Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism

Draft agreement between Joseph Pulitzer and the university to endow the Graduate School of Journalism, c. 1908

In 1892, Joseph Pulitzer, a Hungarian-born newspaper magnate, offered Columbia University President Seth Low funding to establish the world's first school of journalism. He sought to elevate a profession viewed more often as a common trade learned through an apprenticeship. His idea was for a center of enlightened journalism in pursuit of knowledge as well as skills in the service of democracy. "It will impart knowledge—not for its own sake, but to be used for the public service," Pulitzer wrote in a now landmark, lead essay of the May 1904 issue of the North American Review.[6] The university was resistant to the idea. But Low's successor, Nicholas Murray Butler, was more receptive to the plan.[7]

Pulitzer was set on creating his vision at Columbia and offered it a $2 million gift, one-quarter of which was to be used to establish prizes in journalism and the arts. It took years of negotiations and Pulitzer's death in October 1911 to finalize plans. On September 30, 1912, classes began with 79 undergraduate and postgraduate students, including a dozen women. Veteran journalist Talcott Williams was installed as the school's director. When not attending classes and lectures, students scoured the city for news. Their more advanced classmates were assigned to cover a visit by U.S. President William Howard Taft, a sensational police murder trial and a women's suffrage march. A student from China went undercover to report on a downtown cocaine den. A journalism building was constructed the following year at Broadway and 116th Street on the western end of the campus. A statue of Thomas Jefferson was installed in June 1914 as a symbol of "free inquiry" exemplified by the debates between him and fellow American founder and Columbia alumnus, Alexander Hamilton, a statute of whom was unveiled directly across campus six years earlier.[8]

A bust of Joseph Pulitzer and plaque in the Columbia Journalism School lobby

In 1935, Dean Carl Ackerman, a 1913 alumnus, led the school's transition to become the first graduate school of journalism in the United States. As the school's reach and reputation spread (due in part to an adjunct faculty of working New York journalists and a tenured full-time faculty that included Pulitzer winners Douglas Southall Freeman and Henry F. Pringle and Life Begins at Forty author Walter B. Pitkin), it began offering coursework in television news and documentary filmmaking in addition to its focus on newspapers and radio. The Maria Moors Cabot Prizes, the oldest international awards in journalism, were founded in 1938, honoring reporting in Latin America and the Caribbean. The Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Awards for excellence in broadcast journalism moved to the school in 1968. In 1958, the Columbia Journalism Award, the school's highest honor, was established to recognize a person of overarching accomplishment and distinguished service to journalism. Three years later, the school began publishing the Columbia Journalism Review.[9]

Pulitzer Hall

After joining the tenured faculty in 1950, veteran United Nations correspondent John Hohenberg became the inaugural administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes in 1954, a secondary appointment that he would hold until 1976. Ackerman was succeeded as dean in 1954 by former Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs Edward W. Barrett, who served until 1968. In 1966, the school began awarding the National Magazine Awards in association with the American Society of Magazine Editors. Former CBS News president Fred W. Friendly was appointed the same year to the tenured faculty and enhanced the broadcast journalism program alongside former NBC News correspondent Elie Abel, who served as dean from 1970 to 1979. Abel was succeeded by former Newsweek editor and prominent New York socialite Osborn Elliott (1979-1986), who in turn was succeeded by longtime Bill Moyers collaborator Joan Konner (1988-1996), the school's only female dean to date. By the 1970s, the Reporting and Writing 1 (RW1) course had become the cornerstone of the school's basic curriculum. The Knight‐Bagehot Fellowship was created in 1975 to enrich economics and business journalism. In 1985, the Delacorte Center for Magazine Journalism was founded. While serving as Pulitzer administrator, former The New York Times managing editor Seymour Topping joined the tenured faculty in 1994.

The Pulitzer Hall foyer

A doctoral program was established in 1998 by communications theorist James W. Carey, who emerged as an "editor of and contributor to many scholarly publications at a time when Columbia was urging journalism professors to do more academic research."[10] In 2005, Nicholas Lemann, two years into his tenure as dean, created a second more specialized master's program leading to a master of arts degree, prompting the hiring of political journalist Thomas B. Edsall and music critic David Hajdu. As a result of industry changes forced by digital media, the school in 2013 erased distinctions between types of media, such as newspaper, broadcast, magazine and new media, as specializations in its master of science curriculum. The Toni Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism, dedicated to training select students interested in pursuing careers in investigative journalism, opened in 2006. A year later, the Spencer Fellowship was created to focus on long-form reporting. The Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma relocated to Columbia in 2009 to focus on media coverage of trauma, conflict and tragedy.[11] In 2010, the Tow Center for Digital Journalism was created. The Brown Institute for Media Innovation was launched under the aegis of former Bell Labs statistician and data scientist Mark Henry Hansen in 2012.[12][13]