Ernest Sotomayor is Dean of Student Affairs and Continuing Education at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York City. He oversees the school’s offices of Admissions/Financial Aid, Student Services and Career Services.
He directs the Journalism School’s Continuing Education Program that holds professional development courses for journalists worldwide, with special emphasis on training in multimedia storytelling and investigative reporting.
He joined Columbia in February 2005 after 16 years as an editor at Newsday in Long Island and in New York City, and specializes in issues related to print and digital journalism.
Sotomayor began his career as a 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.
He served for two years as president of UNITY: Journalists of Color, Inc., and presided over its third national convention in August 2004 in Washington, the largest journalism convention ever held. 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).
In June 2011, he was inducted into the National Association of Hispanic Journalists’ Hall of Fame. He graduated from the University of Arizona with a bachelor’s degree in journalism.