Knight-Wallace Reunion 2020

 

 

For Fellowship Alumni:

We’ve decided to space out the frequency of our beloved fellowship reunions to every five years. The date for our next big get-together will be September 4-6, 2020. We expect that Labor Day weekend, with plenty of notice for advance planning, will entice you and your families back to Ann Arbor for a beautiful September visit.

We hope to see Fellows from what will by then be all 47 fellowship classes for a weekend of engaging events, dinner and dance, and, of course, barbeque at Wallace House.

As our plans develop, we’ll be in touch with information on hotel bookings, RSVP’s and more.

For now, save the date!

Wallace House

Q & A with Wallace House Director Lynette Clemetson and Hovey Speaker Bernice Yeung

Bernice Yeung arrived as a Knight-Wallace Fellow in 2015, following an intense period of collaborative reporting that produced two award-winning investigations, Rape in the Fields and Rape on the Night Shift. Since the Fellowship, she has published a book, “In a Day’s Work: The Fight to End Sexual Violence Against America’s Most Vulnerable Workers.” Bernice returned to Wallace House in September to give the 33rd annual Graham Hovey Lecture. Prior to the lecture, Lynette and Bernice had a conversation discussing the relevance of her reporting in the context of the #MeToo Movement.

 

 

Clemetson: You first started writing about sexual abuse of low-wage workers in 2012. How do you view the cultural change in our recognition of and conversation around the issue?

Yeung: There has been a complete transformation of the public dialogue. When we started in 2012, the campus sexual assault conversation was ongoing and robust. Simultaneously, the military sexual assault investigations were happening. There was a slow drumbeat of looking at sexual violence in different corners of society. But now, post-#MeToo, it is part of the daily headlines. The conversation is almost inescapable. There is a completely different resonance now.

 

Clemetson: And yet, much of the current conversation is around prominent figures. Do you think that the people that you focused on are being represented enough?

Yeung: There is a part of the movement that is about understanding the prevalence of sexual violence. And then there is a fascination with the comeuppance aspect of the story, an interest in famous people and the fall of power. I think more attention ought to be paid to those who are less powerful in terms of their professional and financial positions.

I recently reported a story where I talked to women truck drivers, public health workers, government workers, and hospital techs. They were excited to see the way #MeToo has opened up a space to have these conversations. But a lot of them still wonder whether that opening has reached them yet. They were impressed by the famous women who had come forward, amazed and grateful that they had spoken up, but they also really wondered why when they themselves had spoken up, why they weren’t heard in the same way.

 

Clemetson: What drew you to this particular corner of the issue?

Yeung: There was an element of it that I was inclined to be curious about because of my own family’s immigrant background to the United States. I had done some stories on domestic violence and immigrant women and had seen the holes and gaps in policy and law when it comes to assisting immigrant women, and how seeking any kind of recourse or help was so formidable for those women.

 

Clemetson: How did approaching the issue for a book lead you to new insights?

Yeung: We tend to think of sexual harassment as a problem between two individuals, as a behavioral problem by a bad apple. The book helped me look at policies, how companies operate, how industries function and how they create environments that make certain workers more vulnerable. So much of our labor law enforcement is predicated on the worker making a complaint. And when you have a population who are low wage, immigrant, perhaps with tenuous immigration status, living on the edge of poverty, expecting them to come forward is not realistic. We don’t have a realistic way for them to engage with the resources that would enable them to put an end to labor abuses.

 

Clemetson: There seems to be a greater appetite and more space now across platforms for journalism that explores issues systemically.

Yeung: Yes. I am lucky be a journalist in this moment where there is space for investigative journalism about systemic issues. I have always been interested in melding sociological strategies with journalism. My study plan was looking at how social science research strategies could be applied to journalism. I think there is something about what sociology provides, a systems-based orientation, plus an attempt to quantify, along with qualitative human interviews, that makes sociology a kindred spirit to journalism.

 

Clemetson: How did the fellowship inform how you approached the book?

Yeung: I don’t think I would be the same journalist I am now if I had not done the fellowship. I don’t think my book would exist. The mental and emotional space that the fellowship provided made it possible to do this book. I was coming off several years of looking at this issue when I arrived, and the mental fatigue was real. It was really important to give myself some time to stop, regroup and fortify myself so I could job back into it.

And there were so many resources at the university that I drew from. For instance, Catherine MacKinnon in the University of Michigan Law School, is THE person, THE scholar, who defined what sexual harassment is. Having the opportunity to learn from her and others like her left me astonished. What I was able to bring to the book in terms of a contextual and systemic look, that was possible because of the time I had at the university.

 

Clemetson: As this issue has exploded, it has also caused turmoil in many news organizations.

Yeung: I have been so heartened and impressed by the incredible reporting that has been done by the dogged and sensitive journalists working on this issue, the amount of vetting and checking, and deep research and reporting. I don’t know if the general public appreciates how serious and rigorous the reporters have been on these stories. And then you have journalists who are raising this issue, even as they are having to report on their own organizations and call into question the authority of their own employers. I just have so much respect for the work that is being done, and I appreciate those who are doing the work.

 

Clemetson: Do you feel that we truly are in a moment of change, a substantive shift?

Yeung: I see parallels to the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas moment. I am sure we’ll look back on #MeToo and see it as a watershed moment and a shift in the cultural consciousness. But I think the question is, now what? There is work being done around prevention and solutions, and those are harder stories to cover. As reporters, we want things to be concrete and evidence-based, something we can measure. The slow culture change that seems critical to shifting the way we deal with sexual harassment is harder to document. But I think that is where we need to be paying more attention now.

 

Clemetson: So you intend to keep going.

Yeung: As much as I can, yes. I intend to. I am in that space now where I want to know that it is all going to lead to something, some tangible example of change. I am definitely watching and tracking. It is important to tell those stories about how change can happen, how reform can happen.

Korea Without Frilly Clothes

A highlight of the trip: revisiting my grandparents’
place in Seoul and digging up old photos that I didn’t
find as interesting on previous trips.
Photo submitted by Candice Choi

Staring at video of the Samsung chairman allegedly with prostitutes, I knew this trip to Korea would differ from my past visits.

The hidden camera footage was published by Newstapa, an investigative group formed in 2012. The newsroom was one of the first stops for the Knight-Wallace Fellows and signaled I’d be seeing the country from new perspectives.

My last trip to Seoul was more than 20 years ago, when I was in high school. Upon arriving for childhood visits, my conservative grandparents would take my brother and me shopping for stuffy clothes and make us wear them to a formal restaurant. The ritual made me see new clothing and the entire country of Korea as suffocatingly superficial.

Yet after learning the Fellows were headed to Korea, I grew excited about returning with a reporter’s mindset. I read up on modern Korean history and politics and began to see the country’s vibrancy.

Among our stops were a museum of antique Korean furniture, the taping of a K-pop TV competition, and a U.S. military base. We also went to the Demilitarized Zone, which jarringly played to tourists with cardboard cutouts of soldiers for photo ops while also reminding us of the peninsula’s tragic past.

Our visit would take on added significance weeks later, when the leaders of North and South Korea would meet at the same site to discuss denuclearization and perhaps formally ending the Korean War.

Back at the Newstapa office, our host was a young woman who left her job with the police force to become a reporter, inspired in part by the movie “Spotlight.” She wore a modern black hanbok that gave her an authoritative presence as she explained libel laws that allow journalists to be criminally charged.

Newstapa nevertheless published video that appears to show the Samsung chairman with prostitutes. Adding to the intrigue, the tapes were apparently obtained for blackmailing purposes before ending up with Newstapa.

It was ethically messy, making the decision to publish all the more daring.

Newstapa’s model of relying on reader donations is also provocative. The idea is to gain public support as an independent news source in a society where conglomerates have huge power. The approach is a challenge to news outlets around the world.

Outside newsrooms, some of the best moments were unscheduled, such as people watching on the subway and wandering alone on the striking campus of Ewha University. Over a late night coffee, a friend who works as a TV sports analyst explained his quest to emulate the argumentative style of New York sports radio. I laughed imagining a Korean version of “Mike and the Mad Dog.”

The highlight of the trip, though, was returning to my grandparents’ apartment, which was largely unchanged from my childhood. My grandfather died of stomach cancer years ago and my grandmother has Alzheimer’s disease, making it too late to ask about their pasts. But I dug out stacks of old photo albums I had never bothered looking at before.

The black-and-white images showed them in unfamiliar contexts – smiling on a train, mingling at a garden party, wandering down a Seoul alley. I realized how little I knew about their lives, which spanned Japanese colonialism, the Korean War and the country’s economic boon.

Growing up, I thought my grandparents were overly conservative and limited in their worldview, traits I chalked up to their Korean background. In the years since, I’ve come to see the immaturity of those judgments, a realization this trip helped underscore.

Candice Choi is a 2018 Knight-Wallace Fellow and Food Industry Writer for the Associated Press (New York, N.Y.).

Figure it out – Apply for a Knight-Wallace Fellowship at the University of Michigan

Now is the fight time to apply for a Fellowship
Mosi Secret 16′ explains how a Knight-Wallace Fellowship
changed his life both personally and professionally.

Mosi Secret, Knight-Wallace Fellows Class of 2016, shares on Medium how his Fellowship year changed the trajectory of his professional life and how it impacted his personal life.

He explains why he left his job as a reporter for The New York Times, a position that for many represents the pinnacle of American journalism. 

He discusses how it felt walking away from his comfortable life in New York in pursuit of what he describes as an ill-defined dream. Secret maintains that his time at the University of Michigan was the beginning of a march toward a deeper and more sustainable sense of happiness and professional satisfaction.

“If you’re thinking of changing your life and career,” said Secret, “there’s no time like the present. Apply.” Learn more what about what attracted him to the program.

The Knight-Wallace Fellowships for Journalists at the University of Michigan are accepting applications from U.S. applicants 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 to apply is February 1, 2018.

Read Mosi Secret’s reflection on his fellowship year on Medium.

 

Mosi Secret was a member of the Knight-Wallace Fellows Class of 2016. He is an independent journalist based in Brooklyn, NY.  Find out more about what Mosi Secret has been doing post-Fellowship.

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

The 32nd Graham Hovey Lecture

“Piercing the Bubble: Politics, Media and America’s Prosperity Gap” with Alec MacGillis

September 14, 2017

Wallace House Gardens
620 Oxford Road, Ann Arbor

Watch the video recording.

Alec MacGillis, political reporter for ProPublica and 2011 Knight-Wallace Fellow will deliver the 32nd Graham Hovey Lecture. He will address income inequality in the U.S. and the perilous implications of winner-take-all cities and left-behind places.

His reporting and analysis of blue collar voters in the 2016 presidential election earned him the 2017 Polk Award for National Reporting and the 2017 Scripps-Howard Award.  This work included his piece, “Revenge of the Forgotten Class,” which was published the morning after the election and drove much of the post-election conversation. His recent investigation for ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine titled “Jared Kushner’s Other Real Estate Empire,” exposed the disreputable landlord practices of the president’s son-in-law and advisor.

MacGillis is also the recipient of the Toner Prize for Excellence in Political Reporting. He is the author of “The Cynic,” a biography of Senator Mitch McConnell.

MacGillis was previously a senior editor at The New Republic and a national reporter for The Washington Post. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic and The New York Times Magazine.

He earned a B.A. in history and English from Yale University. As a Knight-Wallace Fellow in 2010-2011, MacGillis studied income inequality. His subsequent reporting examined the culprits and costs of this issue with stories ranging from the influence of corporations on public policy to the disruption of Democratic Party strongholds.

The annual lecture recognizes a Knight-Wallace journalist whose career exemplifies the benefits of a fellowship at the University of Michigan and whose ensuing work is at the forefront of national conversation. The event is named for the late Graham Hovey, director of the fellowship program from 1980 to 1986 and a distinguished journalist for The New York Times.

Welcome remarks by Liz Barry, Special Counsel to the President.

A reception followed the lecture.

Watch the video recording.

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Connecting Knight-Wallace Fellows Around the World

Knight-Wallace Alumni Locator

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Covering Trump: The Presidency and the Press in Turbulent Times

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December 2, 2016 

4:00 to 5:30 p.m. 

B1580 Blau Hall
Ross School of Business

Event is free and open to the public

A panel of national journalists and a political science expert will offer analysis about the presidential election and the tempestuous aftermath during a public discussion at the University of Michigan.

The focus will be on criticism of the media, what journalists, pollsters and political experts missed, and the path forward in covering an unprecedented presidency and divided country.

Lynette Clemetson, director of Wallace House at U-M, said it is important to hear from reporters who have covered the presidential election from the beginning.

“It is even more important to turn our attention to what comes next,” Clemetson said. “We are entering uncharted waters. As much as news organizations need to to examine their coverage priorities, news consumers need to become astute in assessing the flood of information coming at them and the role and function of a free press in society.”

The panel includes alumni of the U-M Knight-Wallace Fellowships for Journalists who covered the campaign and will report on the transition, as well as a former Livingston Awards winner and a U-M expert who follows elections and voting behavior.

Panelists:

Craig Gilbert is the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Washington bureau chief and author of “The Wisconsin Voter” political blog. He has covered every presidential campaign since 1988 and has written extensively about the electoral battle for the swing states of the industrial Midwest. Gilbert was a 2010 Knight-Wallace Fellow.

Vincent Hutchings, U-M professor of political science, is an expert on public opinion, elections and voting behavior. He studies demographic change and its effect on voting behavior and how campaign communications are designed to appeal to various group identities.

Tracy Jan is a national political reporter who covered the campaign for The Boston Globe. She focused primarily on the GOP, including Christian evangelicals, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump. This month, she joins The Washington Post to develop a new beat on the intersection of race and the American economy. Jan was a 2015 Knight-Wallace Fellow.

Laura Meckler is a staff writer with The Wall Street Journal where she covered the Democratic presidential primary and Hillary Clinton’s campaign. She has reported on presidential politics, the White House, changing American demographics, immigration and health care. In 1999, she received a Livingston Award for national reporting.

Katie Zezima is a political reporter for The Washington Post where she covered the Obama White House years. She chronicled the campaigns of Kentucky Senator Rand Paul and Texas Senator Ted Cruz from start to finish and before switching to enterprise reporting on social issues riling the election in its final months. Zezima was a 2012 Knight-Wallace Fellow.

Jon Morgan, an editor in the Washington bureau of Bloomberg News since 2010, will serve as moderator. He was a 2001 Knight-Wallace Fellow.

The event is being presented by Wallace House and the College of Literature, Science and the Arts.

Watch video of the event»

Knight-Wallace Fellows Travel to South Korea

Seoul, South Korea CityscapeThe Knight-Wallace Fellows will travel to Asia for the first time since expanding our international news tours beyond North America in 2000. On December 10, our Fellows will board a flight to Seoul. They will gather knowledge of politics, economics and the present situation in South Korea, while also learning about culture and history.

Wallace House Director Lynette Clemetson ‘10, who worked as a foreign correspondent in Hong Kong, is pleased to take the class to Korea. “Exploring journalism, politics and culture in other parts of the world is a cornerstone of the Knight-Wallace Fellowships. I am thrilled to be expanding the program’s travel into Asia. Wallace House has welcomed so many talented journalists from South Korea to Ann Arbor over the years. How wonderful that we can now take our Fellows to Seoul to connect with our accomplished alumni network there.”

Ten classes of Fellows visited Turkey under the leadership of KWF Board Member Ferhat Boratav, editor-in-chief of CNN Turk. We were planning to go to Istanbul again this December when a new travel warning was issued in early November: The State Department ordered the departure of family members of employees posted to the U.S. Consulate General in Istanbul “based on security information indicating extremist groups [were] continuing aggressive efforts to attack U.S. citizens in areas of Istanbul where they reside or frequent.” With a heavy heart and thinking of our alumni and friends in Turkey, we decided to cancel our trip.

Clemetson talked about expanding travel to Asia from the first day she arrived in Ann Arbor. But she wasn’t expecting to do it so soon. With only five weeks to departure, a trip to Korea seemed like a difficult adventure to pull off. But after current Fellow Jin Kim helped arrange a conference call with our journalism partners at Seoul’s Press Association, the Kwanhun Club, the proposal turned into a fun and exciting proposition.

We were assured that it would be possible to put together an informative and eye-opening trip for our Fellows on short notice. Kim has been working for the past month as the liaison between our Korean partners and Wallace House. And our alumni in South Korea moved into action right away, too.

“I just moved to Seoul in April for a new adventure covering the peninsula for Stars and Stripes newspaper. I am looking forward to showing KWF ’17 my new country,” said Kim Gamel ‘15, an American foreign correspondent who spent many years in Russia and the Middle East. Gamel immediately started planning our trip to the border between the two Koreas and arranged a roundtable with U.S. military stationed in South Korea.

Jaepil Noh, KWF ’16, is working tirelessly behind the scenes to schedule our week in Korea. He is trying to take the week off work to be with us. “I will show our Fellows various aspects of Korea especially focusing on its political situation. The DMZ tour will expose them to the past and the future of Korea. I will take them to historical places so they can better understand the long history of Korea. Just come and enjoy!”

Our schedule now resembles a typical Wallace House news tour:

  • Seminars about policy, politics and economics in Seoul
  • Dinner with Fellowship alumni and foreign correspondents
  • Seminar with Newstapa (the Korea Center for Investigative Journalism partnered with current Fellow Bastian Obermayer for The Panama Papers)
  • Tour and seminar at Samsung
  • Trip by express train to Gyeonju, the capital of the ancient kingdom of Silla
  • Travel to the DMZ, the Korean Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea

And of course, we are keeping with our news tour traditions of going to places at the most interesting time:
Since changing our plane tickets from Istanbul to Seoul, the protests calling for the Korean President Park Geunhye to resign have grown. In the past, Fellows have experienced protests in Argentina, Brazil and Turkey. They saw the Canadian oil production tank in Alberta.

Now we will arrive in South Korea in the middle of a fascinating political crisis.

“So I plan to take you to the square where Korean people gather on Saturdays to demand that the President steps down,” said Noh. “The demonstrations are peaceful and people are enjoying them as if they were a festival. If you see them, you will see how humorous and witty and great the Korean people are.”

We are curious and excited to discover Korea, and very thankful for all the help our partners and alumni are giving us.

Here’s to new adventures with KWF ’17!

Lynette Clemetson Interviews Molly Ball

lynette-molly

By Lynette Clemetson

 
Molly Ball ’10, has emerged as one of the most prominent political reporters of the 2016 election season. As a staff writer for The Atlantic, her unsparing analysis of the campaigns, keen observations of society and dry wit have made her a must-read for political junkies. They’ve also made her a favorite of cable news programs and Sunday morning political shows. In addition to following her richly textured stories from around the country and her quick takes on the news of the day, Ball’s tens of thousands of social media followers also delight in her frequent selfie posts, where she makes fun of her glamorous TV makeup then notes that it is time, once again, to “Face the Nation.”
And yet, Ball didn’t grow up watching “Face the Nation,” or any of the other political shows on which she is now a regular. Her family didn’t own a TV.

I asked her about that, as well as a few other things, when she visited Wallace House in September to deliver the 31st annual Graham Hovey Lecture. Her topic, of course: Election 2016 – The Great Disruption of American Politics.

Lynette Clemetson: Many people feel they are getting to know you this election cycle through your television appearances, as much as through your writing. And yet you have a very distant relationship with TV. What’s the importance of television for you as a journalist?

Molly Ball: My parents are retired college professors. My mother felt very strongly that television rots children’s brains. So I was the freak in school who didn’t know what any of the television shows were. The downside of that is that to this day I am culturally illiterate. I’ve never seen an episode of “Happy Days” or “Saved by the Bell.” But the upside is that my consciousness of stories and of narrative was formed by reading books.

Television is not my job. I don’t get paid for it. I just want to have interesting conversations with people. I’m just trying to get my head around what’s happening in this country. America is a puzzle that I’m always trying to solve. I do that by flying around the country and talking to people and seeing things happen, by being a witness to events and then trying to tell that story to other people in a way that makes them think or sheds light on things. The medium really doesn’t matter when that’s what you’re trying to achieve. It can be Twitter, it can be TheAtlantic.com, it can be “Meet the Press” or it can be an article in a print magazine. Which does still exist.

Clemetson: Speaking of print, you have different audiences with different habits there, too. Do you approach the print and digital versions of The Atlantic differently?

Ball: I think I write in the same voice in both publications. What I love about The Atlantic is that since it was founded in the 1850s, it’s been the magazine of the American idea. I like stories that are about ideas, not just about personalities or events. Not “This happened and that happened,” but “What does it mean? Why is it happening? What’s the context, the history, and what does it tell us about the bigger picture?”

Inside The Atlantic, we refer to things as “Atlantic-y.” You know it when you see it. It’s that combination of smart and fun, high and low, in a way that is both enlightening and shareable, which has the great virtue of working really well in our current online marketplace. It doesn’t matter if the thing is a listicle or a photo meme or a 300-word blog post or a 3,000-word story. It’s just about having that sensibility.

Clemetson: How did the Knight-Wallace Fellowship help shape your career?

Ball: The fellowship changed my life. I was stuck. Stuck in a newspaper business that no longer had any sort of upward mobility, at least not for me. I had been banging my head against the wall trying to move up for so long. I thought maybe I should take the hint the world was trying to give me and just get out of journalism altogether, which would have been both heartbreaking and difficult, since I didn’t know how to do anything else. This has been the only thing I knew how to do since I was 12 years old and started a newspaper in my neighborhood in Colorado.

The journalism business had been saying no to me for years and years. And suddenly, at Wallace House, I was in this place where the answer to everything was yes. And it absolutely restored my soul and showed me there was a path forward in journalism.

Clemetson: Was that path immediately clear for you?

Ball: I still didn’t know what that path was when I left the fellowship. Nine months after I left Las Vegas and moved to Ann Arbor, I still didn’t have a job anywhere. But the fellowship restored my sense of possibility and my confidence that I belonged.

My husband and I moved to Washington, D.C., in June 2010 with no jobs, an infant, and a small amount of savings. Politico hired me in late September. I was dying to cover the midterms because I knew the Harry Reid race backwards and forwards. The Atlantic hired me a year later.

Clemetson: Has this election cycle revealed anything to you about yourself as a writer, and as an observer of people?

Ball: There have been times in this campaign when I’ve actually felt that my reporting skills were atrophying because to write an amazing story about what’s happening right now in American politics you don’t need any kind of clever angle. All you have to do is point and go, “Holy crap, look at this.” But it’s a great story. And I feel like I’m learning a lot about America – not all of it happy. Those are the best stories, the ones that make you rethink your assumptions and question all you thought you knew about how this thing works. And having the tools and the confidence and the support to just go out and tell the story the way it needs to be told is an incredible privilege at a time like this.

Clemetson: Campaigns can make journalists cynical. You actually seem excited.

Ball: I’m more excited about journalism than I’ve been in a long time because the election is such a great story. There’s so much texture to it. There will be so many aftershocks. There are so many strands to pull out and explore. And they are going to last for so long after this election.

Four years ago, I was trying to find interesting angles on Mitt Romney, which was sometimes a challenge. I was looking ahead to the rest of my career, thinking, “Am I just going to be writing the same stories every four years until I die?”

But no, because it turns out this thing is always changing. And that’s really exciting and cool. The story most people want to read about an election is who’s going to win. But most of the time that’s the least interesting story. The more interesting story is what is happening out there in America. Who are these voters? What are they thinking? What does it reveal about our national character and society? And the extent of the disruption in this campaign makes me think that we are really at a turning point in American political history, and I don’t think any of us know where it’s going to end.