Sara-Ellen Amster, Ph.D., has worked as a daily newspaper reporter in New York, Florida, Delaware, and Hawaii, having trained at dailies in some of these and two additional states. She earned her Ph.D. in communication from UC San Diego and holds a master’s degree from Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her undergraduate degree is in English and Creative Writing from Cornell University, where she ran the college daily newspaper, The Cornell Daily Sun. In 1992, while working as a social services reporter at The News Journal in Delaware, she was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for an unusual, four-part series called “Inside Delaware State Hospital,” during which she gained unprecedented access to the wards for a week and chronicled the lives of the mentally ill, who are typically unseen by the public. Amster is lead faculty member for the digital journalism B.A. at National University, which will expand to offer a M.A. in Digital Journalism in January. She is the author of the 2006 book, Seeds of Cynicism: The Undermining of Journalistic Education from University Press of America.

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