Sean Campbell ('17 M.S.), an adjunct professor at Columbia Journalism School, recently received the Deadline Club Awards' 2020 Les Payne Award for Coverage on Communities of Color. Campbell shared the award with journalists Sarah Ryley and Jeremy Singer-Vine for their The Trace and BuzzFeed News joint investigation "Free to Shoot Again." The investigation explored how, in the United States, a shocking number of shootings go unsolved, and how, in some police departments, hundreds of cases aren't investigated at all.
Campbell is currently a senior reporting fellow at ProPublica, where he has been using data to investigate how COVID-19 has been overwhelming nursing homes and health care systems. His previous investigations have prompted action from members of Congress, change in the CDC, contributed to Twitter changing its policy on 3D-printed guns. The recipient of a Sidney Award from the Hillman Foundation, Campbell has also been a finalist for an investigative data journalism award given by the Online Journalism Awards.
Campbell first came to Columbia Journalism School as a student in its Part-time Master of Science Program, where he concentrated in data journalism. "I got into journalism in a roundabout way," he explained. "In undergrad, I was trained as an aerospace engineer at the University of Florida. And then I got really interested in writing. I received my MFA in creative writing, and I did a reading with one of Columbia Journalism School's faculty members, Helen Benedict. In the green room afterwards, we were talking about criminal justice and social justice issues. She said that a lot of our work and a lot of our interests jibe - they play off each other. And, it made me think: why not give journalism a shot? I was always deeply interested in social justice issues, criminal justice issues, and journalism seemed like a great avenue to go about exploring them."
Now a member of Columbia's faculty, Campbell is co-teaching a section of the Master of Science Program's introductory reporting class with Professor Meg Kissinger this fall. "We cover the reporting basics: how to find sources, how to get out there and meet people you have never talked to before," he said. "Our class is geared around the justice system, so each of our students gets a particular beat, whether it be criminal justice outright, or something like housing and probate. Our students are taught how to cover these issues in-depth from both a beat perspective - like any journalist who is starting out on the job might get - and from a breaking news perspective, where it's: 'this is your beat, something is happening, now get out there and cover it.'"
As an alumnus of the Master of Science Program, Campbell offered advice to new and future students about how to make the most of their time at Columbia Journalism School. "Anyone entering Columbia's Master of Science program will have a wealth of resources available to them," he said. "I would recommend any student take full advantage of those resources. When I was a student, any time there was a talk or a lecture, I always went to every single one. I made it my standard operating procedure to go to every training that was available, whether it was learning about how to use a Bloomberg Terminal, how to analyze data - any time those things came up, I found a way to fit them into my schedule. That's one of the biggest things any student coming in to Columbia should take advantage of - not only the lectures, but also the resources and your peers too. You get into Columbia for a reason - there's ambition, there are things you can feed off from your classmates, even remotely. That's a huge and vital resource that you don't get at any other kind of school."
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