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Professor George is a journalist and journalism educator. She is the founding faculty member and lead architect of two journalism programs, first at SUNY Purchase in New York, and then at Montclair State. She has spent her career in service to the field of journalism, through program-building, passionate teaching, committed mentorship, impactful scholarship, and her own multimedia work.

Educated at Cambridge University in England and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York, Professor George has a global profile, having worked as a reporter in Singapore, London, New York and New Jersey. She was a staff writer at The New York Daily News, covering the metro, national and courthouse beats before transitioning to academia. Her multimedia freelance work has been published in The New York Times, New Jersey Monthly magazine, MediaShift, Nieman Lab, Poynter.org and aired on NJTV.

Professor George was the first journalism professor at Montclair State's School of Communication and Media and spent eight years leading and building the Journalism and Digital Media major. The program is now vibrant and robust, intimately connected to a suite of campus media organizations, to the University's Center for Cooperative Media, and to the professional world of journalism. A generation of students has passed through her programs and her classes, and now occupy positions in all corners of the media industry including at The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, CNN, Newsweek, NBC and beyond.

Her scholarship focuses on issues in local, scholastic and collegiate journalism, and includes coverage of collaborations in media and the search for new revenue models for local journalism. She co-authored a report looking at Health and Wealth in Local News, which examines the factors that lead to success in hyperlocal news sites. She authored a white paper on The Journalism Pipeline, an analysis of the accessibility of journalism instruction for New Jersey's high school students. She is currently co-authoring an analysis of news influencers in New Jersey.

Professor George teaches a wide range of journalism classes to undergraduates, including freshmen in the university's Honors Program. Her teaching is innovative and prioritizes student engagement. She has embraced new technologies and presented the results of experimentation in her teaching at conferences including Rutgers University's Online Learning Conference. Her impact as an instructor extends beyond the classroom. For many years she helped lead The School of Communication and Media's Collaboration Desk, an initiative that brings together students, faculty and campus media to work on live multiplatform projects. The FOCUS special project, which she conceptualized, endures and has gone on to win national recognition.

For eight years she worked closely with student editors at Montclair State to overhaul and modernize The Montclarion, the independent campus newspaper, turning it into 24/7 digital-first multimedia news organization that routinely swept the state collegiate journalism awards and earned recognition at the national level. In 2024 she was awarded the national College Media Association’s Distinguished Advisor Award for her work with The Montclarion. She has also won Montclair State’s Professing Excellence Award, a student-nominated accolade, for her mentorship and teaching at the university.

Beyond campus, she has lead training sessions for local journalists running hyperlocal news websites and taught high school journalists at The School of The New York Times.

Professor George believes strongly in public institutions of higher education. She and her husband have three daughters who all attended college at public universities. Last year, she was a guest at the wedding of two students who met in her Intro to Journalism class (the bride was The Montclarion's Editor in Chief and the groom was the Sports Editor). She likes to swim at the Rec Center on campus, draw cartoons and walk in the woods with her dog, Red.

Links

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• Interview on NBC New York on how journalism students are using and learning from artificial intelligence
• Write-up in Nieman Lab about a faculty/student collaboration conceptualized by Professor George
• Coverage of interdisciplinary collaboration between journalism and illustration seniors organized by Professor George

Research Projects