montanajournalism Awards, Feature, J-School, Montana Kaimin, Student

Dogged Reporter, Peregrine Frissell Wins Hearst Award For Athletic Investigation

Montana Kaimin web editor and reporter, Peregrine Frissell, had never written a sports story before when he started investigating UM’s controversial compliance efforts with NCAA regulations this past October. After being published in the Kaimin on November 4th, 2015, his story, “Unsportsmanlike Conduct,” won 7th in the Hearst Awards competition for Sports Reporting.

photo of Peregrine Frissell holding a small monkey.
Frissell takes a moment to pose for a photo while reporting abroad in Nepal. Photo by Peregrine Frissell.

“Peregrine did a great job of looking at athletics on the UM campus beyond just the scoreboard,” said Nadia White, faculty advisor to the Kaimin. “His story looked at NCAA rules and regulations and examined what those mean for student athletes.”

Frissell’s research involved digging into those regulations and interviewing UM athletic officials and the NCAA representatives to whom they report any infringements. Violations included anything from coaches recruiting high school athletes too aggressively to convictions of current athletes who commit off-the-field incidents. Frissell said talking to public representatives of those departments was challenging because they wanted to keep control of the information they told him during interviews.

Kevin Van Valkenburg, the fall 2015 Pollner professor and advisor to the Kaimin, said, that a lot of journalists would have dropped the story when they heard officials use the term ‘minor infractions’. “Don’t let the administration convince you it’s no big deal. Ask the right questions,” he said. “UM mis-reported and mis-understood the facts, but Peregrine understood the bigger picture here, and he pursued that to explain it in context.”

“I needed every minute I got,” Frissell said, since he only had two weeks to get the story to print. “I’m really thankful to get recognized.”

Yet Frissell has plenty of reporting experience, both in Montana and abroad. He’s been a Global Leadership Initiative fellow at UM and completed studies in the UK and Thailand, as well as working as a reporting intern for the Nepali Times. “I arrived a month after the earthquake and spent much of my time outside of Katmandu, covering earthquake recovery,” he said. “The earthquake was tragic, but I enjoyed my experience there.”

Back on the UM campus, Frissell has worked with the Montana Journalism Review (MJR) as both an editor and a reporter, and he’s now pursing political stories on the Crow Indian Reservation in Montana as part of the class Native News.

“Peregrine is a dogged reporter. He’s critical and curious, and his instincts are spot on,” Nicky Ouellet said. As a graduate student, she’s overseen his work at MJR and now for Native News. “He’s the type of reporter an editor hopes for—capable of following a tip to create a deeply reported and contextualized story. I’ve enjoyed working with him and can’t wait to see what he pops out in the future.”

Scheduled to complete his journalism degree in May, Frissell said he wants to report in the US for a couple of years and then go back abroad. “I’m still waiting to hear back about potential jobs and internships,” he said.

However, Van Valkenburg has high hopes for Frissell’s future. “He reads a lot and is interested in things of public interest and importance,” he said. “Peregrine will make a great investigative reporter.”

Catch the latest news updates with Peregrine Frissell via Twitter.

By Jana Wiegand
montanajournalism Awards, Feature, J-School, Student

Sarah Yovetich: Covering Breaking News & Winning A Hearst Award Too

selfie of Sarah Yovetich
Photo by Sarah Yovetich.

Commercial radio may be Sarah Yovetich’s first love, but a story she produced for UM News in the fall semester won 12th place in the Hearst Awards TV News category. The piece, “Budget Cuts Result From Decreased Enrollment, State Funding at University of Montana,” took three weeks of research, interviews and editing to compact the news into a minute and 36-second long story.

Yovetich’s photographer for the piece, Peter Riley, pitched the idea after the budget cuts were released right before Thanksgiving break. “We never thought anything was going to come out of it,” Yovetich said. But the campus unrest that followed proved otherwise.

“It’s not just teachers that care, but students,” Yovetich said. “It proved enrollment’s a thing to be worried about.”

However, her research took a step back from the students and staff responding to the university’s proposed budget cuts capture a broader perspective and ask the question, “were the budget cuts out of line?”

“This was a strong story because Sarah found a new angle on UM’s budget cuts by digging into the history of state funding for higher education,” said Ray Fanning, associate professor who co-teaches UM News. “She discovered that at the same time enrollment was falling, the state legislature was reducing its allocation to UM.”

Ray Ekness, who co-teaches UM News with Fanning, agreed. “Sarah did some really good work in UM News this past semester, and it’s nice to see that she’s being recognized for that.”

Yovetich’s worked with Ekness ever since her first introductory journalism class, and she dropped her political science and business majors to switch to journalism. “I loved him and everyone in the journalism department,” Yovetich said. “I really lucked out finding journalism.”

During the summer between her freshman and sophomore year, Yovetich worked as a campus anchor for Montana Public Radio, and since then she’s transitioned to other commercial radio stations in Missoula. She covers news stories for KGVO during the week as an on-air broadcaster and reporter. “Some of the newscasts I do everyday are sent state-wide, so you’ll be able to hear me in different cities, which is kind of cool.”

On weekends, she turns into a DJ for the show “Campus Connection” on 107.5 ZooFM. Yovetich said, “I love relating my life to others and connecting with the community.”

Back on campus, Yovetich just finished serving a full year as the president of the Alpha Phi sorority’s Chi Chapter. The sorority’s helped her with scholarships and academics, as well as serving as a second family to her. Yovetich helped return the support to her sisters through motivational Instagram posts that share her dedication to power-lifting regimes. She now holds five state records in the squat, bench press, and dead lift.

“It’s hard being a senior and balancing that stuff,” Yovetich said. “School’s definitely taking a precedence this year.”

When she graduates in May, Yovetich’s ready to take her journalism skills beyond Missoula. She’s staying open to opportunities in both broadcast and radio fields to continue gaining more experience.

“She’s always been working in things like radio,” Ekness said. “Now she’s stepping out in television, so it’s kind of exciting for us.”

Tune into 107.5 ZooFM on Saturdays and Sundays from 10am-3pm to hear Sarah Yovetich hosting the “Campus Connection.”

By Jana Wiegand
montanajournalism Awards, Feature, J-School, Student

J-School Student Awarded Study Abroad Fellowship

Autumn Barnes-Fraser traveled to Germany for the first time between high school graduation and University of Montana orientation. Despite the nearly 5,000 miles between her hometown of Helena, MT and Berlin, Germany, “As soon as I hit the tarmac, I knew I had found home,” she said.

photo of Autumn Barnes-Fraser

Now Barnes-Fraser will be going back to Germany two more times, as part of the Missoula-to-Berlin International Reporting course at the J-school and for the Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange (CBYX) program for young professionals. The CBYX program is a public diplomacy fellowship funded by the U.S. Congress and the German Bundestag and covers most of the participants’ expenses.

Barnes-Fraser found out she won the CBYX fellowship on March 7th, 2015, about a year after submitting her written application and successfully passing the interview process. The notification left her both ecstatic and dumbfounded. “I get to live in a culture that I love so much, and in a country that I feel so close to,” Barnes-Fraser said.

“Only 75 people across the US get this thing—that’s a big deal,” Associate Professor Henriette Lowisch said. “Passion and dedication are really a thing, they will get you where you most want to go. Autumn has just given us proof of that by winning this very competitive fellowship.”

Lowisch has worked with Barnes-Fraser as part of the Missoula-to-Berlin reporting project. The project’s goal is to document Germany’s response to the refugee crisis while teaching students journalism skills for reporting abroad, in a breaking-news setting. In the fall, students focused on fundraising efforts for the trip, but now they’ve started pitching story ideas.

“Autumn is one of the leaders of our Missoula-to-Berlin reporting project,” Lowisch said. “She’s put in an amazing amount of time and energy, not only for her own sake, but to make the entire team succeed.”

Dean of the UM School of Journalism, Larry Abramson, who is co-leading the trip, agreed with Lowisch.

“Autumn has a special link to Germany, and her passion for our trip to Berlin is evident in her class participation,” Abramson said. “It’s great to see her developing that passion through this trip, and I have no doubt that her coverage of the refugee crisis will be unique.”

Barnes-Fraser said the diversity of students in the class enhanced how they researched and reported their story ideas. While her double major is in Broadcast Journalism and German, others students have majors in Economics, Political Science and Business. “We all have different interests and different experience levels, so I think we’ll work really well together as a team,” she said.

A month after Barnes-Fraser returns to the States after the Missoula-to-Berlin trip, she will leave for the year-long CBYX program, which is divided into three parts: language immersion, semester studies and a five-month internship. She hopes to focus both the studies and internship on radio journalism. Both NPR Berlin and Deutsche Welle radio stations would offer her the opportunity to report in German, then produce pieces in English.

“I like the local perspective,” she said.

Based on her experience, Barnes-Fraser said locals are usually more willing to talk with foreign reporters who make the effort to communicate in their native tongue. Personally, her favorite journalism pieces relate to human features and long narratives.

Despite the fact that she won’t know where she will be interning until a few weeks before the CBYX trip starts, “I’m excited because of the flexibility and not knowing exactly what will happen.”

Stay up to date with the latest Missoula-to-Berlin news via their Facebook page.

By Jana Wiegand