, reznet project director
Office phone: (406) 243-2191

Denny McAuliffe directs reznet, an online journalism training and mentoring program for Native American college students around the country. Reznet is intended to increase the number of Native Americans working in professional journalism.

Five foundations fund reznet. They are the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation, the McCormick Tribune Foundation, the Gannett Foundation and the Freedom Forum.

For his work on reznet, McAuliffe was awarded the University of Montana’s 2006-07 Nancy Borgmann Diversity Award and the 2005 Barry Bingham Sr. Fellowship from the National Conference of Editorial Writers, presented annually to a journalism educator committed to preparing minority students for successful careers in journalism.

McAuliffe, an enrolled member of the Osage Tribe of Oklahoma, has taught reporting at the past seven sessions of the Freedom Forum’s American Indian Journalism Institute, a three-week journalism training program for Native American college students. Reznet recruits many students from AIJI, which McAuliffe helped to create. A 1999 Freedom Forum grant brought McAuliffe to the University of Montana School of Journalism from The Washington Post, where he worked for 16 years, mostly as a foreign desk assistant editor.

In 2000 and 2001, McAuliffe was one of four Freedom Forum Diversity Fellows, who traveled across the country to colleges and universities with high minority enrollments to identify talented students of color for careers in print journalism. McAuliffe visited 65 colleges, many with high enrollments of American Indians.

He is the author of "The Deaths of Sybil Bolton: An American History," an account of the murder of his Osage grandmother during the Reign of Terror against the Osage Indians in the 1920s (republished in paperback as "Bloodland: A Family Story of Oil, Greed and Murder on the Osage Reservation").

He is a U.S. Army veteran, and winner of the 1995 Oklahoma Book Award for Non-Fiction, and of Vanderbilt University's 1968 Grantland Rice Memorial Scholarship for Sportswriting.

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