ERNEST R. SOTOMAYOR Assistant Dean for Career Services Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism

Ernest R. Sotomayor is Assistant Dean for Career Services at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Since February 2005 he has directed the school’s efforts in career counseling, assisting students in finding opportunities such as internships, fellowships and fulltime employment in print, broadcast and online media fields. Previously, he spent more than 16 years as an editor at Newsday in Long Island and at New York Newsday in New York City.

Ernest Sotomayor began his career as a city hall and enterprise reporter at the El Paso (Texas) Herald-Post in 1976, and in 1979 joined the Dallas Times Herald, where he worked as a reporter and editor. At the Times Herald, he managed a yearlong project in 1987 covering the immigration amnesty program, which won numerous state and national prizes, including the SDX-SPJ’s National Gold Medal for Public Service. Ernest joined New York Newsday in 1989 and was Brooklyn/Queens Editor. He later served as Newsday’s Long Island regionals editor, deputy business editor and Long Island editor for Newsday.com. He was among the editing staffs at New York Newsday that assisted in covering the New York City subway crash in 1991 and with Newsday Long Island in covering the crash of TWA Flight 800 off Long Island in 1996. Both won staff Pulitzer Prizes for Spot News coverage.

He served as president of UNITY: Journalists of Color, Inc., and presided over its third national convention in August 2004 in Washington, the largest journalists convention ever held with 8,300 attendees. In 1986, he was co-director of the Summer Program for Minority Journalists at UC Berkeley for the Institute for Journalism Education (now the Maynard Institute). He recently planned and coordinated the participation by Columbia at the 2008 UNITY Convention in which more than two dozen faculty and staff attended.
Ernest is a graduate of the University of Arizona with a bachelor's degree in journalism