SISSEL MCCARTHY

BOARD MEMBER | EXECUTIVE OFFICER

Award-winning 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 15 years at Hunter College, NYU, and Emory University. At Hunter College, she has introduced multimedia reporting across the curriculum, beginning in Reporting and Writing 1 and 2 right through all upper-level courses.

All Hunter journalism students now build their own website to establish their digital identity and publish their work while learning best practices for digital journalism. Students are also using social media to research, report, publish and promote their stories. Journalism classes at Hunter use #hunterjourn for tweets, #hunterjourpgm for Instagram posts, and the YouTube channel Hunter College Journalism and Hunter Students Speak for visual storytelling. McCarthy has also introduced the study of news literacy at Hunter College, and her course MEDIA 211: News Literacy in a Digital Age is now a CUNY Common Core course.

At the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, she taught an intensive writing workshop on the basic elements of news writing and reporting while 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 from 2004-2014.

Before her job in academe, McCarthy spent more than a decade reporting business news for CNN, CNBC, and PBS in New York, London, and Atlanta as both an anchor and reporter. Before her career in television news, she 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 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, NH. She was a Daniel Webster Scholar during her four years at Dartmouth (top 5 percent of the class in academic and personal achievement) and received a Citation for Excellence in Speech and Debate. She lives in Bronxville, NY with her husband, Steve, and their four sons.