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Senior ESPN Writer comes home

Each semester, the T. Anthony Pollner Distinguished Professorship endowment brings exceptional talent from the working world of journalism to teach a seminar class. This fall semester, ESPN the magazine and ESPN.com Senior Writer Kevin Van Valkenburg is carrying on the tradition; except that he is the first Pollner professor to be returning home, and the first to have known the endowment’s namesake.

Photo of Kevin Van Valkenburg
Kevin Van Valkenburg is a 2000 graduate of the UM School of Journalism.

The program began in 2001, when Anthony Pollner, a graduate and former staff member on the Montana Kaimin, died in a motorcycle accident. Van Valkenburg and Pollner were friends and co-workers at the Kaimin during their shared time at the University.

“Anthony was someone who inspired a lot of us,” Van Valkenburg said.

In addition to being back at the University, town and state that he calls home, Van Valkenburg is excited to pass along his enthusiasm for story telling in all its forms, and inspire the kind of ambitious work he knew Anthony loved.

Professor Henriette Lowisch, who first came to the University as a Pollner Professor, sees Van Valkenburg as a natural continuation to a great tradition. “The idea of the Pollner professorship is to inject the reality of the industry into the J-school,” she said.

Van Valkenburg’s experience with a wide variety of media – radio, website and magazine writing, makes him a real asset to students. “That’s such a unique experience he brings,” she said.

Students in Van Valkenburg’s class are learning the nuances of writing great non-fiction and embracing the challenge inherent in a Pollner Seminar. “Sometimes, from really awful things, can come wonderful things,” said Van Valkenburg.

By Andrew Graham
montanajournalism J-School

J-School Professor speaks about science journalism

A University of Montana Journalism professor said the Environmental Science Journalism graduate program is a unique part of the Roundtable on the Crown of the Continent.

Logo for the Crown of the Continent Reporting Project
The Crown Reporting Project sponsors students at the University of Montana to produce stories about the environment in the Crown of the Continent region. Learn more about it on the website.

The round table is an annual conference which serves to encourage a dialogue about environmental science in the mountainous north west region of North America. The area known as the Crown of the Continent includes all of Glacier National Park and the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex. It is one of the wildest places on the continent.

September 17th, Professor Nadia White gave a talk about the specifics of the UM J-School’s environmental science graduate program. “We do emphasize the science end of things,” White said, before going on to explain one of the program’s most unique features, a semester long seminar called Story Lab.

In Story Lab, graduate students in the journalism program are paired with their counterparts in the sciences. The science journalists-to-be embed in research labs, where they spend the semester producing stories in all different mediums about the science and the scientists they get to know.

The motivation behind the class is to address a problematic culture gap between science and journalism. Scientists often “worry about letting someone else control the narrative of their science,” White said. Meanwhile, deadline driven journalists are often frustrated at scientists’ reluctance to give definitive responses before the completion of the excruciating peer review process so necessary to science’s function. This program allows both sides to get to know each other, and two distinct cultures.

In addition to Story Lab, White discussed the new Crown Reporting Fund, which supports journalism students as they pursue stories in the Glacier National Park area of Montana and Canada.

This year, two graduate students have been paired with accomplished professional journalists as mentors. Celia Tobin teamed up with Ted Alvarez, editor of the environmental news website Grist to pursue a story on border crossing contamination from mine waste. Ken Rand is paired with Christopher Joyce, a science correspondent at National Public Radio, to write about invasive fish species in the Flathead Valley.

“Our whole program is based on the idea that we’re in a terrific place to learn to tell stories about the landscape,” said White.

By Andrew Graham
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Just do it.

Ira Glass speaks to students and professors from the UM J-School

Radio demigod Ira Glass came to Missoula last week to entertain the public radio faithful, and to speak to J School students. Of the many lessons he imparted, one stuck with me: don’t wait, he said, before starting to create the journalism you have in your head. This is good advice for many reasons.

Ira confessed it took him decades to get good at radio. He stressed that the only way to get good at journalism is to do it. If you could buy journalism training at the drug store, the directions would read: write, edit, repeat. Learning about the history of journalism is a noble pursuit, so is trying to analyze trends in coverage. But the only way to become a great writer is to write. Great photogs need to shoot, radio folks need to gather sound, and of course we all need to post and tweet.

Part of Ira’s point is that there’s no need to wait until some employer gives you permission to do a story. Reporters—and students—today can develop their own news products, and can publish without a big backer. The podcast explosion has opened up new possibilities for many creative minds, and has turned out to be a great source of revenue for Ira’s show, This American Life. The barriers to entry are dropping. Your audience will be small at first, but you will be learning, and you may come up with something that will impress a prospective employer. So why are you wasting time with this blog? Go start your own.

By Larry Abramson