The Walter Cronkite School hosted spring training Friday through Sunday for out-of-state journalism students in order to prepare them for their Carnegie-Knight News21 summer project, the News21 national director said.
News21, headquartered at the Cronkite School, is a national fellowship involving 12 elite journalism schools that explores social issues and allows students to engage in deep reporting, director Jody Brannon said.
This summer, students will produce media content pertaining to national food safety, which will then be sent to major media outlets, including the Washington Post, the New York Times and MSNBC.
The students spent the weekend getting to know one another and further developing their digital media and reporting skills, University of Missouri graduate student Joe Yerardi said.
“The idea is that we’ll all mostly be on the same page come summertime,” he said.
For the summer project, which begins May 23, 10 students will be present from the Cronkite School, two from Missouri and four from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The students will work as paid fellows for 10 weeks at the Cronkite School, said Len Downie Jr., Weil Family Professor of Journalism and overall editor of the News21 summer project.
Students from the University of Maryland will be at their school along with one Harvard fellow, and they will work on the national food safety project with the News21 fellows stationed at the Cronkite School over the summer.
Prior to spring training, the students engaged in video conferencing with Downie and watched recorded sessions of his investigative reporting class. They were divided into teams and asked to come up with story ideas to bring to training.
Downie said the goal of spring training, which is in its third year, is to expose students to nationally recognized speakers and Cronkite faculty, selected by Brannon.
“She brought in the stars,” Downie said.
One notable speaker was Brian Storm, founder of MediaStorm and former multimedia director at MSNBC.com.
“I was introduced to ideas I had not considered before … like search-engine optimization so people read the stories,” said Nebraska senior Rachel Albin.
The selection process for the News21 fellowship is extremely competitive, and the Cronkite School has yet to select its fellows, opting to take the rest of the semester to study potential candidates, Brannon said.
Yerardi said spring training helped him know what he will need to do over the summer, and he is excited to return to Phoenix to participate in the fellowship in May.
“The infrastructure is already in place,” Yerardi said. “All they’re waiting for is for us to produce the copy.”
Contact the reporter at mlstewa3@asu.edu
