More J-School News

Senior pictures
First round of Hearst brings features award
J-School gets glowing PNNA evaluation
Brian Howell, J-school alum, dies at 53
R-TV students sprint to semester finish line
Final reporting project looks at city growth
Broadcast student wins scholarship

Senior Pictures

photos by Yogesh Simpson

J-School seniors stand with Dean Brown for the annual senior photo. Print and photo students are in the picture above. Broadcast students are below.

First round of Hearst brings features award

photo by Bret Ferris

Chelsi Moy

The Native News Tab continues its streak in the Hearst Competition with its first award of the year going to senior Chelsi Moy for her feature on a Fort Peck Reservation girl.

Moy said she ran across the story when she was talking with the Native American Studies director at the beginning of the project.

Moy won 13th place in the Hearst feature writing competition for her story about 15-year-old Adriann Buckles, who took on a national problem at her local level. Buckles thought her middle-school lunches were not nutritious and believed they were contributing to an obesity problem that reached far beyond the middle school cafeterias of the Fort Peck Reservation.

Buckles led a student boycott and called for the firing of the entire lunch staff. Her efforts received national attention and won her a trip to Washington D.C., where she spoke on nutrition in public schools

"It was just one of those things I ran into, really,” said Moy. "As for winning an award, I didn’t really expect that.”

The story was entered in the features competition, the first in a series of 13 contests throughout the school year. The Native News stories have placed regularly in the Hearst Awards since the publication began in 1990.

"The subjects themselves are usually interesting if not dramatic,” said J-School professor Carol Van Valkenburg who co-teaches the honors course offered every spring semester.

The Hearst Awards, considered the Pulitzer Prize of college journalism, are funded by the William Randolph Hearst Foundation in conjunction with the Association of Schools of Journalism and Mass Communication (ASJMC). There are six writing, three photojournalism, two radio broadcast news and two television broadcast news competitions each academic year, beginning in October and ending in April.

-Jesse Nation-Ames

J-School gets glowing PNNA evaluation

The School of Journalism at the University of Montana has received an outstanding evaluation from the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Association.

“The school values professional experience among members of its faculty, encourages high achievement by students in its admission policies, maintains close ties with professionals in the field, and exposes students to a wide-ranging liberal arts education,” the evaluation committee wrote.

The evaluation was written by Dale Leach, of The Associated Press in Seattle, Hilary Kraus of The (Spokane) Spokesman-Review and Peggy Bellows of The (Tacoma) News Tribune. The committee valued the faculty’s continuous involvement in the professional world of journalism as well as their regional ties to newspapers. Faculty members strive to bring working editors, reporters, producers, photographers, academics and writers to the school; these connections play an important role in job placement for the graduates of the J-school, the committee wrote.

J-School Dean Jerry Brown said he was delighted by the report.

"It confirms a relationship between the academic community and the professional community that we value and that benefits our faculty and students,” Brown said. "We greatly respect the PNNA as a professional organization that promotes the highest standards of journalistic practice.”

The J-school’s opportunities for Native American journalists were also highlighted in the evaluation. Reznet, an online newspaper created by 20 paid Native American college students and directed and edited by J-School professor Dennis McAuliffe, was frequently mentioned.

“It’s the most impressive report I think we’ve ever gotten,” said Brown.

The PNNA is an organization of daily newspapers in Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Utah, Washington and British Columbia.

-Kelly Jackson

Brian Howell, J-school alum, dies at 53

Brian Howell (M.A. 1994), in a recent picture with his family.

Brian Howell, who taught media law at the J-School in 1990, died Nov. 23 in Madison, Wisc., from lung cancer. He was 53.

Howell was city editor of the Missoulian when he returned to school to earn a master’s degree in journalism. He and Dean Charlie Hood collaborated on a degree program that allowed Howell to take graduate classes in both the School of Journalism and the School of Law. His master’s thesis was an analysis of Montana’s Right to Know provision of the state Constitution. As a graduate student and the school’s Delaney Teaching Fellow, Howell taught the media law class while Professor Bob McGiffert served as acting dean during Dean Hood’s year teaching in Japan. He earned his master's degree in journalism in 1994.

Howell, whose undergraduate degree also was from the University of Minnesota, worked at the Missoulian from 1979 to 1991, when he took a job as national/foreign editor at the Wisconsin State Journal. He was later features editor at the paper until 1997,when he accepted the job of editor of Madison Magazine.

After his death a story in the Wisconsin State Journal said: “He was an admired editor at both publications because of his abilities to work with writers, to bring from them their best efforts and to convince them they were part of something larger than themselves. Those same qualities made him a popular teacher at UW-Madison.”

The paper also called him “one of Madison’s characters, a man people liked to be around, a man who seemed always eager for the next challenge.”

He is survived by his wife, Patricia, and children Katherine, 22, Allison, 20 and Joseph, 16.

Howell’s friends are invited to a potluck dinner and memorial service Dec. 18 at 7 p.m. in the School of Journalism A.B. Guthrie Library.

-Carol Van Valkenburg

R-TV students sprint to semester finish line

Radio-Television students at the University of Montana have been hard at work completing end-of-semester projects.

In Advanced Broadcast Reporting, J-350, students are creating television packages that deal with subjects ranging from the new university housing project near Dornblaser Field to downtown window painting for the holidays and a new program at Big Sky High School.

In professor Denise Dowling’s Senior Seminar, seniors are working on their senior papers. The students had to conduct two “live” interviews and cite at least three different written sources in their papers. The goal of the paper is to have students consider all sides of the issue and reach some conclusion on subjects like plagiarism, media consolidation, violence in the media, investigative reporting, and embedded reporters. Along with their senior paper, the seniors have also been assembling résumé tapes.

In Newsroom Editorial, J-450, seniors are working on the third “Montana Journal,” this one about juvenile justice. Segments will look at parole, probation and youth court in addition to juvenile treatment centers such as Pine Hills, the Swan Valley Academy, and Alternative Youth Adventures. “Montana Journal” will air Jan. 15 at 7 p.m. on KUFM, MontanaPBS.

-Kelly Jackson

Final reporting project looks at city growth

Some J-School students’ final projects for Public Affairs Reporting might be headed for the Kaimin presses next semester.

“I’m hoping that we can get these stories into the Kaimin or some other venue,” said Sherry Devlin, a Missoulian reporter who doubles as a professor at the J-School. “Students will focus in on neighborhoods and the people that live in them to look more tightly at Missoula growth.”

Students from her class will each report on a single case of Missoula’s “growing pains” – infill, urban sprawl, etc. – and will end up with a series of vignettes telling how a growing community is dealing with change, said Devlin.

“I see it as an offshoot of the coverage we’ve been doing of the City Council and elections,” she said. “It has been clear that the overwhelming issue has been growth in Missoula and how it has affected people,” but the final project is structured to avoid writing about such generalities in favor of specifics.

She pointed to Ward 4 Councilman Jerry Ballas’ pending lawsuit over infill and the so-called “spot zoning” of an Orange Street residence for commercial use as just a few examples.

“What I’m hoping for students is that it gives them an opportunity to make use of all the different reporting and writing techniques we have learned this semester and bring those things together,” said Devlin.

The stories will be presented to the class the week of finals and are tentatively scheduled for publication sometime after Christmas.

-Patrick Galbraith

Broadcast student wins scholarship

Natalia Kolnik, a junior in broadcast news, has won a $1,500 scholarship from the Broadcast Education Association. The BEA Scholarship Committee this year awarded scholarships to 18 students from 16 schools for 2004-2005. Kolnik was one of three students to receive the Country Radio Broadcasters Scholarship.She has been invited to attend the nation BEA convention in Las Vegas in April.

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