montanajournalism J-School, Meet the Profs

Faculty Q&A: Professor Elisabeth Kwak-Hefferan on Her Freelance Career and the Power of ‘Campus Energy’

By Kathleen Shannon

Courtesy photo.

Elisabeth Kwak-Hefferan is an adjunct professor teaching a foundational seminar for new graduate students called Journalism and Society. She has done a variety of writing as a freelance journalist and she works as the deputy editor of Outside Business Journal’s print magazine.

Below is a lightly-edited transcript of Elisabeth’s conversation with graduate student Kathleen Shannon. Read to the end to find out how Elisabeth likes to spend her Saturdays in Missoula.

Q: Tell me about your background in journalism. 

A: I started out as a reporter working in a very small rural town in northwest Colorado at the Moffat County Morning News. I loved the job and I hated the town. I decided to go to graduate school after that, and applied to Northwestern and got in there and decided to specialize in magazine journalism. Because that was always my dream: to have a little bit of extra time versus [being] a daily newspaper reporter. I interviewed with Backpacker [Magazine] and got an internship. Right around that time, they were bought by Active Interest Media. They had been in Pennsylvania and they moved to Boulder, Colorado, so I was super excited about the chance to move [there]. I worked there as an intern for eight or nine months and then one of the junior editors happened to leave and so that opened up an assistant editor job that I got. So I started out editing the “Skills” section of Backpacker, [which] still remains near and dear to my heart. Then I decided to try a job [at an] educational media company and learned a bunch of video stuff and also learned that that wasn’t really where my heart was. So I got back into print and magazine journalism as a freelancer and I’ve worked on a variety of things over the past decade or so. I’ve done some freelance editing, I worked as the editor of Yellowstone Journal Magazine, which has turned into National Park Journal since I left. I have written all types of stories for Backpacker, 5280 Magazine, Women’s Adventure, The New York Times. I am also the deputy editor of Outside Business Journal’s print magazine, which we launched about three years ago. I’ve been doing that on a contract basis ever since. 

Q: That was probably a really cool learning process. 

A: Yeah, it was. We really had to build a magazine from the ground up. And we had to do it fast because the company really wanted to distribute it at the outdoor retailer show that year. When we started [it was] early fall and it was done by January. That’s kind of our timeline now for an existing magazine. Doing that plus also deciding what it even was, was crazy. But it was really fun. And it’s been really well-received. We’ve gotten a whole bunch of awards and award nominations. So it feels really good to be a part of it. 

Q: What are some of your most fun duties as an editor? 

A: The best part of any production cycle is always the beginning. It’s the brainstorming phase when [we] have kind of a blank canvas and we have to figure out what we’re going to put on there. It’s like piecing together a puzzle because you have specific topics and areas that you want to hit like, for example, DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion resources). Inclusion is a really big part of our magazine, so we always want to make sure that we’re representing that topic in some way. Sustainability is a huge part of it. We want to make sure we have a good mix of writers and a good mix of types of stories. You know, we’ve got 80 pages to fill and we meet together and brainstorm different ways to do it. We bring in our art team and they talk about the different ways that we can visually put these together, which is always really fun because that’s not my strong suit.  

Q: I bet having 80 pages to fill feels like a big moment of possibility. 

A: [Then] you kind of get into the grind of actually doing it. That’s fun: to work with individual writers. Particularly with a less-experienced person who’s got a lot of potential, it’s really rewarding to kind of help them figure out how to find their own voice and how to put a story together. Then you get to the last couple of weeks [when you’re] just reading the same thing over and over again. It’s really daunting. 

Q: How does it feel to be back on a campus and teaching here at UM? 

A: It feels great. I always was just a big fan of school, in general. I loved college, I loved going back to grad school and just being back in that environment because you don’t really have the same, you know, business pressures. Really, it’s a place where you’re supposed to just dedicate yourself to learning and getting better and talking about big ideas and figuring out what you want to do with your life. I think that environment is just very invigorating and inspiring. So it’s really nice to be back among students who are in the middle of that. And it’s fun to just be on the campus and feel the energy of the campus scene. 

Q: Who are some writers that you admire and like to read? 

A: I love Susan Orlean. She’s awesome. A colleague and friend of mine who I think is brilliant is Tracy Ross. She writes about everything, but she does a lot of outdoor journalism. And she’s wonderful. Bruce Barcott. He’s out of the Pacific Northwest, and he does a lot of really interesting kind of environmental and outdoor stuff. 

Q: Tell me about a project from your career that you’re proud of.  

A: My very first big feature story was a neurology and outdoor piece that I did for Backpacker. I think we ended up calling it “Hiking makes you smarter.” It was about research in the Utah desert. There’s a researcher who is at the University of Utah who was look[ing] at how wilderness immersion changes the way the brain works, specifically relating to [how it] restores your executive function. So I got to shadow him and a couple of his co-researchers as they went on a trip in southeastern Utah, [while] they were coming up with the way they wanted to tackle it. It was such a cool way to bring hard science into a magazine like Backpacker and a great way for me to learn how to handle a bigger story. 

Q: What kind of fun thing do you find yourself doing on an average Saturday in Missoula? 

A: We almost always are out on a local trail with the kiddos. You know, they’re not super fast. It’s not usually a hardcore hike, but we take them somewhere beautiful and let them run free. And everybody’s in a good mood and everybody gets tired. 

Q: Great! That’s like me and my dog. 

A: Four-year-olds and dogs are very similar. You gotta work ‘em out. 

montanajournalism J-School

Fall T. Anthony Pollner Distinguished Professor Jan Winburn Says Even When the News is Bad, It Pays to Stay Engaged

Editor’s note: You can listen to and download Jan Winburn’s full lecture on Soundcloud here. You can also listen to the full lecture here or with the video below.

By Kathleen Shannon

Jan Winburn, this semester’s T. Anthony Pollner Distinguished Professor, understands why people may be feeling burned out on the news.  

“I was not surprised to learn that the word ‘doom scrolling’ was added to the Oxford American Dictionary in 2020,” she said to a crowd of about eighty students, professors and community members in the University Center Theater on Monday, September 27. 

But, in her lecture titled “Don’t Tune Out: How the Barrage of Bad News can Make You a Better Person,” she said there may be benefits to staying engaged.  

“Research shows that the traumatic and the tragic are avenues to connection and compassion. And what do we need more in this polarized world?” she asked. 

Winburn’s interest in trauma reporting began on the worst day of her own life — when she learned her brother, Jim, had died in a military plane crash.  

She was at the start of her own career in journalism when she was interviewed by a journalist about her loss. 

“[The journalist] was in pursuit of a story like so many, a headline that marks an ending. It was the ending of a search, the end of my brother’s life and the end of our hope. But sometime after that day, and the years that followed, I began to understand personally and as a journalist, that where every headline marks an ending, a new beginning was about to unfold,” she said. “And those were the stories I became interested in telling.” 

Frank Ochberg, founder of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, calls this reporting  “Act Two” journalism — “Act One” as the witnessing, “Act Two” as reporting on what comes after. Winburn said this is where journalists have the opportunity to report in a “better and more humane way.” 

Act Two journalism “is often the product of what I call ‘slow journalism,’ in which a reporter can give survivors time to process what has happened to them, and perhaps make some sense of it,” Winburn said.  

“Let me be clear, these stories do not deny or erase the suffering. But telling them seems [as] important as bringing you the news. They give a fuller, more balanced account of human trauma and recovery. They convey complexity and subtlety. They aren’t just informational. They are experiential. They touch the heart, as well as the head,” Winburn said. 

“Sometimes the story can be told within days of a tragedy. More often it takes weeks, months or years. This type of storytelling has its own effect on readers, listeners and viewers. Research has shown that the more information the brain absorbs about a person, the more empathy grows for that person. In other words, deeply told narrative stories—stories that put you in someone’s shoes—can spark feelings of empathy,” she said. 

Winburn referred to the work of Harvard professor and social scientist, Arthur Brooks, who has said some people who have been through trauma may later experience “post-traumatic growth.”  

“We’ve all known somebody who’s gone through some terrible trial, and yet, says: ‘that was the worst time in my life and it was the best time in my life.’ They’ve survived a devastating trauma, but they report feeling transformed: changed in some positive way,” Winburn said. 

Winburn witnessed that very phenomenon in her own family in 2009. Thirty years after her brother Jim died, an Air Force friend of his called Winburn’s family to tell them about the recent local effort to clean up the crash site where Jim had died, which was high up in the Utah mountains. The work crew had found a watch, the owner of which they could identify by a serial number.  

It was Jim’s. 

Winburn, her parents, and her brother, Jack, took a trip to visit the site two years later. They were guided by locals and followed a GPS to find the exact site — a scar on the mountain still visible after three decades. The family left a small, granite marker on the site. Winburn said she was comforted by the beauty of the place. 

“The next morning at breakfast in the hotel, my mother recalled being awakened in the middle of the night on December 3, 1977,” Winburn said. “My father [had been] traveling and she was home alone when the two Air Force officers knocked on the door. My dad listened quietly. He’d always regretted not being there with my mother in that awful moment.”  

“But soon, he was caught up in his own reverie. He replayed for us every moment of our journey from Georgia to Utah and Nevada, to the Goshute Reservation, to the peak known as Haystack Mountain. It was, he told us, one of the best days ever.” 

Winburn encouraged listeners to curate their news by looking for these “Act Two” journalism stories: 

 “Students who graduated from this university, people who teach here or have taught here, and students learning the ropes today: they tell these stories. Or, they will. Because these are the stories that matter.” 

The Pollner professorship was created in 2001 by the family and friends of T. Anthony Pollner, a 1999 School of Journalism alumnus who died in a motorcycle accident. You can learn more about the professorship here. Winburn is the 28th Pollner professor at the School of Journalism. You can read more about Winburn’s background in Kathleen Shannon’s recent Q&A with her.

Kathleen Shannon is a first-year graduate student in the School of Journalism’s Environmental Science and Natural Resource Journalism Master’s program.