other news outlets have,” Hester said of the site.

Though she’s graduated, Riddle traveled to Arizona this past March to receive one such award — a Shaufler prize in journalism in the student category for her reporting on the impact of Covid-19 on New York’s struggling school system. The project, published on the NYCity News Service site, is called .

“I think having the opportunity to go through a full editorial process with critically acclaimed editors who are really thinking intentionally about the type of work that they're putting forth, I think that's huge,” she said of the program.