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.

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.

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.

Knight-Wallace Fellows Travel to D.C.

Fellows travel to D.C.
Knight-Wallace Fellows meet with leaders in the nation’s capital and participate at ONA.

International travel has long played an important role in the Knight-Wallace Fellowships, taking the mid-career journalists in our program to places facing transformative social and political change. We’ve witnessed economic collapse, corruption scandals, public protests, government repression and tumultuous leadership shifts in countries including Argentina, Brazil, Turkey and Moscow. Last year we traveled to South Korea for the first time on the heels of massive street protests that led to a presidential impeachment.

As we started to plan travel for this year, it was impossible to escape the fact that few countries now are facing more consequential change – with more global implications – than the United States. So this October we’re heading to the most intriguing, perplexing, maddening place of the moment – Washington D.C.. We’ll hold seminars with interesting thinkers, players and influencers. And yes, we’ll request an audience with the Trump administration. Who knows whether we’ll get to Yes. But we are sure the pursuit will be interesting.

With major political shake-ups happening nearly every week, Washington also seemed to fit the running narrative of upheaval that has come to define Knight-Wallace trips. We’ve immersed our Fellows in culture, both ancient and modern, communed in the rainforest, met with scholars, court justices, political leaders, musicians and artists. But social tumult has been such a persistent backdrop of the destinations we choose, that it has become a running joke of sorts: If the Knight-Wallace Fellows are coming to your country, a coup or catastrophe may be afoot.

Washington D.C. is also the location this year for the annual Online News Association Conference from October 5 to October 7. After spending the early part of our trip in Fellows-only seminars, this year’s class will gather with hundreds of journalists and innovators around a shared commitment to advancing our industry and the technologies that support our craft. We’ll have a booth at the ONA conference to introduce new groups of journalists to the many benefits of a Knight-Wallace Fellowship. We also expect to absorb plenty of new ideas for how we can enhance our programs.

This will be a year of robust engagement for Wallace House. We’re continuing to expand our public events around the country and for the campus community. In addition to welcoming back 2011 Knight-Wallace alum Alec MacGillis for the 32nd Graham Hovey Lecture, we’ll hold public events with Pulitzer Prize winner David Fahrenthold of The Washington Post, former Livingston Award winner Lydia Polgreen of the Huffington Post and Livingston Awards national judge Bret Stephens of The New York Times.

Our globe-trotting resumes in the winter term. It’s an especially fortuitous time to have strong connections in South Korea, and we are eager to return. Last year our Fellows met with officers representing the more than 30,000 U.S. soldiers, airmen, sailors and Marines based in South Korea. We got an up close window into their “Fight Tonight” readiness if North Korea’s military provocations rose to dangerous levels. At the time, it sounded oddly hawkish, a blast from the past seemingly at odds with the relative geopolitical calm of the region. What a difference a year can make.

Whether in Washington, Seoul or on campus in Ann Arbor, we look forward to a visible and active year. At a time when the essential role of journalism is being so openly undermined, it is important to have a presence and a voice, supporting journalists and the vital work they do.

Lynette Clemetson is the Charles R. Eisendrath Director of Wallace House.

Learning to Wear Many Multimedia Hats

What’s the best way to get to know new people who share a common interest? Join a club. As we settled in for the first semester of our fellowship, we noticed a recurring theme in discussions at Wallace House: the growing need to be your own everything on assignments. We would have to become the videographer, photographer and audio technician on every story. The message came in loud and clear, over and over again: newsrooms are looking for more content to post on the website, on Facebook, on Twitter, and it’s up to us to be efficient providers.

With these ideas in mind, we started the Knight-Wallace AV Club. Think beyond the high school version; there are no film projectors or running slide shows. This AV Club focused on digital world problems including improving camera and audio skills. Print, radio and television journalists joined the club. Most had basic knowledge of professional DV cams and audio setup but some were starting from scratch. My biggest concern stemmed from past experience. After I had completed my former company’s training program, I went for months without needing to use the equipment and suddenly, I would need to haul out that box of gear, hoping my memory didn’t fail me on deadline. However, the club’s built-in mandate to practice together gave promise to committing these techniques to our long-term memory banks.

We quickly found that this fellowship organization needed a faculty advisor. New Knight-Wallace board member Jim Burnstein and Assistant Director, Birgit Rieck, found just the right fit in Screen Arts and Cultures instructor, Victor Fanucchi. He navigated around our busy class and seminar schedules to create a program tailored to our individual needs. Working out of both Wallace House and Michigan’s Instructional Support Services Media Center, Victor covered a different topic each week. Club members got the chance to focus on one area of learning: lighting, audio, composition or a complete overview of each topic. The same amount of time was spent on the science behind shutter speed selection as strengthening a person’s comfort level handling the equipment.

Television producer Eric Strauss said, “Even as someone who has already had experience using videos cameras, lights and microphones as a producer at ABC News, I found the KWF AV club very valuable. Victor was able to combine introductory and advanced elements in the same class. For me, the sessions proved to be refreshers and an opportunity to learn some advanced techniques.”

I am left-handed by nature. Working with Victor, however, I realized I was faster and steadier working with my right hand. Beyond learning from Victor, we learned from each other. Jason Margolis, correspondent with Public Radio International’s program “The World,” shared his audio knowledge. He offered tips for handling sound in spaces with less than ideal acoustics and how to get the best microphone position for interviews on the fly. Associated Press reporter Samantha Henry recounted her experiences as a multimedia journalist, reassuring us that with patience we, too, could successfully navigate this new way of covering stories from a multitude of different angles.

Even after completing the formal sessions, Club members are still in action. As fellow Larry Lage develops his project, a news platform for the deaf and hard of hearing, we are video documenting his progress and conducting on-camera interviews as part of his audience research.

Bottom line: the future favors multimedia journalists. As newsrooms rely more on social media to promote content and engage viewers, we can find more opportunities to extend coverage and raise our digital profiles by improving our abilities across all platforms. The Knight-Wallace AV Club brought us all a little closer to reaching that goal.