montanajournalism Awards, J-School, Student

15 J-School Students Win Awards from the SPJ

A week ago, the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) released its Mark of Excellence awards, and 15 UM journalism students were announced as category winners in Region 10, encompassing Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Oregon and Washington. Yet even more J-school students received acknowledgment for their work, recognized as finalists in those same categories.

SPJ logo

“The wide range of projects that we’re being noticed for includes the entire spectrum of journalism, covered in these awards, and that’s pretty cool,” Ray Ekness said, professor and director of student success.

Professor and director of faculty affairs, Dennis Swibold agreed. “It just seems like the whole gamut of what we teach is getting national honors,” he said. “If we’re not just good, but good at lots of things, that proves we have a well-rounded program.”

SPJ set their standards high and stated that in their contests, if none of the entries received rose to a level of journalistic excellence, they would refrain from giving out that award. However, UM students rose to the challenge and received recognition in categories that covered photography, reporting, writing, radio, online and television pieces. Six of these students were selected for at least two different projects, and some even received awards in different mediums.

“To see it happening across the range is very rewarding. We’ve encouraged them to be more than one kind of journalist and it shows,” Swibold said. “Students are becoming ambidextrous and proving that they work well across different mediums.”

Swibold cited senior Sojin Josephson as the apex example for accomplishing exactly that. Josephson won in the sports writing category and was a finalist in the television feature and television general news reporting categories. Her winning piece, “Kicking and breathing: Daniel Sullivan’s body quit football, but Sullivan couldn’t quit the game,” which she wrote for the Montana Kaimin, will go on to compete at the national level.

The 14 other winners also compete at the national level against students from different regions and recognized in the same category.

Not only were students’ individual projects honored, but the SPJ recognized UM’s Student Documentary Unit and the UM News class for their collective work.

“In class, students aren’t just talking about doing journalism, they’re going out there and doing it—class work is extended beyond class,” Swibold said. “I’m proud to see the fruits of last year’s labor pay off. There’s a lot of excitement in the department right now. We’re small, but we know the students and we’re very accessible to them.”

The UM School of Journalism is currently ranked 8th in the nation and celebrated its centennial birthday in 2014. National winners in the SPJ 2015 Mark of Excellence Awards will be announced later this spring, and will be honored at the Excellence in Journalism convention in New Orleans, running from September 18th-20th.

The complete list of Region 10 SPJ awards results is available on their website.

montanajournalism Events, Graduate, J-School, Student

Live Reporting Via Social Media: Grad Students Experiment At Vandana Shiva Lectures

Graduate students in the Environmental Science and Natural Resource Journalism program used several social media platforms for reporting live coverage of Vandana Shiva’s lectures at the University of Montana last week.

By reporting live, via Twitter, Instagram and Periscope, the grad students tried to engage with a broader audience and instigate a conversation with people who weren’t physically present to hear Shiva speak. Prior to Shiva’s talks, to gain journalistic insight on Shiva’s influence, Associate Professor Nadia White had the grad students read a controversial profile on Shiva that the New Yorker published in August 2014 and the consequent responses from Shiva, the New Yorker’s editor and outside journalists.

Vandana Shiva speaks at the Dennison Theater
Vandana Shiva speaks at the Dennison Theater on Wednesday, February 24th, 2016. Photo by Courtney Gerard.

Vandana Shiva, an environmental activist who passionately opposes genetically modified organisms (GMOs), spoke at the University of Montana on Wednesday, February 24th. During the afternoon she led a seminar called “Living Seed, Living Soil, and Earth Democracy”. Then, in the evening Shiva spoke as part of the Brennan Guth Memorial Lecture series, sponsored by both the Environmental Philosophy and Environmental Studies programs. Both presentations were part of the on-going President’s Lecture Series at UM.

Shiva’s evening lecture, “We Are All Seeds: Food Security and Environmental Sustainability,” followed the metaphor of humans as seeds, as Shiva spoke about the need to preserve the diversity and health of both physical and metaphorical seeds. Her presentation was met with a packed theater and three standing ovations. More people queued up for the Question & Answer sections than she had time to address.

From Shiva’s hotel room in Missoula, she said that looking out at the Clark Fork River reminded her of where she grew up in India. Over the years, she watched a swimming stream dry into a trickle and a natural forest turn into cultivated apple orchards. “I realized how vitally our ecosystems are under threat,” Shiva said. “And how much we took them for granted.”

Some J-school graduate students took Shiva’s quotes to Twitter—capturing both the questions Shiva raised as well as her prolific statements about how industrialization has changed humans’ relationship with nature. Katy Spence received an immediate like when she captured Shiva’s message, “We’ve been brainwashed to believe we are separated from nature…that nature is dead.”

Courtney Gerard also felt quick support from Instagram after posting pictures of Shiva speaking in the Dennison Theater. Gerard also had an eye on the crowd and captured a few people thinking more critically of Shiva’s message. While she snapped pictures of the audience and Shiva from center stage, Gerard left her tape recorder running so she could accurately quote the lecture in further stories.

Benjamin Alva Polley noted Shiva’s efforts to make a connection with UM community members. Polley tweeted Shiva’s opinion, “Campuses are not just about education anymore, but about life.” At the evening lecture, a researcher at UM asked Shiva what she would tell academics researching GMOs and furthermore, what evidence would she need to change her absolutist stance against GMOs.

“My scientific background tells me this is not the future,” Shiva said. She continued to speak about the corporations promoting GMOs “only to collect royalties,” and called GMO research an “inaccurate science” and “failed technology.”

Looking out at the full auditorium, Shiva asked, “How long do these corporate benefactors take care of you or the planet?”

Graduate student Matt Roberts noticed the lack of verifiable, scientific facts backing up Shiva’s prolific speech. He produced a multimedia article via Storify that addressed the disconnect between Shiva’s anti-GMO beliefs and the vague scientific facts she cited. In Roberts’ editorial “Going Through The GMOtions” he wrote, “If you attended the event to gain a deeper level of understanding about how GMO’s work and why they might be bad other than “because it’s unnatural and people say so,” then you were probably left a little confused.”

During one example, Shiva cited the rates of autism prevalence in the United States as 1 in 35 people and faulted BT toxins and GMOs in gut bacteria. She predicted that ratio would rise to 1 in 2 in the next hundred years.

However, current autism research reflects a ratio of 1 in 68, and to understand autism’s role in the brain, current research focuses more on the neurological and genetic causes. Additionally, autism experts think that the recent rise in both awareness and diagnoses programs also contribute to the rising rates of people who experience autism spectrum disorder (ASD), so Shiva’s prediction reflects more on scare-tactics than scientific fact.

Coming from a journalist perspective, the main challenge came not from any controversial opinions about GMOs or Shiva’s personal beliefs, but from the lack of her ability to answer the basic and specific “who, what, where, when, why and how” questions.

While Robert acknowledged Shiva as a notable scholar, the tone of her lecture made him feel like he was reporting on a politician instead of a scientist. Roberts said, “The whole evening was an anti-GMO pep rally.”

The next event in the Presidential Lecture Series, will take place on Monday, March 21st and feature Roald Hoffmann, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1981.

By Jana Wiegand
montanajournalism Events, Feature, guests, J-School, Student

Award-Winning Documentary Director, Chad A. Stevens, Speaks At J-School

Chad A. Stevens, director of the documentary “Overburden,” tried out two other titles for his film before settling on the third. Appropriately, Stevens’ presentation at the UM School of Journalism on Wednesday, February 24th, also came with three potential titles: “The Life, Death & Afterlife of a Documentary,” “How in the World did I Survive this Thing?” and “Thank God for Talented Friends and Box Wine.”

“Overburden” played at the Wilma Theater as part of the 2016 Big Sky Documentary Film Festival later that same day. The film follows two women in the heart of Appalachian coal country and their fight to save Coal River Mountain from the Massey Energy Company after an underground fire kills 29 miners.

Stevens said the first iteration of this project began while he was working on his master’s thesis at Ohio University. However, his moment of inspiration began several years earlier, in 2003, during his time as a photojournalist-in-residence at Western Kentucky University. One day, Stevens and a friend were driving through the hills when they crested a ridge and Stevens got his first look at a mountain top removal site. “There was a shocking amount of destruction,” he said.

Chad A. Stevens speaks to the audience a screening of “Overburden” in Boulder, Colorado.
Chad A. Stevens speaks to the audience a screening of “Overburden” in Boulder, Colorado. Photo by Erin Hull.

Originally Stevens focused on the environmental aspects of coal mining. He photographed events at the Mountain Justice summer convergence and followed the activists who chained themselves to bulldozers at the top of Coal River Mountain. Yet Stevens realized that this story lacked the intimacy to connect with a broader audience. He looked to the valley where people lived right below the mining sites, whose blasts shook their homes’ foundations.

“I started to have this idea that maybe it could be more,” Stevens said. “I was like, 100% heart. I have to do this no matter what.”

It took Stevens about two years to gain the trust of one of his main characters, Lorelei Scarbro, who had seen plenty of journalists disappear after getting their pictures and quotes from the community. Yet Stevens referred to time as a gift and said it allowed him to understand what mattered most to Scarbro and her battle against coal.

“I was so damn stubborn and wouldn’t leave,” Stevens said, and his patience paid off. “To be there when her grandson was born—that never would’ve never happened without that time.”

One of the project’s major turning points came on April 5th, 2010, when a methane leak and an errant spark caused an explosion in the nearby Upper Big Branch mine.

“As you can imagine, that deeply impacted the community,” Stevens said. “And of course, it changed the film as well.”

A second main character emerged—a pro-coal activist whose brother died in the explosion and spurred her to join Scarbro’s fight.

Stevens also realized that the film’s central theme switched from an environmental perspective to more economy-based story, which explored how extraction-based economies limit local communities.

During the production process, Stevens licensed some of his footage and sold it to organizations that were working on tangential stories, as long as he knew they wouldn’t overlap with “Overburden.”

“I actually paid an editor to edit my film because I felt too close to it,” Stevens said.

Looking back on this ten-year project, Stevens reminded the room full of UM Journalism students about the importance of reaching out to others for help and the importance of remaining humble, because “it’s always bigger than just us.”

Stevens also spoke of the potential that comes from “opportunity blindness.” He said, “When you first start off, there’s no way to know what doors will open down the road. You just got to put it out there.”

While funding such projects remains a challenge for today’s journalists, one of Stevens’ teachers once told him, “Sometimes you do what you gotta do to feed your belly. And sometimes you do what you gotta do to feed your soul.”

Now a tenured professor at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, Stevens has his own mantra for students to learn.

“It’s all about collaboration and community,” Stevens said. “When we care, we as the story-tellers care, that care transfers.”

 

“Overburden” is currently available for rent on iTunes, Amazon, Google Play and Vudu. Check the film’s website or follow its Facebook or Twitter accounts for details about upcoming screenings.

To learn more about UM J-school affiliates reporting on coal communities in Montana, check out second-year graduate student, Andrew Graham’s contributions to National Geographic’s blog The Great Energy Challenge, and adjunct professor, Matthew Frank’s publications on Mountain West News.

By Jana Wiegand