Three prominent journalists will visit Cornell this semester, providing students with a closer look at careers ranging from investigative journalism to broadcast media communications.
Zolan Kanno-Youngs: New York Times White House Correspondent
Zolan Kanno-Youngs is a reporter for The New York Times, currently covering the Trump administration through his role as a White House correspondent.
On Tuesday, he shared his experience on campus as a Zubrow Distinguished Visiting Journalist. At the event, “Reporting on the White House: View from the Inside,” Kanno-Youngs talked about his experience interviewing President Trump in the White House.
At the Times, Kanno-Youngs covers topics relating to “the detention of migrants, immigration enforcement, the Secret Service, protests and the Trump administration’s response to national emergencies,” according to his New York Times bio.
Kanno-Youngs began his journalism career as an intern at CBS Radio. Before joining the Times, he covered criminal justice and the New York Police Department at The Wall Street Journal.
He shifted his focus to national reporting when he joined the Times in 2019, with a focus on federal policy and law enforcement. Then, in 2021, Kanno-Youngs began to cover news from the White House related to the Biden-Harris domestic and foreign policies as well as the 2024 election.
On Jan. 10, Kanno-Youngs interviewed President Donald Trump in the Oval Office. The interview was related to subjects on the ICE shooting in Minneapolis, immigration, the Russia-Ukraine War and his view of power as commander-in-chief.
“An interview with the president of the United States in the Oval Office can be a high-pressure, challenging task,” he wrote in an email statement to The Sun. Kanno-Youngs also wrote that he had to come prepared “for a president known for lashing out against the media and unleashing a torrent of false claims.”
Although it was his first Oval Office interview, Kanno-Youngs wrote that “the collaboration of reporters and editors back in our newsroom instilled me with confidence."
On Wednesday, Kanno-Youngs was joined by his aunt Robin Young, co-host of NPR's Here and Now, for a career conversation. The conversation explored careers in journalism today in both print and broadcast media” and was “followed by a Q&A with the audience,” according to the event website.
Kanno-Youngs wrote that building sources and rapport requires persistence for students interested in pursuing politics or immigration journalism.
“Be present. Show up in your subject's environment even when you're not on deadline,” Kanno-Youngs wrote. “Hold the power to account, but also remain curious. Show empathy for a wide range of subjects.”
Kanno-Youngs also encouraged students to make the most of their time in college, emphasizing the idea of learning outside the classroom.
“I would take advantage of this point in time where you have four years to essentially just learn. Use that time to learn about those who came before us,” Kanno-Youngs wrote.
Keri Blakinger: Investigate Reporter on the Criminal Justice System
Keri Blakinger ’14, a two-time Pulitzer prize finalist, has been an investigative reporter for ProPublica since September 2025, a non-profit investigative news source where she focuses on prisons and the death penalty.
Blakinger will be hosting a book talk on her memoir, Corrections in Ink, on April 22 as part of the “Recovery in Community” film/book series hosted by Cornell Health throughout Spring 2026. The series hopes to connect “personal stories of recovery to broader questions about systems, stigma, and belonging,” according to the Cornell Health website.
In the past, Blankinger has worked as a journalist and author for The Los Angeles Times and The Marshall Project, the latter of which is a non-profit news source focused on criminal justice.
Blakinger is originally from Pennsylvania, and obtained a B.A. in English from Cornell in 2014. She began writing for The Sun in 2008 as a copy editor and went on to write news stories for The Sun’s weekly magazine supplement The Red Letter Daze, which is no longer in existence. Her articles ranged from a feature on a retired hockey rink Zamboni driver to a film conference held at Cornell.
Blakinger explained that The Sun was her first introduction to structured reporting within journalism and the networking that comes with it.
“It was both the place I learned the basics of journalism and the place where I fell in love with it,” Blakinger wrote in an email statement to The Sun. “Over time, the connections I made during those years have proven invaluable.”
While a student at Cornell, Blakinger struggled with addiction to heroin and other drugs. In 2010, she was arrested on drug possession charges and spent two and a half years in jail after pleading guilty to charges. After her release, Blakinger eventually returned to Cornell and completed her degree in 2014.
While the experience interrupted her education, it allowed her to “understand the way the [incarceration] system really works with a nuance that can be difficult for outsiders to grasp.” Blakinger wrote.
Her time in prison later became a driving force in her journalism, shaping the topics she would pursue throughout her career, according to an article by National Public Radio, which stated how “Blakinger came to realize just how many inmates struggle with addiction and mental illness” when incarcerated.
Throughout her time as a journalist, Blakinger worked at several smaller news outlets, such as The Ithaca Times and The New York Daily News. She later joined The Houston Chronicle in 2016 as a criminal justice and death row reporter. She was a member of the Pulitzer prize finalist team, contributing to breaking news coverage of Hurricane Harvey in 2018.
Blakinger’s article, “The Dungeons & Dragons Players of Death Row,” published in The New York Times Magazine in partnership with The Marshall Project, was a Pulitzer Prize Finalist in 2023.
At ProPublica, Blakinger continues her work as an investigative reporter focused on conditions inside prisons and jails. Her recent reporting has examined federal prison staffing shortages amid ICE recruitment and the overall treatment of incarcerated people.
Blakinger wrote that her time at The Sun continues to shape her career long after graduation.
“I landed my current job after a former Sunnie introduced me to a top editor; and it was through a former Sun editor that I met the literary agent who sold my first book,” Blakinger wrote. “I don't think that back then, when I was up at all hours helping put the paper to bed, that I would have ever guessed that time would open so many doors for me down the road.”
Her memoir, Corrections in Ink, was published in 2022. It chronicles Blakinger’s path from competitive figure skater to incarcerated student to investigative journalist.
The “Recovery, justice, and storytelling” book talk on April 22 will feature Blakinger as she “examines addiction, incarceration, and recovery through lived experience and investigative reporting,” according to Cornell Health.
Supporting the themes of her book, Blakinger emphasized how her past experiences still influence her reporting today.
“I lived in that world long enough to remember that everything there is human, and to see the value of ensuring that is reflected in my reporting,” Blakinger wrote to The Sun.
Bret Stephens: American Conservative Columnist for The New York Times
New York Times opinion columnist and Pulitzer-prize winner Bret Stephens debated investor Seth Klarman ’79 at the event “On Democracy, Conservatism and Journalism,” hosted on March 6 by the College of Arts and Sciences. Klarman, who is a billionaire hedge fund manager and CEO of Baupost Group, gave the leading donation to construct Klarman Hall in 2015.
The debate featured a structured conversation about media journalism’s role in democracy and debate, according to the Cornell Chronicle. The event, which was recorded in its entirety, drew an audience of over 1,000 and focused on the role of journalism and respectful disagreement in an increasingly polarized political climate.
“Conversations are better when there’s friction,” Stephens said during the debate. “I grew up in a family that loved to argue. Dinnertime was the time to disagree about things. My parents cultivated a certain art of disagreement, but at the end of the day, we sat down at the table together and we walked away from the table as a family.”
Stephens joined The Times in 2017, previously working at The Wall Street Journal and The Jerusalem Post after graduating from the University of Chicago in 1995 with a degree in political philosophy. He won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for commentary with his work in The WSJ. Stephens’ writing focuses on both foreign policy and domestic politics.
Over the course of his career, Stephens’ opinion columns have frequently garnered attention due to their conservative-leaning viewpoints.
In his Times bio page, Stephens wrote that he is “often described as a conservative” though he claims to be a “harsh critic of the direction of the Republican Party.”
His latest article, “For Once, We Fight With an Equal Ally,” was published on Tuesday. In the piece, Stephens argues how “the war against Iran is different,” as it’s the “first time since the Second World War that Washington [DC] has had an equal partner [Israel] with which to share the burdens of war.”
The article garnered over 500 comments on the same day it was published, with conflicting responses to Stephen’s take on how “Israel, population 10 million, is behaving as an equal partner to America.”
At the debate, Klarman mentioned Stephens’ first ever column for the Times from 2017, which acknowledged climate change but specified that it was not a “civilizational catastrophe.”
Klarman’s column led to backlash from other outlets and a slew of more than 1,000 comments on his piece with overwhelmingly negative reactions.
One scientist invited him to Greenland to witness the impact of accelerated glacier melt.That trip to Greenland, as well as a conversation in 2022 with Klarman about climate change risk, influenced Stephens’ new point of view, which he wrote about in that same year.
Reflecting on the themes of debate and disagreement that have also shaped his relationship with Klarman over the years, Stephens said that “democracy at its best overcomes our natural proclivity to imagine that if we disagree with someone on a matter of opinion, we disagree with them on a matter of morals,” according to an article Cornell Chronicle.
The article emphasized Stephen’s sentiment that open dialogue is something that should be grown through education and healthy disagreement.
“It’s the business of a well-functioning democracy and institutions in service of democracy, as Cornell is, to teach people out of that instinct,” Stephens wrote in the article.
Svetlana Gupta is a member of the Class of 2029 in the College of Engineering. She is a contributor for the News department and can be reached at sg2622@cornell.edu.
