LynNell Hancock is a veteran education journalist and associate professor of journalism at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. She has taught reporting and writing and covering child and family policy at Columbia J-School since 1995. Prior to joining the faculty, she served as education and family policy writer for Newsweek Magazine, and as education beat writer for the New York Daily News and the Village Voice. She is the author of Hands to Work: The Stories of Three Families Racing the Welfare Clock, William Morrow, 2002, a book that analyzes New York City’s welfare policies through the lives of three families in the Bronx.
Her work on education, welfare, juvenile and family justice has appeared in Newsweek Magazine, U.S. News and World Report, Columbia Journalism Review, The New York Times, and other publications. Current book projects include one on juvenile justice and another on school segregation. Other book chapters have included one on Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s education policies in America’s Mayor, and analysis of media coverage of children and violence in The Public Assault on America’s Children.
Hancock joined Columbia as director of a mid-career fellowship for children and the news, a program dedicated to improving media coverage of child and family policies. She developed the curriculum on Covering the Youth Beat and is currently teaching Covering Education, a course funded in part by the Hechinger Institute on Education and Media at Teachers College. Her teaching earned the Society of Professional Journalists’ honor as best instructor at the J-School in 2002.
Hancock serves as an adviser to the University of Maryland's Journalism Fellowships in Child and Family Policy, and as a steering committee member of Columbia University's Child and Family Policy Institute. She is a board member for both the Foundation for Child Development and for Columbia's National Center for Children in Poverty. She has lectured widely on media coverage of education and social services both nationally and abroad.
Her journalism awards include one from the Education Writers Association Award for best national magazine feature, the Education Press Award for distinguished features, the National Press Club Consumer Journalism Award for the business of higher education, the Association for Black Journalists Prize for a story on domestic violence, and the New York Newswomen's Front Page Award for investigative journalism.
A graduate of the University of Iowa, B.A. 1977, Hancock received an M.A. in East Asian Languages and Literature from Columbia University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, 1980, and an M.S. from Columbia Journalism School in 1981. Born and raised in Iowa, she lives in Montclair, New Jersey, with her sportswriter husband, Filip Bondy, grandson Dominik from time to time, and two grown children, Stefan and Halley, when they decide to come home.
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