UPHOLD DEMOCRACY. SUPPORT JOURNALISTS.

This article appeared in the Fall 2023 issue of the Wallace House Journal. 

Not long after Lynette Clemetson was named director of the Knight-Wallace Fellowship in 2016, I sat at a long wooden table, facing her and members of the selection committee, trying to convince them I had a great idea for a fellowship.

The truth is all I had were questions. Since bluffing my way into my first reporting job at the Queens Tribune back in 2003, I’d been trying to figure out how to keep my head above water in the journalism world. Half the newsrooms on my résumé had collapsed or closed. But I stayed employed, jumping from job to job, in part by getting clicks and traffic with whatever was the new way to communicate: blogging, listicles, slide shows, newsletters, tweeting.

For a while, I carried a camcorder and tripod and uploaded entire press conferences onto a new website called YouTube.

But by the time I was sitting at that wooden table in Ann Arbor, none of it made sense anymore. The news cycle I had helped accelerate was too fast. Way too fast. Every time I started reporting on one story—figuring out what was true and what wasn’t—I’d get distracted with a breaking news alert. And another. Colin Kaepernick was kneeling. Donald Trump was tweeting “covfefe.” Somehow, doing what I had always done didn’t seem like enough.

So, I applied to the fellowship and sat across from Lynette. The most memorable moment of my interview was when she asked me about my hobbies. I described my penchant for putting audio clips of news on top of musical beats. My favorite one: Excerpts of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton’s third debate, on top of Tupac’s “Gangsta Party.”

Everyone laughed and Lynette shared a part of her bio that I had missed; she had been a DJ at a hip-hop station. She seemed like a new kind of director.

I got selected and at the first big event of the year, the Hovey Lecture, featuring ProPublica’s Alec MacGillis ’10, Lynette welcomed all the guests warmly, then politely told them that there was something missing from the event: new people. Events like this one should be out there, at libraries, theaters, anywhere, really, where a diverse, possibly younger, crowd who had never heard of Wallace House and wasn’t plugged into journalism would go. Perfect, I thought—I was moving toward Wallace House just as Lynette was moving Wallace House somewhere else.

Thanks to Wallace House’s interest in bringing more events to more people in more locations, I found myself getting around the only way I knew how: walking. And it did me good.

But her timing couldn’t have been better. The world was changing, and journalists needed to be among the people, soaking it all in and sharing what they do with people who perceived them as suspect. Wallace House brought Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter David Fahrenthold of The Washington Post for a public event on his coverage of Donald Trump’s charitable giving. Before he spoke, Lynette arranged for me and another Fellow obsessed with politics to have lunch with him. In February, Wallace House brought then NPR host Joshua Johnson to record a live episode of the show “1A.” Shortly after, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens gave a talk titled “Free Speech and the Necessity of Discomfort.” To prove his thesis, he stood on stage as an endless parade of undergrads pelted him with sharply worded statements, sometimes delivered in the form of a question.

This was not the Wallace House back garden. I was witnessing journalism and reporting, surrounded by the people it was affecting. It reminded me of my Queens Tribune days, with late nights at community board meetings and early-morning doorknocking with local candidates.

Thanks to Wallace House’s interest in bringing more events to more people in more locations, I found myself getting around the only way I knew how: walking. And it did me good.

Since the fellowship, I’ve been tweeting less and absorbing more. Stories are driven more by accountability and less by clicks. It’s been five years, one wedding, a pandemic, a newborn, and two jobs since I left Ann Arbor. And it’s been exactly zero days since Lynette’s words about being out and in touch with the world have left me.

Azi Paybarah is a 2018 Knight-Wallace Fellow and national reporter covering campaigns and breaking politics at The Washington Post.

I was working in a medium-sized television market at WRALTV in Raleigh, North Carolina, a great station all around. But I was feeling frustrated. Many of us start our careers as generalists. We find what we’re good at and our employers hone in. Over time we get boxed in, and that thing that made us stand out starts to hem us in. We forget the wide-open optimism of our early careers and tunnel vision takes over.

I was the Education Fellow in 2002-03. But I also had music on my mind. In addition to my reporting career, I have always maintained a side gig as a professional classical musician. I have sung with the Virginia Symphony Chorus and the professional chamber group Virginia Pro Musica. I also spent time with the Raleigh Oratorio Society and the ROS Master Singers. During my time in the fellowship, I learned that my journalism and music were spiritually connected. When producing effective news stories, my music tended to be good, and vice-versa. When I came to the fellowship, I had been neglecting my music training and performance. And I had developed a puzzling case of stage fright and performance anxiety. So, beyond my formal study project, I wanted to spend time at the School of Music.

When I presented myself, the dean had never heard of the fellowship. She told me I could not take voice lessons. I produced my music résumé and she changed her tune. I was in! However, my assigned voice teacher made one requirement of me. I had to perform at the end of the Winter semester. Publicly. Stage fright and all.

And I did. At Wallace House.

I visited Charles in Ann Arbor on a trip home where he told me, “Dream bigger!”

I chose to perform at Wallace House because other Fellows were my friends and not likely to pick apart the performance as music students and faculty are prone to do. I did invite my voice teacher from Michigan and my former Belleville High School choral music teacher to a program of classical art songs and a few pieces from the Great American Songbook.

I was terrified, but I got through it. Kind of like contemplating my next steps in reporting.

I wanted independence and in 2003, I was getting it. I had decided not to return to WRAL, and it hit me in February of my fellowship that I had no job waiting, even though I’d studied the intricacies of No Child Left Behind, news convergence, and educational gaming. What had I done? What was I going to do?

Charles Eisendrath chuckled when he told my fellowship group, “Yvonne has succeeded in being the fellow to panic the earliest during the fellowship year!” But part of the Eisendrath charm was to encourage us to move forward. Light would illuminate our paths when we were ready.

I did freelance work for a short period of time after the fellowship, followed by a Monday-through-Friday anchor job. At one time, I had thought that was my calling. It turned out to be a bit of a bore. So much for dreams! I visited Charles in Ann Arbor on a trip home where he told me, “Dream bigger!”

So, in 2005, I made a leap to journalism management. I am helping train the next generation of journalists in television and digital pathways, and there is much to do! One job led to the next, all across the country. I landed in Sacramento at the CBS networkowned station, where I thought I might stay. But darn if I didn’t start wanting something with a bit more challenge. I jumped to Portland, Oregon, where I lead a large staff and helped us turn a 3 station into a #1 station in the market. I am also on the ABC Affiliate Advisory Board, helping the network better serve its partner stations. It’s been 17 years of bigger dreams— and counting.

The fellowship doesn’t ask that dream question anymore, not explicitly anyway. But, the concept survives: Hope for something more, and trust in the journey that leads you toward it.

Yvonne Simons is a 2003 Knight-Wallace Fellow.

 

This article appeared in the Fall 2023 issue of the Wallace House Journal.

 

Life as a journalist was a lot less complicated in 1981 when I arrived in Ann Arbor as a member of the Michigan Fellows Class of 1981-82, during Graham Hovey’s tenure as director. It was at a time when the internet barely existed. Computers were rudimentary at best, and cell phones wouldn’t be widely available for another couple years. No 24-hour news cycles. No social media to watch over or feed. No online anything.

For most of us, the sprint to capture the important events and issues of the day ended at deadline when keyboards fell silent and the massive presses a few floors below roared to life moments later, rumbling beneath our feet.

We came from news operations that, for the most part, were rich, powerful and fiercely independent—before online advertising and public access to news and information decimated the traditional newspaper business model and before corporate conglomerates and hedge funds began gobbling up newspapers and local broadcast media.

Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and operating from a two-room suite in the Frieze Building, which no longer exists, Graham led six classes of Fellows between 1980 and 1986, through one of the most meaningful years of

We came from news operations that, for the most part, were rich, powerful and fiercely independent—before online advertising and public access to news and information decimated the traditional newspaper business model and before corporate conglomerates and hedge funds began gobbling up newspapers and local broadcast media.

Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and operating from a two-room suite in the Frieze Building, which no longer exists, Graham led six classes of Fellows between 1980 and 1986, through one of the most meaningful years of our careers.

Graham didn’t let us forget that we were journalists, making sure our weekly journalism seminars included some of the major figures of our time.

Graham was a Renaissance man. A Fulbright scholar, a talented amateur French horn player, a lover of opera, and an award-winning journalist who made the transition from World War II correspondent to covering post-war Europe. He reported on diplomacy and international affairs and served on the editorial board of The New York Times. Graham was an exemplar of what the NEH sought to achieve by immersing the Fellows in the community of a great university, free of the pressures of daily journalism for a year.

And our editors agreed. They supported the NEH’s notion that exposing mid-career journalists to all that a world-class university could offer would enhance their professional capacity.

So we eagerly pursued our own courses of study, venturing out to classes in medicine, law, foreign affairs, business and the arts, with the NEH reminding us to include a ration of humanities courses.

Graham reinforced this suggestion by bringing to our humanities seminars some of the school’s most distinguished professors who were giants in their fields. One that I fondly remember is the late Diane Kirkpatrick, a world-renowned art expert. She became one of the friends of the fellowship who seemed both amused by and respectful of our group while inviting us to see the world’s great art and its impact through her eyes.

Spending time with her and with other U-M faculty luminaries underscored the value of what our fellowship offered. And, opening ourselves to this discovery allowed us to reshape our own paths. That enrichment continued through our trips to Japan, Germany and Australia, where Graham arranged opportunities to meet and exchange ideas with leaders of those countries.

But Graham didn’t let us forget that we were journalists, making sure our weekly journalism seminars included some of the major figures of our time. One of them was the flamboyant Gannett Chairman, Al Neuharth, who picked our brains about his idea to start a national newspaper. “Do you think it’ll fly?” he asked. Regardless of our opinions—and we offered many—he launched USA Today two months after we left Ann Arbor.

Another larger-than-life editor who visited was Gene Roberts of The Philadelphia Inquirer, where the tradition of playing newsroom-wide pranks was legend. He totally enjoyed the belly dancer who dropped in to regale Graham for his birthday, but it was one of the few times we ever saw Graham speechless. I was hired by Gene after my fellowship year, though the topic of the dancer never came up.

My year at the Michigan program also had a deeply important impact on my life. I met my husband, Charles Fancher, during our fellowship year to the delight of Graham, his charming wife Mary Jean, and Margaret DeMuth, his extraordinary program assistant. In addition, several of the Fellows from our year have become close lifelong friends.

A special treat over the years has been meeting new Fellows, sometimes at the annual Graham Hovey Lecture, given by a former Fellow in Graham’s honor. But meeting the 2022-23 class during a recent visit was especially gratifying, not only because it was so representative of what the program has become— so international and committed to the safety and welfare of journalists from troubled corners of the world—but also because this class featured something we hadn’t seen for the four-plus decades since our time in the program—a serious romance. Alexandra Talty and Antoni Slodkowski, 2022-23 Fellows, whom we’ve had the great pleasure of getting to know, have announced their engagement, and we wish them at least the 44 happy years Charles and I have enjoyed together.

Diane Brozek is a 1982 Knight-Wallace Fellow.