The Council is committed to scholarship, teaching, and experiences inside and outside the classroom that expose students to the best practices and critical thinking skills employed by the world’s most accomplished journalists.
In the past year, Journalism seminars have taken students to Arizona; Winnepeg, Canada; and Sarajevo, Bosnia. Since 2016, a summer Journalism seminar, Reporting on the Front Lines of History in Greece, taught by Program Director and Ferris Professor in Residence Joe Stephens, has taken students to Athens and Lesbos, Greece. There they covered the ongoing global refugee crisis. In fall 2018, Kira Kay, director of the Bureau for International Reporting, taught Reporting After War: Post-Conflict Nation Building in Bosnia. The seminar focused on reporting on post-conflict nation building in Bosnia. For Politics and the Media: Covering the 2018 Elections, Kathleen McCleery, a PBS NewsHour special correspondent and freelance producer who has covered presidential campaigns since 1980, traveled with students to the center of the 2018 midterm elections in Arizona.
The Program in Journalism’s growing slate of reporting trips has reached six countries.
Certificate Student Reports from Bosnia
Certificate student Jordan Salama ’19 enrolled in the new Journalism course, Reporting After War: Post-Conflict Nation Building in Bosnia in fall 2018. He and 11 other students spent their break exploring and reporting on the reconstruction since the conflicts ended in 1995. His reporting from Bosnia was published on the conservation news site Mongabay.
Salama and his reporting partner, Liam O’Connor ’20, documented the hydropower boom in Bosnia-Herzegovina and other Balkan nations while chronicling the stalwart efforts of the small Bosnian village Kruščica – and specifically the “Women of Kruščica” – in their stand to stop construction of a proposed dam that threatens to drain the Kruščica River, the villagers’ primary source of drinking water. Salama is a Spanish and Portuguese major who recently was awarded a ReachOut fellowship for public service and is also pursuing certificates in creative writing, environmental studies, and Latin American studies. Read his article: “In Bosnia-Herzegovina, Grassroots Opposition Stalls Another Hydropower Project.”
Accompanying the Mongabay piece is a video that Salama produced with O’Connor and Kira Kay, the creator and director of the Bureau for International Reporting, a nonprofit news organization dedicated to the coverage of overlooked foreign issues and regions.
View the video here:
Students Travel to Arizona to Cover 2018 Mid-Term Elections
Students traveled to Arizona for on-the-ground reporting on how the toss-up race was being determined by issues such as immigration, gun control, healthcare, taxes, and the Russia investigation. The seminar explored how those issues were highlighted in news reports.
Group 1: Farmers, Tariffs, and the Battle for Arizona’s Independent Vote
Jordan Antebi ’19, Hamza Hashem ’21, Molly Milligan ’20, and Natalie Nagorski ’20 investigate how the farm vote and President Trump’s tariffs contributed to the election of Kyrsten Sinema, Arizona’s first Democratic senator since 1988.
Group 2: Border Battles
Morgan Carmen ’21, Kieran Murphy ’19, Lindsey Schmidt ’21 and Emerson Solms ’20 report from the quiet, bi-national border community of Douglas, Arizona, and its 18-foot-high steel fence bordering Mexico that divides two nations and also divides Arizona voters.
Group 3: Arizona Women: On the Forefront of Political Change
Mallory Williamson ’21, Nate Levit ’20, and Rose Gilbert ’20 examine the impact of female voters in Arizona as a record number of female candidates run in Arizona’s 2018 mid-term elections.
