UMass journalism

Part time Faculty

Nancy Eve Cohen has always been interested in telling stories through images. She began her journalism career more than fifteen years ago in television, producing environmental documentaries and recording sound for network television. In 1994, after graduating from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, she parlayed her sound recording skills into a new career in public radio. Cohen believes radio is a visual medium based on the details of close-up sound and robust writing. She says good radio creates mind-pictures for her listeners. Today Cohen is the environmental reporter for WNPR, Connecticut.

Listen... here to Nancy Cohen's story on bottled water sales.

Here is her NPR story about locomotive engineers. Sound really drives this story:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4622137

Cohen won a 2006 Connecticut Associated Press Broadcaster’s Award for this story on cleaning up sewage:
http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/wnpr/news.newsmain?action=article&ARTICLE_ID=990183

Cohen has been named the 2008 Rivers Alliance of Connecticut Reporter of the Year. Read more...

Cohen sorts through trash for a National Public Radio story tracing the life of a plastic water bottle.

Listen to the NPR story and see the web story that accompanied it:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=10874230

Prior to reporting Cohen served in several critical editorial positions at National Public Radio in Washington DC, including overnight editor on Morning Edition, editor of All Things Considered and Midwest editor. Her stories have also aired on the CBC in Canada, Marketplace and CBS Radio. She has written for the Boston Globe, Wall Street Journal and Audubon Magazine.

Her television documentary “The Water Talks To Me”, which aired on WGBH, followed a fishing family in Gloucester, Massachusetts grappling with over-fishing.

Watch a clip of “The Water Talks To Me”:
http://der.org/films/water-talks-to-me.html

Her television sound recording assignments included a rare interview with Fidel Castro, programs shot in Guatemala and Russia, and the war in Sarajevo.

Prior coming to U. Mass., Cohen was a visiting faculty in the Sound Department at School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Cohen’s teaching is based on the idea that students learn by doing.

She coaches her students through their first reporting assignments for radio---allowing them to practice journalism and build their confidence.