Announcing 2020 Livingston Winners

2020 Livingston Award winners (counter-clockwise from top: Caroline Chen, Assia Boundaoui and Brett Murphy)

In the midst of a seismic social movement and a lingering pandemic, it is pivotal to our democracy to support and recognize reporting that advances the cause of truth and justice. Today the Livingston Awards honor stories that represent the best in local, national and international reporting by journalists under age 35. The stories highlight a New Jersey hospital that prolonged life support to boost its transplant survival rate; the FBI’s decades-long surveillance of a tight-knit Muslim community outside of Chicago; and the U.S. military’s devastating raid on its own security forces in Azizabad, Afghanistan. The $10,000 prizes are for work released in 2019.

Livingston Awards national judges John Harris, co-founder of Politico, Ken Auletta of The New Yorker and Christiane Amanpour of CNNi and PBS congratulate the winners above in a video tribute. This year’s Livingston Award winners will be honored in person in June 2021, when we hope to return to our traditional awards luncheon.

“As we honor our Livingston Award winners, we are consumed by unrest and uncertainty.  2019 seems like a lifetime ago, and we wonder what difference an award can make when we are torn by grief, anger and weariness,” said Livingston Awards Director Lynette Clemetson. “But the reporting we recognize today, reporting that scrutinizes accepted narratives and brings transparency to hidden tactics and actions, reminds us of the power of journalism to move us beyond the breaking news cycle. It reminds us that it will be journalists who, months and years from now, help us to more fully understand all that we are struggling through and pushing toward now.” 

Funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the University of Michigan to support the vital role of a free and independent press, the awards bolster the work of young reporters, create the next generation of journalism leaders and mentors, and advance civic engagement around powerful storytelling. Other sponsors include the Indian Trial Charitable Foundation, the Mollie Parnis Livingston Foundation, Christiane Amanpour, and Dr. Gil Omenn and Martha Darling.

The 2020 winners for work released in 2019 are:

LOCAL REPORTING

Caroline Chen for the ProPublica series “Heartless Hospital,” co-published with New Jersey Advance Media and WNYC, an investigation of a hospital transplant team’s efforts to keep a vegetative patient on life support and mislead federal regulators, while failing to consult with the patient’s family on treatment decisions.

“I recall being swept away by the power of Caroline Chen’s series ‘Heartless Hospital.’ It exposed an outrageous reality. Imagine doctors keeping a heart transplant patient with no hope of survival alive in a vegetative state in order to bolster their one-year survival statistics and keep federal funding. There’s not any doubt that’s what happened at Newark Beth Israel Hospital. Caroline Chen had it on tape. Her story led to public investigations and reforms that will help future patients.” – John Harris

NATIONAL REPORTING

Assia Boundaoui for PBS’s POV “The Feeling of Being Watched,” a deeply personal, riveting documentary uncovering a two-decade FBI probe on more than 600 Muslim American mosques, businesses, charities, and private individuals across the U.S. and examining the corrosive impact of perpetual surveillance on the community of Bridgeview, Illinois that Boundaoui’s Algerian-American family has long called home.

“When I clicked on Assia Boundaoui’s video ‘The Feeling of Being Watched,’ the journalist cop in me was wary. Feelings. Journalists should deal in facts. Yet as I watched, I realized the feelings, in fact, did matter. The humanity she dared share, showed the story more powerfully than a keep your distance reporter could. We watched her interview her mother, brother, and members of the Muslim community. We learned that the FBI was indeed watching them. She filed freedom of information requests. She asked tough questions to government officials who lied to her. She grew before our eyes into a truthteller. She revealed that for more than 20 years the Chicago FBI profiled a Muslim community, tracked them, and gathered information on an entire community. I say it made us all watch and feel – really feel.” – Ken Auletta

INTERNATIONAL REPORTING

Brett Murphy of USA TODAY for “Show of Force,” a searing investigation of a 2008 U.S. military attack on its own security forces in Azizabad, Afghanistan, killing dozens of civilians, including as many as 60 children, and the subsequent attempts by the U.S. Defense Department to downplay the tragedy.

“I congratulate Brett Murphy for deciding to go back and go through the evidence that had been kept away from public consumption – from going to Afghanistan, to getting thousands of pages of military records that had not been made public, to doing the leg work in the United States, and to talking to soldiers who had been involved. Of course, the Pentagon didn’t want to talk about this. Of course, they wanted it to be kept secret, but Brett uncovered it and did an extraordinary job. It’s not only the stories of the day that are important, but it’s the stories that you go back to look at and come out with a different truth – the truth that wasn’t known at the time – that are important. We absolutely need that now.” – Christiane Amanpour

In addition to Harris, Auletta and Amanpour, the Livingston national judging panel includes; Dean Baquet of The New York Times; Clarence Page of the Chicago Tribune; Anna Quindlen author;  María Elena Salinas, CBS News contributor; Bret Stephens of The New York Times; and Kara Swisher of Recode.

More on the winners here.

About the Livingston Awards

The Livingston Awards for Young Journalists are the most prestigious honor for professional journalists under the age of 35 and are the largest all-media, general reporting prizes in American journalism. Entries from print, online, visual and audio storytelling are judged against one another, as technology blurs distinctions between traditional platforms. The $10,000 prizes are awarded annually for local, national and international reporting. The Livingston Awards are a program of Wallace House at the University of Michigan, home to the Knight-Wallace Fellowships for Journalists and the Wallace House Presents event series. Learn more at wallacehouse.umich.edu/Livingston-awards.

About the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation

The Knight Foundation supports transformational ideas that promote quality journalism, advance media innovation, engage communities and foster the arts. The foundation believes that democracy thrives when people and communities are informed and engaged. For more, visit:  knightfoundation.org.

Announcing the 2020 Livingston Award Finalists


Wallace House and the University of Michigan announced today the 2020 finalists in local, national and international reporting. The awards support young journalists and honor the best reporting and storytelling by journalists under the age of 35 across all forms of journalism. The 56 finalist selections were chosen from more than 500 entries for work released in 2019.

This year’s Livingston Award winners will be announced on the Wallace House website and Twitter on June 4, 2020 and honored in person in June 2021, when we hope to return to our traditional awards luncheon. We will not gather this year due to public health concerns.

“This year’s Livingston Award finalists affirm the persistence, commitment and creativity of journalists to push beyond the surface to reveal complex truths and illuminate the human experience,” said Wallace House Director Lynette Clemetson. “The more than 500 entries we received are a testament to the role young journalists play in pushing the craft forward despite industry challenges and public efforts to invalidate journalism’s role in society. In recognizing these finalists we hope to extend the reach of their work and encourage the further development of their careers.”

Funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the University of Michigan to support the vital role of a free and independent press, the awards bolster the work of young reporters, create the next generation of journalism leaders and mentors, and advance civic engagement around powerful storytelling. Other sponsors include the Indian Trail Charitable Foundation, the Mollie Parnis Livingston Foundation, Christiane Amanpour and Dr. Gil Omenn and Martha Darling.

The Livingston Awards regional judges read all qualifying entries to select the finalists in local, national and international reporting. The regional judging panel includes: Raney Aronson-Rath, executive producer, “Frontline,” PBS; Molly Ball, national political correspondent, Time; Stella Chávez, education reporter, KERA Public Radio (Dallas); Chris Davis, Vice-President of Investigative Journalism, Gannett; David Greene, host, “Morning Edition,” NPR; Stephen Henderson, host, “Detroit Today,” WDET; and Shirley Leung, columnist and associate editor, The Boston Globe.

The Livingston Awards national judges review all finalist entries and select the winners. The national judges are Christiane Amanpour, chief international correspondent, CNNi and host, “Amanpour on PBS”; Ken Auletta, author and media and communications writer, The New Yorker; Dean Baquet, executive editor, The New York Times; John Harris, co-founder, Politico; Clarence Page, Chicago Tribune; Anna Quindlen, author; María Elena Salinas, contributor, CBS News; Bret Stephens, op-ed columnist, The New York Times; and Kara Swisher, editor at large, Recode.

We present the 2020 Livingston Awards finalists and invite you to review their work here.

Local Reporting

  • Jenny Abamu, WAMU
  • Bridget Balch, Richmond Times-Dispatch
  • Michael Barajas, Texas Observer
  • Neil Bedi, Tampa Bay Times
  • Caroline Chen, ProPublica co-published with NJ Advance Media and WNYC
  • Emily Corwin, New Hampshire Public Radio
  • Taylor Elizabeth Eldridge, Type Investigations in partnership with The Appeal
  • Allie Gross, Detroit Free Press
  • Alyssa Hodenfield, The Sacramento Bee
  • Lizzie Johnson, San Francisco Chronicle
  • Marisa M. Kashino, Washingtonian
  • Spencer Kent, NJ Advance Media
  • Taylor Mirfendereski, KING 5
  • Danielle Muoio, POLITICO New York
  • Tim Prudente, The Baltimore Sun
  • Dylan Segelbaum and Amber South, The York Daily Record
  • Marina Starleaf Riker, San Antonio Express-News
  • Alain Stephens, The Trace in partnership with NBC Bay Area, NBC San Diego and NBC Los Angeles

 National Reporting

  • Emily Baumgaertner, Los Angeles Times
  • Sarah Blaskey, Nicholas Nehamas and Caitlin Ostroff, Miami Herald
  • Helena Bottemiller Evich, POLITICO
  • Assia Boundaoui, PBS’s POV
  • Jacob Carah, Abby Ellis and Kayla Ruble, FRONTLINE
  • Ashley Cleek and Janice Llamoca, Latino USA
  • Jessica Contrera, The Washington Post
  • Robert Downen, Houston Chronicle
  • Katie Engelhart, The California Sunday Magazine
  • Ryan Felton, Consumer Reports
  • Brian Freskos, The Trace in partnership with The New Yorker
  • Kenny Jacoby, USA TODAY Network
  • Emily Kassie, The Marshall Project in partnership with The Guardian
  • Julia Lurie, Mother Jones
  • Jenna McLaughlin, Yahoo News
  • Jack Nicas, The New York Times
  • Bobby Olivier and Michael Sol Warren, NJ Advance Media
  • Kendall Taggart, BuzzFeed News
  • Emily Tate, EdSurge and WIRED
  • Stuart A. Thompson and Charlie Warzel, The New York Times

 International Reporting

  • Rosalind Adams, BuzzFeed News
  • Lama Al-Arian and Ruth Sherlock, NPR
  • Sarah Butrymowicz, The Hechinger Report in partnership with Marie Claire
  • Doug Bock Clark, GQ magazine
  • Isabel Coles, The Wall Street Journal
  • Max de Haldevang, Quartz
  • Olivia Goldhill, Quartz
  • Jarrad Henderson, USA Today
  • Andrew Keh, The New York Times
  • Natasha Khan, The Wall Street Journal
  • Kate Linthicum, Los Angeles Times
  • Brett Murphy, USA TODAY Network
  • Molly O’Toole, Los Angeles Times
  • Kenneth R. Rosen, WIRED
  • Blake Sobczak, E&E News
  • Ben Solomon, FRONTLINE on PBS
  • Chris Walker, Rock and Ice Magazine
  • Karla Zabludovsky, BuzzFeed News

More on the finalists and links to their work »

Knight-Wallace Alumni Reunion Update

 

An update for all Knight-Wallace alumni

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and uncertainty in the coming months around travel, group gatherings and campus activity, we have made the tough decision to cancel our Knight-Wallace Reunion scheduled for Labor Day weekend, September 4-6, 2020.

We will look at ways to gather our Knight-Wallace family at a later time. Further updates will be posted on our website, social media channels and in our newsletter.

Now more than ever, each of us is reminded why journalists and the work they do every day matters. We look forward to a time when we can share in celebrating journalism, our support for each other and the enduring relationships of our Knight-Wallace family.

Please contact us if you have any questions.

 

COVID-19 and Updates from Wallace House

 

Due to the current public health emergency and in accordance with national, state and University of Michigan directives, all Wallace House Presents events have been canceled for the remainder of the semester and regular fellowship activities have been suspended.

Our staff is working remotely and remains available to our fellows, applicants, alumni and partners as we adapt our programs to address critical concerns on public health and safety.

Please contact us if you have any questions about our programs.

Build Confidence and Skills with a Knight-Wallace Fellowship

Jennifer Guerra, Knight-Wallace alum, won a
Peabody Award for Michigan Radio’s podcast, “Believed.”

I wrapped up my Knight-Wallace Fellowship in April 2018. Thirteen months later I was at Cipriani’s in New York City, sharing the red carpet with Billy Porter and the cast of “The Good Place.” I was there with my colleagues from Michigan Radio, accepting a Peabody Award for “Believed,” our podcast about the women who brought down serial sexual predator Larry Nassar. I was the project’s executive producer and head of a newly launched podcasting unit – two roles that seemed out of reach before the fellowship.

“Believed” is the first nationally-produced podcast by Michigan Radio, an NPR affiliate that covers news across the state. It is one of the most in-depth, significant projects that we’ve ever taken on as a newsroom and a station and it became the first podcast produced by a member station to be distributed by NPR. The series topped the Apple Podcast chart one week after its debut and remained in the top 30 throughout the next eight weeks. In addition, being recognized with a Peabody Award, my colleagues Lindsey Smith and Kate Wells received the Livingston Award for the podcast series. None of these honors mean as much to us as the many letters and emails we received from survivors who said they were moved by our story. They’re the reason why we did the podcast: to help people understand how Nassar was able to abuse so many girls and women for so long, and how you could have missed it, too.

The podcast was a remarkable team effort: reporters, editors, producers, fact-checkers, lawyers. You can hear each of their names in the credits, along with a list of thank yous to folks who helped out on individual episodes.

The Knight-Wallace Fellowship wasn’t mentioned in the credits, but it may as well have been. For me, the fellowship gave me the confidence and skills to advocate for myself as executive producer of this major new project. And it gave me time.

Time away from deadlines. Time to focus on craft. Time to envision the next phase of my career.

The Fellowship intentionally, methodically pushes reporters out of their comfort zones. For some, that means taking courses in rocket science or Russian literature. For others, it means taking a modern dance class and pushing past what it feels like to learn something new in a room with trained 20-year-olds who know what they are doing. The goal is to step beyond what we’re used to in the newsroom and, instead, to sit in that moment of tension and discomfort and let it affect you.

I don’t pretend to speak for everybody who’s gone through the fellowship, but I can wholeheartedly say that for me, having the opportunity to step away from the daily news grind for nine months was liberating, and career-changing.

A podcast bootcamp at Wallace House in
November 2017

When I got to the University of Michigan, I thought about stories in terms of how they fit into four-and-a-half-minute radio features because that’s what I knew how to do; it’s what got me in the fellowship in the first place. But during those nine months as a Knight-Wallace Fellow, I got to entertain the possibility of something bigger. I spent hours talking to students about campus climate and civil discourse and explored new (to me) books in an ethnographic writing class with Ruth Behar. Jeremy Levine’s class on nonprofit business strategies was particularly inspiring, and, with help from Wallace House director Lynette Clemetson, helped me hone my own plan for where I wanted to take my work. By the time I left the fellowship, I had developed a vision – and an editorial and business pitch – for how to create a podcast unit within Michigan Radio.

I took that pitch back to Michigan Radio and immediately started work on “Believed” as the executive producer. As an executive producer, I was responsible for the overall production and execution of the nine-episode podcast. Since “Believed,” I’ve been working on podcasts full time. I’m now in charge of our nascent podcast unit and am currently developing limited-run and serialized shows for the station. We just released a five-part series about identity called “Same Same Different,” featuring one of my incredibly talented fellow Fellows, Regina H. Boone. My team and I are hard at work on a narrative podcast that will drop around the 2020 election. Stay tuned!

All this is to say: Apply! I don’t know how many times in your life you’ll have the opportunity to talk anytime you want to with some of the smartest people on the planet, to spend time with journalists from all over the world, to take a minute to wonder about what stories the world really needs to hear, see and read right now… and to develop the methods and frameworks to tell them.

The Knight-Wallace Fellowships for Journalists at the University of Michigan are accepting applications from U.S. applicants for the 2020-21 academic year. We’re looking for accomplished journalists eager for growth and deeply committed to the future of journalism. The deadline to apply is February 1, 2020.

Learn more about the Knight-Wallace Fellowship »

Jennifer Guerra was a 2017-18 Knight-Wallace Fellow and is Executive Producer of Special Projects at Michigan Radio, an NPR affiliate in Ann Arbor. 

Fellows Collaboration Leads to Coach’s Arrest

Mike Kessler ’17 and Mark Fainaru-Wada appeared on
ESPN’s “Outside the Lines” to discuss their reporting on Conrad Mainwaring
with host Ryan Smith.

It was a story that needed to be told, a story of young lives wrecked by alleged sexual abuse by a respected coach and mentor. And yet it was a story that may have never been told, were it not for the collaboration of former Knight-Wallace Fellows Mike Kessler ’17 and Greg Amante’16, who, along with investigative journalist Mark Fainaru-Wada, broke the news for ESPN’s “Outside the Lines” about Conrad Mainwaring, a 67-year-old track coach and former Olympian now accused of molesting 41 boys over the course of 44 years.

Mike was a Fellow when he first learned about the allegations against Mainwaring. It was the fall of 2016, and he was just settling in to life at Wallace House. One day he got a phone call from an acquaintance named Andrew Zenoff, who had a story he wanted to share about his late brother, Victor. In the 1970s, beginning at the age of 12, Victor had attended a boys’ sports camp for several summers at Camp Greylock in Massachusetts, where Conrad Mainwaring was a much-admired counselor. Friendly, easygoing and a natural athlete, Victor’s young life had abruptly veered off course after his time at Greylock, spiraling downward into drugs and self-destructive behavior that left his family struggling for answers. Then, just weeks before his death in a hiking accident at the age of 18, Victor revealed to his mother that he’d been sexually abused by Conrad Mainwaring. Now, decades later, Andrew Zenoff wanted the world to know what Mainwaring had done.

The problem was, Mike was unable to pursue the story. One of the conditions of the Fellowship is to agree to put aside professional work for the duration of the program. Mike remembers feeling frustrated with this, but he noted that he needed this time for himself.“The point is to step away from your primary life and not be consumed by your usual work.” Still, knowing how important Zenoff’s story was, Mike passed it along to another journalist.

Back working freelance in Los Angeles in 2018, Mike discovered that the story he had passed along had floundered. Determined to not let it slip away again, he tracked down half a dozen accusers willing to go on the record with their own accounts of sexual abuse by Mainwaring. He then approached former Knight-Wallace Fellow and ESPN producer Greg Amante ’16 with a proposal to write a magazine piece for ESPN. Mike and Greg had met in Ann Arbor in 2016. A recent graduate of the Fellowship at the time, Greg and his partner Debra had reached out to Mike and his wife when they arrived at Wallace House, and the two couples had become friends. As Mike recalls, “Greg and I got to talking about how fun it would be to work on something together.” Now, two years later, that day had come.

 

“I believe each of us enjoyed the feeling that we were not just doing something for ourselves, but also something positive for the Knight-Wallace Fellowship program, perhaps laying the blueprint for future collaborations between Fellows.” – Greg Amante ’16, ESPN producer

 

With Greg’s backing as a producer, and with the support of editors Mike Drago and Chris Buckle, along with ESPN Vice President and KWF board member Kevin Merida (who presented a seminar at Wallace House during Mike’s Fellowship year), Mike teamed up with investigative journalist Mark Fainaru-Wada. What had begun as a possible twelve-week magazine piece quickly grew into an investigation that would stretch over a year. The challenges were immense. For the four decades Mainwaring was alleged to have carried on his abuse of young boys, he’d led a life of secrecy, moving from one prestigious university to another as a track coach and counselor, keeping his past and his whereabouts hidden. Working together, Mike, Greg and Mark gathered hundreds of hours of interviews from dozens of people, in an investigation that spanned two continents. In the end, 41 survivors of sexual abuse ranging in ages from 22 to 59 came forward. On June 19, 2019, Conrad Mainwaring was arrested in Los Angeles for felony sexual battery. Less than two months later, on August 1, “Outside the Lines” released the story that Mike, Greg and Mark, with the support of their colleagues at ESPN, had worked so hard to produce.

Looking back on their efforts, Greg says: “I believe each of us enjoyed the feeling that we were not just doing something for ourselves, but also something positive for the Knight-Wallace Fellowship program, perhaps laying the blueprint for future collaborations between Fellows.” As for Mike, he sees their collaboration as a game-changer. “If I hadn’t met Greg, I wouldn’t have had the support of ESPN on such a massive scale.” He goes on to credit the Knight-Wallace Fellowship and his time at Wallace House. “Not to sound corny, but KWF gave me a chance to think about my career in a more holistic way, to let my mind wander and see what happens. That can also be very unnerving – that not-knowing – but I think it was a huge service to my personal and career growth.”

 

Travis Holland has been leading writing workshops at Wallace House since Fall 2008.  He is the author of “The Archivist‘s Story,” and a contributing editor at Fiction Writers Review.

Q & A with Wallace House Director Lynette Clemetson and Hovey Speaker McKenzie Funk

McKenzie Funk’s seven-year old son, Wilson,
carefully inspected the Hovey Bowl presented
by Wallace House Director Lynette Clemetson.

McKenzie Funk came to the Knight-Wallace Fellowship in the fall of 2011 to study the paradigm of endless economic growth and to unpack years of reporting on how governments and corporations were profiting from global warming. His 2014 book, “Windfall,” won a PEN Literary Award and was named a best book of the year by several publications. He returned to Wallace House in September to give the 34th annual Graham Hovey Lecture, and he sat down with Lynette Clemetson before the event to discuss writing on and living with the topic of climate change.

 

Clemetson: Discussions of climate change are most often presented through science or politics, or the clash between the two. What made you want to explore it through financial gain?

Funk: I wasn’t a climate change person. I grew up being interested in environmental issues because of my parents and where I grew up in Oregon. But precisely for the reasons you describe – that it’s a political fight or a scientific question – as a narrative writer, I had shied away from it.

Clemetson: And what changed that?

Funk: It was 2006, and I was living in New York trying to get my freelance career going. I got an email from the Environmental News Network, a short one or two line item about something called a sovereignty operation up in northern Canada, a group of Canadian Rangers there to defend the Northwest Passage. And I thought, “that’s really weird.” They mentioned a climate connection, and it just sounded very different from everything else I’d heard about people reacting to climate change. I called the PR people at the Canadian Forces to ask if I could go along on the next one. They were overjoyed because this was basically aimed at the United States. They wanted the world to know that the Canadian military was up there staking a claim to the melting North.

Clemetson: And what made you want to follow the thread and keep reporting?

Funk: In the background of all of this, “An Inconvenient Truth” had just come out. There was an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report coming up the next year. There was the prospect of climate legislation coming up in the Senate. It was all sort of bubbling. My story from the Canadian Forces expedition was published in Harpers in August 2007. Around the same time, the Russian government sent two mini subs down to the bottom of the ocean at the North Pole and planted a Russian flag, and suddenly people were saying, “Wait a minute, what’s going on?

Clemetson: You approach the global crisis through three broad themes – melt, drought, deluge. And your themes are starkly organized around geography.

Funk: Yes, the north versus the global south, high latitudes versus middle latitudes. It’s obvious if you pull back and think about it. The northern countries are the ones that have been wealthiest. We not only have enough in our war chest, as it were, to survive some of these impacts, but we can, in some cases, benefit. And of course, we’re the biggest historic emitters of the carbon that’s causing this problem. That remains true even as we outsource our industrial production to China. We are the end users of much of that carbon.

Clemetson: In the weeks leading up to your talk, this topic seemed to be ever present. President Trump was angling to buy Greenland. The Bahamas was devastated by a hurricane. Do you see this issue everywhere now?

Funk: Once you see it, it’s everywhere. We just moved to Oregon, to a town called Ashland, which is at the very bottom of the state, near the border of California, not so far from Paradise, California. The town is famous for its Shakespeare Festival, which brings in tourists. The economy is basically built on how nice the town is. When we arrived, it had the worst air quality in the entire country because it was ringed with wildfires. It’s something that’s happened consistently summer after summer for the last several years. This part of southern Oregon is just burning, and the smoke permeates everything. My wife Jenny had to stay to attend school but the kids and I, we dumped our bags, our boxes and left immediately, because we were wearing smoke masks out on the street. It was like this apocalyptic new reality.

Clemetson: And how did you feel about leaving?

Funk: I was very aware that we had the privilege to be able to pack up, get in our car and drive somewhere. There were many families in the region that couldn’t get away and were just suffering through the smoke. Businesses were collapsing. It was actually the first time that it became real for my life. I started to think strategically about moving north, back to Seattle, back to a place where, if you look at the impacts, it will be safer.

Clemetson: Your book paints a picture in which the people who can afford to win will win. And people who can’t will lose.

Funk: Yeah. The gaps between rich and poor, between dark and light, between black, brown and white are set to grow unless we’re really careful about this. It’s a justice story essentially. The hope is that if we can more collectively recognize the systemic issues, the more we will take steps to adapt more fairly. A lot of the justice questions have to do with how we adapt and who we adapt for. We’ve done so little in terms of making cities more resilient and in terms of thinking about how we’re going to prepare for the storms or heatwaves or fires. There is still a lot of room to make our responses more equitable.

Clemetson: Some people come to the fellowship to pursue something new. You were already deeply involved in this reporting and in writing a book when you arrived. So how did you approach your time?

Funk: There was a Great Lakes Water Wars class that was outstanding, and Andy Hoffman’s class in the Business School on how corporations were confronting climate change. A lot of the section in the book about Shell Oil was informed by that class. But I also spent a lot of time in the fellowship on seemingly unproductive things. Jenny was pregnant. We spent time hiking in the Bird Hills Nature Area, canoeing on the Huron River. And I spent a lot of time chasing my dog.

Clemetson: Chasing your dog?

Funk: We lived in the house that Matt Power had lived in when he was a Fellow. It was donut shaped, with a central staircase. It was perfect for running in circles. And I would just chase the dog around and around, for a really long time, every day. It was great. It was one of the most important things, just having time to think. To think about what I had gathered and to put it all together.

 
 

Birgit Rieck, Pursuing Her Dream

 

by Lynette Clemetson ’10

After 19 years of working with journalists eager to define the next bold steps in their careers, Birgit Rieck, our beloved Associate Director of the Knight-Wallace Fellowships, has decided to embark on a bold new journey for herself. She’s leaving Wallace House to reconnect with her life back in Germany and to pursue new possibilities for her abundant skills. Her last day with us will be Friday, August 23. 

It’s difficult to imagine Wallace House without Birgit. For hundreds of people who have walked through our doors, myself included, she has been an essential part of the Wallace House experience, a vital point of contact who made everything possible. Far beyond the planning of seminars, workshops and international travel, Birgit – with her infectious laugh and infallible German efficiency – created much of the warmth and welcome of the special atmosphere here. 

Her fingerprints and sensibility dot every facet of our Wallace House programs, from the aesthetic beauty of the Hovey Lecture in the back garden, to the renovation of the Wallace House library and creation of our editing suite, to the hands-on fellowship workshops on writing, editing and audio/visual storytelling. She has been a friend, mentor, travel companion and confidant to countless journalists who have entrusted us with a year of their lives. 

Birgit joined the Wallace House staff in 2000 to manage the Livingston Awards for Young Journalists and in 2004 changed positions to manage the Knight-Wallace Fellowships.

Before coming to Michigan, Birgit studied anthropology (Latin American studies) and English literature at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-University in Bonn. She was awarded a Master’s degree in cultural anthropology (African studies) and education from Johannes-Gutenberg-University in Mainz after completing fieldwork in Uganda and Rome. This fall, she will complete the Media Transformation Challenge, a one-year executive leadership program at Harvard’s Kennedy School. 

As the associate director of the program, she managed daily activities and herded unruly groups of fellows on outings from Flint to Istanbul. She enlivened our intellectual pursuits with pop-up tango lessons, wine tastings and horseback riding. She made the hard work and small details of the fellowship look effortless. She could be laughing at a Thursday night dinner, quietly slip away to arrange group flights for 25 (with multiple return dates!), then be back downstairs for a toast and dessert, without breaking a sweat.

Anyone who has been part of the Knight-Wallace Fellowship knows the transformative power of stepping back to evaluate your career, your dreams and your aspirations. In life there are sometimes moments of clarity when you know it is time for something new, even if you’re not quite certain yet what it is. It is part of our driving philosophy at Wallace House to honor those moments and to respond seriously to the possibilities they present. Those leaps take guts, belief and heart – all traits Birgit possesses in abundance.  Though we truly cannot fathom the place without her, we know that wonderful surprises await.

To state the obvious, Birgit is irreplaceable. We will not be filling her position any time soon. Instead I will use the next year to evaluate the best structure for Wallace House moving forward. We have a Knight-Wallace Reunion coming up in September 2020. Birgit has agreed to come back then, so we can have a spectacular party and aptly celebrate all she has meant to us. 

Lynette Clemetson is Director of Wallace House. She was a 2010 Knight-Wallace Fellow. You can reach her at [email protected] or [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @lclemetson

The Bells, Whistles (and Rockets!) of Fellowship Life

Sharilyn Hufford ‘19 was able to figure out
many ways to “let go” during her time as a
Knight-Wallace Fellow. In addition to the
U of M carillon, she also had the chance to
play on the largest carillon in Central and
South America on the class’ international
news trip to São Paulo.

A hand-lettered sign in a neighborhood coffee shop greeted
me with a bit of wisdom on my first morning in Ann Arbor: “Sometimes you just have to let go and see what happens.” If there ever was a time to let go, this was it. The academic year was about to start, and I had an ambitious study plan for the fellowship – creating high impact news products and best practices for workflow in product design. But I still hadn’t figured out how I would approach the challenge in the classroom.

I’d already combed through the 464 pages of the fall course catalog, searching for classes to teach me how other industries were using processes, systems and technology to transform their work. With so much to choose from, I wasn’t worried about filling a schedule. I knew I would find something that aligned with my study plan. After all I had a ‘short’ list of roughly 25 classes. (OK, I might have been trying too hard.)

The problem was my fear of not finding the right classes, of missing out on something or somehow not getting enough out of my precious time on campus. Could I follow the sign’s advice and just let go? It didn’t take long to find out.

At our very first orientation meeting, I spotted a poster on the way to tour Burton Memorial Tower: “Bells on the brain? Take Carillon 150. Play the U-M bell towers!”

The University of Michigan has two carillons out of only 600 in the world, one in the middle of Central Campus in Burton Tower and one in the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Tower on North Campus. And heck yeah, I wanted to play them.

The other students – a mix of about 20 graduate and undergraduate students – weren’t just music majors. They were studying everything from engineering and public health to community action and social change. We all had some kind of music training or background before signing up for carillon.

All the years of piano lessons and band had set me up for this opportunity, but the carillon required learning new techniques, like coordinating hands and feet, and setting aside time to experiment with new sounds and strengthen new skills.

Once I started spending time in the carillon practice rooms, I realized I had forgotten what it was like to learn something new – to have a beginner’s mind. It was fun. It was humbling and frustrating at times. It was also unexpectedly restorative.

Taking that first leap into the carillon class gave me the courage to try several other seemingly risky classes. I joined a team of mechanical engineering and design science students in a class in which we had to take a physical product from idea to prototype to verification through a series of analytical design processes. It was a crash course in engineering analysis and creativity and also design, psychology, marketing and economics. I learned quantitative methods for idea generation and selection, evaluating designs and anticipating failure modes in designs. In the process of applying those models to my team’s project, I gained new frameworks for thinking about how to create stories and news products.

I took a course where I learned about electronic health records systems and public health records, and the issues surrounding deployment and development of health technology. I have a new appreciation for the planning that goes into software rollouts, launches and upgrades having heard from professionals who manage technology that provides critical care for human beings.

By the time winter semester started, I was ready for more challenges. Someone recommended a course that was an introduction to rocket science.

That’s right, rocket science! Rocket Science might seem like an unusual choice for a journalist, but its language permeates the way our technology –oriented culture describes product development and innovation work: moonshots, launches, missions. And it encapsulated everything that I aimed for as a Fellow – to stretch and reach for new discoveries. To understand more fully why journalism is the work I had devoted my career to, to embrace others who are on the same mission and lift them up, too.

Oh, yeah, and to have a little fun.

The time in practice rooms, in classes, and with other Fellows and my family helped me start letting go of old patterns and routines. Learning a new instrument – or new technology – or taking on a new role requires practicing, stretching into a new repertoire and strengthening new skills.

Now that our time together in Michigan has ended, I think I’ve found the secret equation to the fellowship. It isn’t really about any one class or the specifics of the study plan. It’s about escaping the atmospheric distortion of the day-to-day journalism grind so you can see in different ways and explore new possibilities with a little less gravity. I’m excited to keep exploring – to let go and see what happens.

Sharilyn Hufford ‘19 is Deputy Editor, Platforms, for The New York Times.

Welcome to Korea, My Home

 

On our second day in South Korea we toured Camp Humphreys, the newly constructed U.S. Army Garrison, 40 miles south of Seoul. The massive military encampment covers more than 3,000 acres and is very American, dotted with Subway sandwich shops and suburban looking homes.

Seungjin Choi (front row, third from left) was proud to be a tour guide for
his fellow Fellows. The class is pictured at BulguksaTemple in Gyeungju,
South Korea, an ancient relic of the Silla Dynasty and a Unesco World
Heritage site.

To balance out the day, I arranged for a very Korean dinner at a restaurant specializing in tofu. The restaurant had more tofu dishes than most Americans could imagine. The experience, simple for the average Korean, was exciting and a little overwhelming for our group. From the moment the first dish came out, I fielded many questions: “SJ, can you explain how you eat this food?” “What sauce should I use?” “Can I ask for a fork?” With a little explanation, everyone enjoyed the tofu delicacies, and I had a chance to enjoy my fellow Fellows discovering something new.

For three weeks before the trip, I was communicating with former Korean Fellows seeking advice on planning the itinerary. I was worried about making the right plans and choosing the right places to visit. There were disagreements, as I explained, “I don’t want to show my Fellows the negative aspects of Korea.” But one of the former Fellows corrected me. “They are all journalists. They can see everything, even the things we may want to hide.” He was right. It was not just a trip; it was a journalism trip. I needed to present Korean society as it is, not as I wished it to be.

Our trip coincided with a historical moment as President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jung-Un were meeting in Vietnam. The outcome would have significant political, economic and social implications for South Korea. In addition, the final day of our visit marked the 100th anniversary of the March 1st Movement, a national holiday commemorating Korea’s fight for independence from Japan. It was important to help my fellow journalists understand the political tension still playing out in Northeast Asia.

Certainly we should explore Korea’s economic rise, but we should also discuss corporate corruption and the negative impact of the Chaebol, the Korean term for powerful family-run conglomerates like Samsung, Hyundai and LG. While it would be fun to explore K-Pop and the growing influence of the Korean entertainment industry, it was important to discuss issues like gender discrimination, Korea’s #MeToo Movement, and teen depression and suicide.

How could we accomplish it all in five days? In the end, we struck a balance. We saw the film “Mal-Mo-E” about efforts to save the Korean language during the Japanese occupation. We learned the complex, centuries old geopolitics of East Asia from Dr. Hahm Chaibong, president of the Asan Institute for Policy Studies. We examined the conflict between North and South Korea during a visit to the Joint Forces Naval Command complex.  And we were reminded of the familiar struggle to support independent journalism from two start-up media outlets, one of which has since announced its closure.

We also had fun. We peered down at the city from a dizzying observation deck near the top of the 123rd floor of the Lotte World Tower and stood with a crowd of screaming teenagers to watch
a live taping of a popular K-Pop TV show. We ate live octopus at Noryangjin Fish Market and relaxed at a Korean spa. We learned how to brew Makgeolli, traditional Korean rice wine, which will be ready to drink just in time for a visit from the class of 2020.

As the Fellows learned new things, I discovered new things while looking at my country through their experiences. I never paid attention to how tofu dishes are cooked because it is so familiar to me. Looking at Korean society while traveling with the Fellows, I realized stark generational differences between Koreans that I had never considered deeply before. I learned to look at Korea more objectively and this will certainly impact my work.

Traveling my country with the Knight-Wallace Fellows was an unforgettable experience. I still have many things that I am eager to show, and I hope that the program will return for years to come.

See you in Korea!

Seungjin Choi is a 2019 Knight-Wallace Fellow and Reporter, Maeil Business Newspaper (Seoul, South Korea).