Howard Schneider
Executive Director
Howard Schneider is the founding dean of what is now Stony Brook University’s School of Communication and Journalism. For more than 35 years. Schneider was a reporter and editor at Newsday. For nearly 18 of those years, he was managing editor and then editor.
Under his tenure, the paper won eight Pulitzer Prizes in categories including investigative reporting, deadline reporting, arts criticism, specialized beat reporting and foreign affairs reporting. Under his leadership, Newsday was among the first newspapers in the country to create news websites; he also helped lead efforts to introduce TV and radio into what had been an all-print newsroom.
At Stony Brook, Schneider helped develop the nation’s first course in News Literacy, which seeks to have undergraduates across all disciplines study how to become discerning news consumers. The course has subsequently spread to universities around the nation and globe. He is the Executive Director of the school’s Center for News Literacy. He also collaborated with the actor Alan Alda in launching the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science, which is housed in the school, and which trains future and current scientists on how to communicate more effectively with the public.
Schneider began his teaching career at Stony Brook as an adjunct professor of journalism from 1980-1982. Previously, he had been an adjunct professor of journalism at Queens College in 1979. In 2012, Schneider was the recipient of the Dewitt Carter Reddick Award for Public Communication and Journalism Education from the University of Texas. In 2003, he was the recipient of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism Alumnus Award (M.S.’67). He earned his B.A at Syracuse University in psychology and journalism (’66). He has been a member of the Pulitzer Prize judging panel three times.
Jonathan Anzalone, Ph.D
Assistant Director & Lecturer
Jonathan Anzalone joined the Center for News Literacy in 2007 as one of the center’s first Graduate Teaching Fellows. Since completing his PhD with the Stony Brook History Department in 2012, Anzalone has continued working for the Stony Brook School of Communication and Journalism as a full-time Lecturer and as Assistant Director of the Center for News Literacy. In addition to News Literacy, Anzalone teaches History of Mass Communication and The Press and the Presidency for the School of Communication and Journalism.
Beyond the SoCJ, Anzalone has taught for the Stony Brook History Department, the School of Professional Development, the Program in Writing & Rhetoric, the Graduate Program in Public Health and the Center for Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care and Bioethics. He has also taught history at SUNY College of Old Westbury, Farmingdale State College, and Suffolk County Community College.
Anzalone has presented his research at conferences hosted by the Network of Schools of Public Policy, Affairs, and Administration, the American Historical Association (AHA), the Boston Environmental History Seminar, the American Society for Environmental History (ASEH), the Yale University Working Group on Global Environmental History and the New York State Historical Association (NYSHA). He is the recipient of the ASEH Morgan & Jeanie Sherwood Travel Grant, the New York Archives Partnership Trust’s Larry J. Hackman Research Residency, the Stony Brook Presidential Fellowship, and the Stony Brook History Department Jackson Turner Main Award for Outstanding Research Paper.
Anzalone is the author of Battles of the North Country: Wilderness Politics and Recreational Development in the Adirondack State Park, 1920-1980 (University of Massachusetts Press, 2018) and a coauthor, with Howard Schneider, of the online textbook Making Sense of the News: News Literacy for 21st Century Citizens (Great River Learning, 2022).