NYU News & Documentary Alumni Reunion: Hard News Panel

Welcome to our first ever virtual alumni reunion!

The reunion will be divided into two events: one on November 16th from 3-4PM EST and one on November 18th from 7-8PM EST. You are currently on the event page for the event on Monday, November 16th.

The event on on Monday, November 16th will feature NewsDoc Alumni working in hard news. Panelists include Mona El-Nagar, NYT Correspondent, Cairo; David McKenzie, CNN S.Africa; Yamiche Alcindor, PBS White House Correspondent.

If you would like to register for the event on Wednesday, November 18th, which will feature alumni working in long form and series production, please click here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/nyu-news-documentary-alumni-reunion-long-form-and-series-panel-tickets-128204690681

Please RSVP to either event on its respective Eventbrite page at your earliest convenience. You are welcome to join both events.

See you soon!

Our panelists will be:

Mona El-Naggar is a senior producer at The New York Times, leading international reporting for a video series called The Dispatch. She turned to filmmaking after reporting for The Times in the Middle East and documenting the growing discontent leading up to the Arab Spring. Her work has often focused on issues of identity as they relate to youth, women and religious extremism. Prior to The Times, she worked as an associate producer for the BBC Arabic Radio Service from 2003 to 2004. Mona studied Political Economy at Georgetown University and received a masters in News & Documentary from NYU.

David McKenzie is an award-winning international correspondent for CNN based in Johannesburg, South Africa. With a reporting career that has spanned five continents, McKenzie has reported from more than 30 African countries and brings a deep experience to his reporting on the continent.

For CNN, McKenzie has reported on some of Africa's most significant and talked about stories including the downfall of Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, the Ebola outbreak in West Africa and the death of Nelson Mandela.

In 2019, McKenzie won the prestigious Royal Television Society Award for Best Breaking News Coverage as a lead member of the CNN team reporting on Mugabe's ouster from power. The judges called it a "model of how to cover an unpredictable breaking news story."

McKenzie has reported numerous investigative projects for all of CNN's platforms, including accessing white supremacist groups in South Africa and exposing Chinese involvement in the ivory smuggling -- part of an ongoing focus on conservation reporting.

Yamiche Alcindor is the White House correspondent for the PBS NewsHour and a contributor for NBC News and MSNBC. She often tells stories about the intersection of race and politics.

At PBS, she has directly questioned President Trump a number of times and has traveled extensively for her beat including to places like Belgium for the 2018 North Atlantic Treaty Organization meeting, to Helsinki, Finland as President Trump met with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and to McAllen, Texas to chronicle life on the border of the United States and Mexico and  the impact of President Trump's family separation policy.  

As a contributor for NBC News and MSNBC, she often appears on a number of shows including Morning Joe, Andrea Mitchell Reports, and Meet the Press with Chuck Todd.

Previously, Alcindor worked as a national political reporter for The New York Times where she covered the presidential campaigns of Mr. Trump and Senator Bernie Sanders as well as Congress. She also wrote about the impact of President Donald Trump's policies on working class people and people of color.

Before joining The Times, she was a national breaking news reporter for USA Today and traveled across the country to cover stories including the school shooting in Newtown, Conn., the death of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Fla. and the police related protests in Ferguson, Mo. and Baltimore, Md.

In 2020, the White House Correspondents’ Association named Alcindor the recipient of the Aldo Beckman Award for Overall Excellence in White House Coverage and the National Association of Black Journalists named her Journalist of the Year. She has also been honored with the Gwen Ifill Next Generation Award by Simmons University and NextGen Leader Award by the Georgetown Entertainment & Media Alliance. 

Alcindor earned a master's degree in broadcast news and documentary filmmaking from New York University and a bachelor's in English, government and African American studies from Georgetown University. A native of Miami, Fla., Alcindor is married to a fellow journalist and is the daughter of Haitian immigrants who met while attending Boston College.