Alumni Spotlight on Tracy Jan ’15

Tracy Jan Washington Post
Tracy Jan ’15 provides 2018 Knight-Wallace Fellows with a behind-the-scenes
tour of The Washington Post on their fall trip to the nation’s capital.

Sitting in a hotel room watching propaganda videos from a racist hate group isn’t the way most people would spend a week in Boca Raton, Florida. But back in October 2016 issues like race, class and religion were front-and-center in a presidential campaign grinding toward its improbable conclusion.

At the time, Tracy Jan covered national politics for The Boston Globe’s Washington, D.C. bureau, a beat she’d had since 2011.

For this particular assignment, Jan spent a week in Florida writing about the growing Islamophobia that had taken root there – part of the Globe’s “America on Edge” series.

She was in her element, in a journalistic sense – even though it meant that Jan, who is Chinese American, spent her time attending hate group meetings and lunching with conspiracy theorists – all of whom were white Donald Trump supporters.

“It was cool to be able to peek into a world that was so foreign to me and write about how this hostility, fear and anger was being exploited by Trump,” Jan said over drinks this fall in downtown Washington, D.C.

When The Washington Post came calling about potential opportunities, Jan jumped at the chance to create a new beat covering the intersection of race and the economy.

As a 2015 Knight-Wallace Fellow, she studied “Morality and Money in Medicine.” In addition to covering politics, Jan was also The Globe’s national health care reporter, a role she had hoped to more fully inhabit after the 2016 campaign.

She spent her year in Michigan sitting in on confidential hospital meetings about patient care, learning about reproductive justice, medical ethics and public health. She also wrote a screenplay about Dr. Tim Johnson, chair of the U-M Health System’s Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology and his pivotal role in the national debate over an abortion procedure called “partial birth abortion” by its opponents.

But she said she came away from her fellowship year with much more than a string of story ideas, subject matter expertise and sources.

“In a larger sense, the Fellowship helped me realize that one’s ‘work’ doesn’t have to be your life,” she said. “But as journalists, we tend to make it so. So we might as well be writing about the things we care deeply about.”

Having written about health issues for several years, she felt ready for change. When The Washington Post came calling about potential opportunities, Jan jumped at the chance to create a new beat covering the intersection of race and the economy. She saw the job as a pivotal platform from which to dive more deeply into the divisions that defined the 2016 campaign and widening racial and economic inequalities.

“I like that it’s not a general ‘race’ reporting job but one grounded on the financial team, which helps me bring a bit more focus and structure to this hugely important and oftentimes unwieldy topic,” she said. “The motto here is ‘A1 or viral.’”

“I felt like I had been preparing for a job like this my entire life,” she said.

Her new beat is broad, and Jan has the freedom to choose her priorities – whether it’s a quick piece highlighting the persistent wealth gap between black and white Americans or a front page story about how Facebook disproportionately censors black activists.

“I like that it’s not a general ‘race’ reporting job but one grounded on the financial team, which helps me bring a bit more focus and structure to this hugely important and oftentimes unwieldy topic,” she said. “The motto here is ‘A1 or viral.’”

That means juggling front page or Sunday enterprise and breaking news with chattier web-only pieces to inject The Post as part of the national conversation about race.

Since the beat is new, Jan said she’s focusing on making sure that it becomes seen as an essential part of The Post’s coverage – “so eyeballs are always a consideration, as well as impact.”

Closing in on her first year on the job, Jan said she still has much to learn. She doesn’t see herself as a business “wonk.” Instead, she is focusing the sensibilities she developed covering politics and health in a new direction.

“The things I learned covering lobbying, power and influence as a political reporter should also be front and center on this beat,” she said, “because at the heart, it’s about inequality – who has and wants more, and who is left behind.”

Adam Allington is a 2012 Knight-Wallace Fellow and an environmental reporter for Bloomberg BNA

Dr. Gil Omenn and Martha Darling Pledge $500,000 to the Livingston Awards Endowment

 

Martha Darling and Gil Omenn
Martha Darling and Gil Omenn at the Livingston Awards luncheon

University of Michigan professor Dr. Gil Omenn and his wife Martha Darling contribute to a wide range of philanthropic causes, from the fine arts to medical research to environmental conservation. This year they added Wallace House to the important institutions they support. Omenn and Darling pledged $500,000 to the Livingston Awards, a prestigious annual prize which recognizes outstanding local, national and international reporting by journalists under the age of 35.

Omenn and Darling presented their gift at the Livingston Awards luncheon on June 6 in New York City. With impassioned remarks before the 200 guests gathered for the annual event, the couple expressed admiration for the work of the journalists honored and spoke with urgency about the need to publicly support the press.

“Journalism is a bedrock activity of our society, especially in the current environment,” said Omenn in an interview this month. “This is a field where young people can make a big impact. We think it’s important, it’s underinvested, and we’re delighted to participate.”

Mollie Parnis LIvingston created the awards in 1981 in memory of her son, Robert, publisher of More, a journalism review. For more than 30 years, her family foundation offered sole support to the program, which is administered by Wallace House at the University of Michigan. The Omenn-Darling gift will go toward an endowment to secure the program into the future. They join the Indian Trail Charitable Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Christiane Amanpour, and the University of Michigan among the program’s major supporters.

“This is an especially significant time to recognize and support the vital role journalism plays in our democracy,” says Lynette Clemetson, director of the Livingston Awards. “Young reporters are producing strong work across a range of storytelling forms, increasing public understanding, accountability, empathy and action around important issues. Generous gifts like this not only provide recognition to individual journalists, they also affirm the larger mission of journalism in society. We are deeply grateful.”

Omenn, director of the university’s Center for Computational Medicine & Bioinformatics and the Proteomics Alliance for Cancer Research, served as executive vice president for medical affairs and as chief executive officer of the University of Michigan Health System from 1997 to 2002. He was dean of the School of Public Health, and professor of medicine and environmental health at the University of Washington, Seattle, from 1982 to 1997. He was also associate director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Office of Management and Budget in the Carter administration.

A noted conservationist, Darling is a member of the National Wildlife Federation’s President’s Leadership Council, which honored her contributions with its achievement award last year. Retired from a senior management position at Boeing, she has consulted on education policy for the National Academy of Sciences, and has chaired the boards of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research and the Ann Arbor Area Community Foundation.  She is also a member of the White House Commission on Presidential Scholars.

Omenn was first introduced to Wallace House and the Knight-Wallace Fellowships by former director Charles Eisendrath, who retired in 2016. Over the years Omenn particularly enjoyed his occasional visits to Wallace House to hear from guest speakers, as well as the opportunity to meet with Fellows currently in residence. Last year, Wallace House director Lynette Clemetson launched The Livingston Lectures, public events featuring Livingston winners, an initiative Omenn singled out for praise. Giving students a chance to interact with the winners demonstrates the value of having the awards’ “home base” on campus, he added.

“This is in the sweet spot for the University of Michigan — we’re all about new knowledge and developing young people,” says Omenn.

Omenn and Darling maintain other connections to the journalism world. Omenn serves on the board of directors of the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit investigative news organization based in Washington, D.C. He noted that CPI’s first Pulitzer Prize, in 2014, went to a 28-year-old reporter examining the systemic disenfranchisement of Appalachian coal miners with black lung disease — two-time Livingston Award finalist Chris Hamby.

And Darling is a relative of Jay Norwood “Ding” Darling, who won two Pulitzer Prizes for political cartooning — in 1923 and 1942. He went on to become founder of the National Wildlife Federation and was appointed by President Franklin Roosevelt to head the U.S. Biological Survey, a forerunner to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.

Support for the Livingston Awards bolsters the work of reporters under the age of 35, creates the next generation of journalism leaders and advances civic engagement around powerful storytelling. Go to our donate page for more on how to support the essential work of journalists.