Nicholas Gilewicz serves as the project manager for the Council’s burgeoning work supporting local and community journalism. He provides thought partnership about pedagogy, engagement, and journalism as a humanistic endeavor while assisting NJCH’s collaborators as they innovate new training programs for community reporters.
His interest in developing community journalism arose from his research—which has focused on the social meaning and purposes of journalistic work at moments of intense transformation—and from the wider social concern about the continuing economic stress on such a vital and increasingly threatened democratic need.
He currently teaches communication and journalism at Manhattan College, where he has facilitated student internships with community newspapers in The Bronx, including the Riverdale Press and the Bronx Times. His ongoing research seeks to understand roles of new kinds of participants in journalism, journalists’ articulations of the purposes and politics of journalism, and the dynamic relationship between news and truth. He holds a Ph.D. from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, a master’s degree in journalism from Temple University, and a B.A. in humanities from the University of Chicago.