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Welcome to Reporting and Writing 1!

This course is an intensive writing workshop designed to teach the basic elements of news writing and reporting. You will learn specific skills, including reporting and interviewing from a diverse and multicultural perspective, hard news and feature writing, as well as writing on deadline and using social media to research and report stories, reach a wider audience and promote your work. You will critique each other and learn through the process of writing and rewriting. You will also gain insight into the ethical and legal issues confronting today’s journalists.

Each of you will create your own online domain and set up social media accounts that you don’t have already to establish a digital identity and a personal cyber-infrastructure where you will publish your work. By creating your own website and social media identity, you will be preparing yourself for digital citizenship and learning about the best practices for digital publication. This will be the home page for our class website, and we will have our own Twitter hashtag #hunterjourpgm, an Instagram site and a snap chat account, which will help turn this course into an open, networked community.

 I look forward to getting to know each of you and have included my bio so you can get to know me!


International business journalist Sissel McCarthy is a Distinguished Lecturer and director of the Journalism Program at Hunter College. She has been teaching reporting, multimedia writing and news literacy to undergraduates for more than a decade at Hunter College, NYU and Emory University.  At the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, she taught an intensive writing workshop designed to teach the basic elements of news writing and reporting, hard news and feature writing as well as writing on deadline and using social media to report stories and reach a wider audience.  At Emory University, she was a Senior Lecturer, Journalist-in-Residence and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Journalism Program, teaching reporting and writing, podcasting, news video production, news literacy and professionalism in the workplace to undergraduates from 2004-2014. Her areas of expertise include news literacy, broadcast journalism, and news writing and production across all media platforms.

 Prior to her job in academe, McCarthy spent more than a decade reporting business news from New York, London, and Atlanta. Most recently, she worked for PBS and GPTV, producing, writing and reporting stories from Atlanta for the national PBS business program, Nightly Business Report.  Before moving to Atlanta, McCarthy anchored CNN International’s flagship business programs, World Business Today and World Business This Week from London. She also anchored the London business programming for CNN’s Business Morning and CNNfn. Before joining CNN International, McCarthy worked for CNBC in London for two years as a correspondent and anchor covering international business and politics. She began her career in journalism as a writer and producer for CNN’s Moneyline in New York.

While an anchor for World Business Today, McCarthy interviewed many influential leaders from all over the world, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarek, Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, George Soros, Bundesbank Council members, the U.K.’s Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, the French finance minister, Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski, U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and CEO’s from Fortune 500 companies including Daimler Benz, Ford, United Airlines, UBS, Amazon.com and Microsoft.

Before her career in television news, McCarthy worked on Wall Street where she was vice president of proprietary trading at the investment bank Lehman Brothers. She was also a vice president at Bankers Trust where she traded foreign exchange and government bonds.

 McCarthy holds master’s degrees in both Journalism and International Affairs from Columbia University in New York.  She obtained her bachelor’s degree in Government and Romance Languages from Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H. She was a Daniel Webster Scholar (top 5 percent of the class in academic and personal achievement) during her four years at Dartmouth and received a Citation for Excellence in Speech and Debate. She is married and lives in New York with her husband, Steve, and their four sons.