The Knight-Wallace Fellowships has an impressive alumni network of nearly 750 journalists working around the world. The combined expertise of the group is a tremendous resource, and we want to make it easier to access. So we are adding an Alumni Locator function to our website, a simple tool that will provide the Who, What and Where of our extensive braintrust. We’re making the soft launch of the tool available now with information from recent classes, and we’re calling on alumni to help us make this a fully populated resource.

We know that part of what makes the fellowship year at the University of Michigan special is the degree to which Fellows learn from one another. We structure our program in a way that regularly brings Fellows together outside of classrooms and campus workspaces. During the academic year, Wallace House becomes a hub of activity for journalism seminars, skills workshops, meetings with special guests and public events. It is also a cherished gathering place for movie nights, Super Bowl parties, Tango lessons, cooking classes and a dizzying array of activities that knit our classes together and foster the network of professional support that makes our program so special.

Spending time together, without deadlines or structured conversations, allows Fellows to discuss their work and their journalistic methods, brainstorm their ideas and share aspirations and concerns about their future career paths. Our journalists become each other’s teachers, sounding boards and cheering squads. And the connections they form remain important when they return to their professional lives. We often get calls from Fellows asking for our help in reaching someone from another year. Sometimes it’s because they are switching beats and are in search of topical expertise. Sometimes it is because they are reporting in a part of the world they’ve never been to and they are looking for contacts and suggestions. The Alumni Locator will provide the answers through a searchable database.

Check out the Alumni Locator here. You can search for Fellows by location or subject matter.

We’ve designed this resource with multiple audiences in mind. Prospective applicants often want to reach out to former Fellows. And friends of the program often want to follow the careers of our journalists. A general view of the database allows those groups to see where our Fellows are around the world.

Knight-Wallace alumni will have password protected access that will allow them more layers of information. We’re soft-launching the tool with information provided by recent classes of Fellows.

To fully populate the database, we’ll need our alumni to provide us with the information they would like us to share. We’ll be gathering that information in the coming weeks and months, so that the tool can be fully functional by the end of the academic year.

We will have a lot of information to enter into this new database. Our hope is that by late Fall, if you need background information for a story, need to find a stringer in a new place or want to brainstorm about managing or funding a newsroom, you will be able to go to our website for quick and useful connections.