The Fellowship Life: Podcast Boot Camp

Mosi Secret, Alex Blumberg and Jonathan Menjivar
Mosi Secret, 2016 Knight-Wallace Fellow, Alex Blumberg, CEO and co-founder of Gimlet Media and Jonathan Menjivar
producer with “This American Life,” coach the Knight-Wallace Fellows at the Podcast Boot Camp.

 

During a typical Tuesday evening fellowship seminar at Wallace House, a reporter, author or professor joins our class of mid-career journalists for a stimulating off-the-record chat in front of the Wallace House fireplace. Our guest speakers are dynamic, all experts in their fields. Throughout these ninety-minute salons, Fellows get to sit back, soak up new ideas and ask probing questions. Our seminars are deeply engaging sessions, in a deeply comfortable environment.

Lynette Clemetson with Regina Boone, Candice Choi and Danielle Dreilinger
Wallace House Director, Lynette Clemetson assigns
Fellows into working teams.

A month before Thanksgiving break – just around the time our fellowship class settled into this cozy routine – we were thrust outside of our comfort zone.

Wallace House director, Lynette Clemetson, broke us up into teams, and gave us three weeks to develop a podcast pitch and gather and edit some sample audio. To up the ante, she told us we’d be pitching our concepts to producers from Gimlet Media and “This American Life” who would be joining us just before the holiday break for a two-day audio bootcamp.

Umm, yes please!

I’ve been a radio producer for nearly 15 years and I love “This American Life”-style narrative storytelling. So I was pumped at the chance to learn from two rock star producers. And I wasn’t the only one. You probably don’t need me to tell you that podcasts and audio storytelling are having a moment. Several Fellows had expressed interest in learning what it takes to create a successful podcast and how to make a story sing on air. We were about to get a very hands-on crash course.

Lynette handed out the piece of paper with our teams listed on it and surveyed the room, gauging reactions — a few smiles here, some nervous laughter there, more than a couple of blank stares. Most of the class had little to no experience in audio. Two of us came from radio, but we had never worked on podcasts, which differ in style and approach from broadcast news. We were all feeling a bit out of our element.

That’s one of the best things about this fellowship and what makes the time as a Knight-Wallace Fellow so special; it’s a chance to push yourself creatively in a supportive environment.

Jennifer Guerra and Lisa Wangsness
On assignment: Jennifer Guerra, Marcelo Moreira
and Lisa Wangsness report from a glassblowing studio.

I did a lot of solo work before coming to the fellowship, working on long-form audio pieces for months at a time with only the occasional check-in from an editor. So I welcomed the chance to work on a group project. My assigned podcast team consisted of a photojournalist, a print reporter, an international television editor, and me. Sounds like a joke set up, right? A photojournalist, a print reporter and a TV editor walk into a bar with a radio producer…

But seriously, it was a great project. Never in my career have I had the chance to collaborate on a new idea with such a varied group of smart, accomplished journalists. The medium might have been new, but we all knew how to dive into unknown territory on tight deadlines. It didn’t take long to settle on an idea. We decided to develop something kid-focused. We are all parents, and we knew from our own listening that podcasts for kids are an underdeveloped segment of the market. Within a few days we were in the field grabbing tape.

Our first stop? The city of Ypsilanti. With recording kits in hand and our own kids in tow, we visited a glassblowing studio where the kids felt the heat from the super-hot furnace and tried blowing some glass themselves through a long metal blowpipe.

The work was fun. But the thought of presenting it to our visiting experts was more than a little nerve wracking. Alex Blumberg is CEO and co-founder of Gimlet Media, a company that produces tons of podcasts you’ve probably listened to, including one of my favorites, “StartUp,” which Blumberg hosts. He also co-founded NPR’s “Planet Money” podcast and is a former “This American Life” producer. Jonathan Menjivar is a long-time producer with “This American Life” and has produced some of the show’s most memorable pieces.

Day two of boot camp: Fellowship team of
Chitrangada Choudhury, Azi Paybarah, Matt
Higgins and John Shields (not pictured)
pitch their podcast concept to the guest judges.

To help demystify the podcast process, Alex and Jonathan were joined by Mosi Secret, a 2016 Knight-Wallace Fellow. A print reporter who came to the Fellowship from The New York Times, Mosi had just turned a recent story about a 1960s experiment to integrate an elite private school in Virginia into an hour-long “This American Life” episode. He was there to make the process less intimidating and to push us to contemplate taking new chances post-Fellowship.

The first day of the bootcamp was like a typical seminar. Each speaker talked about their own careers and their editorial and stylistic approach. Jonathan was the producer who helped Mosi create his piece, and the two deconstructed their process for us, explaining how it differed from The New York Times Magazine print version of Mosi’s story.

Day two was more like a journalism version of “The Voice.” Alex, Mosi and Jonathan were the celebrity judges waiting to be impressed by our storytelling chops. We were the yet undiscovered podcast stars, hoping to blow their minds with our raw talent and bankable ideas. And we were asked to workshop our ideas in front of the entire fellowship class. I’ve never done a group edit before, and the idea of playing tape in front of a whole room of people was, frankly, kind of terrifying. But Alex and Jonathan are big proponents of the group edit — more voices in the room, more perspectives to draw from — and I’m happy to report that I am now, too.

Alex and Jonathan talked through each group’s pitch and showed us what it would take to get the concepts up and running as successful podcasts. Fellows chimed in with their own ideas on where to take the story, what voices to include and who would be the ideal host.

Everyone in the group encouraged each other and made the ideas stronger. The supportive input from other teams was invaluable. By the end of the bootcamp, I was convinced that the most important element of this Fellowship is fellowship.

And who knows, it could be one of us producing the hot podcast of 2018. 

Jennifer Guerra is a 2018 Knight-Wallace Fellow and a senior reporter at Michigan Radio, an NPR affiliate in Ann Arbor.

Taking Wallace House to the Public

 

Lydia Polgreen, Brooke Jarvis, Joshua Johnson and Bret Stephens
Wallace House campus events include public engagements with Lydia Polgreen, Brooke Jarvis, Joshua Johnson and Bret Stephens

 

Anyone who has spent time in Wallace House knows that, as an organization that supports the work of journalists, we are also defenders of free speech. It is a fundamental belief evidenced in the irreverent caricatures of politicians that ring our living room and the wide array of provocative books and periodicals that fill our library. It is a proclamation painted in the washroom just off the foyer, in black block letters, a central tenet impossible to ignore – even in the smallest room in the house: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

That sentence, penned by the English writer Evelyn Beatrice Hall in a 1906 biography of the French Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire, is commonly referenced in defense of free speech. For journalists, it serves as a dramatic restatement of basic rights laid out in the First Amendment, that “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press…”

At a time when that foundational right is being challenged and reexamined, it is all the more important to articulate its significance. Wallace House is working to do just that, through public events aimed at highlighting the vital role of journalism to document, interpret, analyze and investigate the forces shaping society.  

By moving journalism away from devices and distractions and into public spaces, we aim to close the gap between an increasingly indifferent public and the reporters taking stock of our times. In this era of echo chambers, we feel called to actively foster civil discourse across profound gulfs of mistrust and cynicism.

For journalists, a free press is inextricably bound to the broader principle of freedom of speech, a principal that is most critical to defend when it is inconvenient and difficult to stomach. Our winter 2018 events will tackle that complexity head on, with prominent speakers from NPR, The New York Times and HuffPost.

We’ll encourage audiences to wrestle with how the American ideal accommodates and protects both Colin Kaepernick and Richard Spencer. We’ll examine the continuum from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s long arc of the universe to hashtag revolutions and crowd-sourced justice. And we’ll elevate important stories subsumed by fast-paced news cycles, from the unseen tragedies of border crossings to the global implications of China’s expanding soft power.

Such tough discussions are regular fodder for the journalists who come through the Knight-Wallace Fellowships for Journalists and the Livingston Awards, the truth-seekers and tellers who think, work and interact within our Wallace House walls. It’s pressing now that we move those conversations out into the open, to forums that prompt wider-reaching debate. Free speech and a free press, after all, are rights too precious to take for granted.

We hope you will mark these events on your calendar, share them with friends and join us.  

1/16/18 | “Who Gets to Define American Values?” with Lydia Polgreen of HuffPost

1/31/18 | “Beyond the Wall: The Human Toll of Border Crossings” with Brooke Jarvis, Livingston Award winner

2/15/18 | “Speak Freely: Debating the First Amendment in a Changing America” a special event with NPR’s daily news program “1A” and host Joshua Johnson

2/20/18 | “Free Speech and the Necessity of Discomfort” with Bret Stephens of The New York Times

3/20/18 | “China’s Soft Power” The Eisendrath Symposium on International News

Information on times, venues and speaker details can be found on our event pages.

Lynette Clemetson is Director of Wallace House, home of the Knight-Wallace Fellowships for Journalists and the Livingston Awards at the University of Michigan. She is a 2010 Knight-Wallace Fellow.

Support the Essential Work of Journalism

 

When you received your Wallace House Journal last month a small blue box on the lower half of page five may have caught your eye. It read DONATE. I hope it prompted you toward action. Journalists often approach charitable giving cautiously, lest an act of generosity at some point be construed as bias. It’s a wise caution. But one cause journalists can support without hesitation, of course, is journalism. And supporting Wallace House is a concrete way to bolster the careers and wellbeing of journalists.

At a time when our profession is being openly and regularly maligned, Wallace House is expanding its reach and standing up for the vital work of journalists.

  • We’re convening more public events in an effort to increase media literacy and engage people in conversations with journalists on important issues.
  • We’re increasing outreach for the Knight-Wallace Fellowships to ensure that we’re attracting the diverse multi-skilled range of talent needed to propel today’s newsrooms.
  • We’re broadening our partnerships to provide our Fellows with access to the most relevant resources, experts and experiences related to their individual study and to the industry.
  • We’re extending the platform of the Livingston Awards, creating opportunities for our local, national and international winners to share their stories beyond the original audiences and extend the impact of their work.

Your donation will help Wallace House create and sustain this work. With your help we can bring award-winning journalists to campus to talk about the biggest news stories of the moment; feature our Livingston Award winners at conferences to train young reporters in ambitious reporting projects; create workshops to help our Fellows develop new storytelling skills, present the Livingston Lectures to areas of the country where journalism is viewed skeptically; develop new international partnerships to expand our overseas news tours.

While our Fellowship program has a generous endowment, expanding our programs requires additional resources. At the same time, we are working to build an endowment for the Livingston Awards to secure the continuation of the prestigious prizes for years to come.  Your donation toward our operational costs – no matter the amount – demonstrates to foundations and individual donors of major gifts that the people who benefit from the work of Wallace House believe in the enduring value of its programs.

Lisa Gartner at Livingston Lecture

If you’ve been a Knight-Wallace Fellow or a Livingston Award winner, you know how life changing our programs can be. If you are not among our alumni, but you’ve encountered Wallace House through our programs and the journalists selected for them, you know the high caliber of the people and work we support and the intellectual and creative value they add at the University of Michigan and around the country.

Support the essential work of journalists by including Wallace House in your end-of-year giving. You can direct your gift to the Knight-Wallace Fellowships for Journalists, the Livingston Awards for Young Journalists or the Wallace House Annual Fund, which provides flexible support to both programs.

A gift to Wallace House is a show of support for truth, accountability and the vital role of a free and independent press in a democratic society.

Please, help us help journalists. Donate.

Lynette Clemetson is Director of Wallace House. She was a 2010 Knight-Wallace Fellow. You can reach her at clemetly@umich.edu or wallacehouse@umich.edu. Follow her on Twitter @lclemetson

Reflections from Washington D.C.
A Clear Mission, a Touch of Envy

Letters from grateful readers addressed to
The Washington Post executive editor, Marty Baron,
hang on his office walls.

On a warm October afternoon, as Marty Baron, the venerated editor of The Washington Post, spoke with our fellowship class, I felt admiration, and envy.

Baron outlined how his legacy newsroom was embracing technological changes and had garnered over a million digital-only subscribers earlier this year. The paper’s willingness to adapt, he stressed, was underpinned by its foundational mission of striving for the truth.

Over the past year, The Post has published an impressive stream of stories investigating President Donald Trump’s election campaign, his family members, his business interests and his administration. Earlier that afternoon, as we toured the Post’s newsroom, the outer glass walls of Baron’s office, plastered with grateful letters from readers, captivated me. One note read, “Dear Mr Baron, [… ] Without the hard work of your reporters, our situation today would be so much more dire.” Another said, “Keep asking the important questions. And print the answers.”

Later, as Baron spoke to us, I wondered if in India, an editor like him could survive the political and economic powers that stifle journalism’s core function – “ask the important questions, print the answers.”

Like President Trump, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi loathes the press. Unlike Trump, Modi chooses complete disengagement. He has not held a single press conference in 40 months of holding office. A senior minister in his cabinet coined the term “presstitutes” for journalists asking inconvenient questions. Most legacy newsrooms in India are fearful and self-censor. Last month, the exit of the editor-in-chief of The Hindustan Times, my former newspaper and a leading national daily, was preceded by a meeting between Modi and the paper’s proprietor. The editor lasted in the job for little over a year. Among the paper’s projects, which reportedly upset the government, was “Hate Tracker” – a digital database documenting India’s rising hate[A1]  crimes, including the lynching of religious minorities.

Newsrooms – mostly small, alternative media, and nascent, digital outlets – that are putting up a fight are especially under threat. On October 5, while we were in D.C., Gauri Lankesh, a Bangalore-based editor of a small newspaper, was posthumously given the Anna Politkovskaya Award, established in memory of the slain Russian journalist to honor a female human rights defender. A month ago, assailants had fatally shot Lankesh outside her home as she returned from work.

The day our trip ended, The Wire, a fledgling, resource-strapped website in India, reported how the turnover of a firm headed by Jay Amit Shah, the son of the President of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), had increased 16,000 times over since the BJP took power in 2014. The BJP and Shah did not challenge a single fact in the story. Instead, they have filed a criminal defamation suit of 100 crore Rupees (over $15 million) against The Wire’s editors and the reporter.  

I did not need dispatches from home to remind me of the powerful forces against which Indian journalists persevere. On our trip’s penultimate day, I wandered through the floors of the Newseum, lingering at the Journalists Memorial – a tribute to over 2,000 journalists, killed in the line of duty. Its centerpiece was a towering panel with hundreds of photographs of slain reporters. The collage of faces from around the world was heartbreaking, yet deeply inspiring.

In the memorial’s section titled “Stories of the Fallen – 2016”, the profiles included Karun Misra. The exhibit recorded that Misra, the 32-year-old bureau chief of a Hindi daily in north India, “had received death threats, and refused bribes, designed to deter him from reporting on illegal mining” before being gunned down last February.

I recalled a quote displayed prominently at The Washington Post newsroom: “There is only one good reason to enter journalism. When we do our job, we can make a difference.” The fellowship trip was a powerful reminder of why we must persist.

Chitrangada Choudhury is a 2018 Knight-Wallace Fellow and an independent multimedia journalist based in the eastern Indian state of Orissa.

Apply Now for a Knight-Wallace Fellowship

2018 call for applcations

Lynette Clemetson, director of Wallace House, goes to Medium with a challenge for accomplished, mid-career journalists to step away from their everyday media bubble and join her at Wallace House for an academic year of personalized study and collaborative learning. Are you interested in sharpening your skills, launching a new project or addressing a challenge facing your newsroom? The Knight-Wallace Fellowships for Journalists at the University of Michigan are accepting applications for the 2018-19 academic year. We’re looking for accomplished, mid-career journalists eager for growth and deeply committed to the future of journalism. The deadline for U.S. applicants is February 1.

Qualified applicants must have at least five years of experience and be currently working in some aspect of journalism for a news organization or as an independent journalist. That includes experienced reporters, editors, data experts, visual journalists, audio producers and engagement specialists, designers and developers, entrepreneurs and organizational change agents.

Read more about Clemetson’s challenge on Medium.

Lynette Clemetson is Director of Wallace House, home of the Knight-Wallace Fellowships for Journalists and the Livingston Awards. She is a 2010 Knight-Wallace Fellow.

Reflections from Washington D.C.
No Simple Answers

 

Marty Baron, pictured with Director Lynette Clemetson, was
generous with his time and gave a seminar for the Fellows during
their visit to The Washington Post.

Walking down the street on my way to the Online News Association’s annual conference at the Marriott Wardman Park hotel in Washington, D.C., a recognizable man with short gray hair and neon shorts ran past me. He looked like John Podesta.

If it was Podesta, it made sense that he would be running away from wherever reporters were gathering. As manager of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, Podesta led the post-election hand wringing about Russians stealing his emails, media fascination with the email saga and the need for a more intelligent way to report on politics. Broadly, I agreed with him. That’s why, after 14 years covering politics in New York City, with a popular newsletter under my belt and enough appearances on cable news shows to justify carrying a blazer and tie in my backpack, I decided to apply for a Knight-Wallace Fellowship.

I was so steeped in daily political coverage that when I heard my class of Fellows was coming to D.C., it seemed incomprehensible that we would do anything other than talk about the 2016 presidential election the entire time. I was surprised when the conversations unfolded differently.

Our group met with Marty Baron, executive editor of The Washington Post, and top editors at NPR and The Atlantic. All were adapting a digital-dominant approach to news and figuring out how to deliver more content to their core constituencies and paying customers. I wondered about the unseen costs of this faster, customer-focused approach.

I hoped to get answers at the conference. When ONA started in 1999, it was like a support group. Digital reporters were interlopers in the newsroom, afterthoughts sitting at the kids’ table, far away from the adults. Today, across the street from the conference hotel, an old Washington Post newspaper box sat empty, spray-painted black and locked. The conference, by contrast, was crammed with over 3,000 digitally-focused attendees. Surely this would be the place to offer direction on the issues nagging at me. How should we use the internet to better cover politics? How are smart reporters using Facebook and Twitter? Can I make a podcast about politics as popular as a cat video?

There was plenty on offer about the latest digital trends. Left hanging, though, remained the thorniest questions raised by the 2016 presidential election. For instance, can reporters clustered on the East Coast reliably cover Red State America? This topic was front and center in ONA’s first session, led by CNN’s Brian Stelter: “Trust, Truth and Questions for the Media.” Panelist Nikole Hannah-Jones, a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, said the public is losing trust in the media because newsrooms aren’t diverse enough. Cenk Uygur, co-founder and host of The Young Turks, said it was less about race and more about poverty, an issue “corporate media” and well-paid reporters are not good at covering.

Both of those seemed correct, and yet, incomplete. I found myself nodding along when public radio reporter Asma Khalid said the primary problem was a dearth of reporters in the majority of American communities. She noted a disturbing trend during the presidential race. Reporters – often from the East or West Coasts – tracked down voters – often in the middle of the country – grabbed their quotes, then left. Practically nobody stuck around, let alone made return trips. Khalid did. “I never thought I’d see you again,” one voter told her. The anecdote reminded me of the “left-behind” places ProPublica reporter Alec MacGillis spoke about weeks earlier at the annual Graham Hovey Lecture back in Ann Arbor.

On the final day of the conference, I entered the main ballroom minutes before the start of a session called “When Satire is the Most Effective Political Coverage.” I sat down next to a man conspicuously older than most at the convention. It was Jeff Jarvis, director of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism and a professor at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. We talked about the fact that the American Society of News Editors was slated to hold their annual meeting in the same hotel a week later. The ASNE conference, Jarvis speculated, would be much smaller. He was drawing a direct correlation between conference size and industry potency.

Jarvis looked out at the amorphous ONA crowd in the ballroom – many still ambling to their seats with tote bags full of CNN water bottles and Facebook notebooks – and said, “They don’t realize they won.”

I left Washington and ONA with more questions than answers. That’s similar to how I started my career at the Queens Tribune, often returning from press conferences with pages full of quotes and a head full of questions. Now in Ann Arbor, that confusion feels comforting. The questions wouldn’t be worth studying if the answers were easy.

 

Azi Paybarah is a 2018 Knight-Wallace Fellow and a senior reporter at Politico New York covering City Hall, politics, crime and the New York Police Department.

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.