Cartoonist will be Dean Stone speaker
Two UM juniors snare Dow-Jones internships
Ekness gets award for cowboy poet feature
Veteran Seattle Times staff photographer visits
Commercials for UM Foundation pay off
Student answers 'Oh Canada' call

Cartoonist will be Dean Stone speaker

Self-portrait by Mark Fiore

The real Mark Fiore

Political cartoonist and animator Mark Fiore has agreed to be this year’s Dean Stone Night speaker on Thursday, April 20, the night before the School of Journalism’s annual awards banquet.

Fiore, from San Francisco, creates animated political cartoons for a number of online news sites. He recently received the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award as well as an Online Journalism Award from the Online News Association and the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.

Print Department Chair Carol Van Valkenburg met Fiore at the Robert F. Kennedy Awards ceremony in Washington, D.C. while accompanying J-School students, who won an award last spring for the school’s Native News publication. 

Fiore joins a long list of Dean Stone speakers that include former NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw, NewsLab Director Deborah Potter and Bill Marimow of National Public Radio.

Dean Stone Night, an event dedicated to awarding student scholarships that began in the 1920s, is named for Arthur L. Stone, who was the J-School’s first dean from 1919 to 1942. The event became formal in the late 1950s when the scholarship fund, largely formed by private donors, started to increase.

Van Valkenburg estimates that about $90,000 will be awarded this year, though how many scholarships that will be is still undecided. Students can only apply for two of the scholarships, while faculty members award the rest.

“The faculty just makes judgments based on the criteria of the donors,” Van Valkenburg said. 

For more information on Mark Fiore, visit his Web site.

-Hannah Heimbuch

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Two UM juniors snare Dow-Jones internships

photos by Garret W. Smith
Ethan Robinson	Allison Squires

J-School juniors Allison Squires and Ethan Robinson will spend the summer of 2006 as copy editing interns through the Dow Jones Summer Internship Program.

Robinson will work at the Los Angeles Times while Squires will intern at the Reno Gazette Journal in Reno, Nev. When he got the phone call on the last day of the fall semester, Robinson said, the only thing he could say was, “Wow!”

The Dow Jones Newspaper Fund offers annual summer internships in business reporting, newspaper copy editing and sports copy editing. The internship includes a training seminar and a $1,000 scholarship for students who return to college.

 To qualify for the copy editing internship, students must take a copy editing test and fill out an application. The test was administered in late October, and the application for the program was due Nov. 1

Robinson said he didn’t have any problems with the test.

“I guess I considered it sort of easy just because Denny (journalism professor Denny McAuliffe) had given us his own version of that test a couple weeks prior to when I’d taken it, and that one was harder,” Robinson said. “It wasn’t easy, but easier than I had thought.”

Robinson said he’s still surprised and is looking forward to the summer. “I think I’d always imagined myself at like one of the local papers where my mom lived,” he said, “and now I’m thinking larger scale and I’m thinking I could work there for like 30 years.”

Squires also was surprised by the news, though it took her a while to get it.

 “I had lost my cell phone that week, and so it was really hard for people to contact me,” Squires said. “Luckily I had put my parents’ home address and phone on there, and so luckily my mom hadn’t been feeling well that day and she came home sick and got the message and called me.”

When Squires finally received the message, she was ecstatic.

“I honestly didn’t think I had that much of a chance, and I started jumping up and down,” she said. “I’m really excited about the internship; I think it’s a great opportunity for me to get foot in the door.”

-Sarah Swan

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Ekness gets award for cowboy poet feature

photo by Michelle Gomes

Ray Ekness

Professor Ray Ekness, chair of the Radio-Television Department, recently received a reward for journalism from the Broadcast Education Association. As a part of its national Festival of Media Arts, the BEA recognized Ekness’ documentary segment on a Montana cowboy poet as an excellent faculty news production.

Ekness filmed Great Falls poet Paul Zarzyski performing in Hamilton, then visited with him at his home in Great Falls, highlighting the Montanan’s unique poetry, old-fashioned typewriter and love for silk cowboy ties. The project was one of four segments Ekness produced for the Montana Arts Council’s Governor’s Arts Awards. 

Ekness won similar awards from the BEA in 2001, 2002 and 2003, all for a segment he produces twice a year at the University called “Backroads of Montana.”

Ekness has been working at the University since 1990, and is now a full-time professor teaching audio and video production classes at the School of Journalism.

“Ray Ekness has a national reputation as a master of production techniques,”  said J-School Dean Jerry Brown. “He is known for his values with respect to journalism generally, and he is a superb teacher and mentor.”

-Hannah Heimbuch

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Veteran Seattle Times staff photog visits

photo by Garret Smith

Betty Udesen speaks to the Native News class about her experiences while covering the tsunami that hit Indonesia in December 2004.

Betty Udesen has always gone with the flow. She keeps open to new possibilities and pays attention to the things that interest her. 

“I find a need and I fill it,” said Udesen, a staff photographer at the Seattle Times for more than 20 years. 

Udesen visited the University of Montana in late February, talking to photojournalism students about her adventures and also about audio recording during assignments.

photo by Garret Smith

Betty Udesen wears a bracelet that resembles a 35mm film-strip .

From stories and photos covering AIDS issues in Africa to "‘Life and Dignity in Colombia," Udesen tackles social issues with a passion to bring the visual truths to a larger audience.

Udesen said she enjoys speaking to students. “I’m energized when surrounded by students who are asking questions and who see the potential to grow," she said. "It’s wonderful, like taking a pulse of where student journalists are today.”

-Garret W. Smith

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Commercials for UM Foundation pay off

photo by Michelle Gomes

Gus Chambers, adjunct instructor in the R-TV Department, goes over a quiz in his Introduction to Television Production Class. Chambers recently won an award from the Montana Advertising Federation.

How to create eye-catching commercials for a UM fundraising campaign?

For Gus Chambers, the answer was blowing in the wind.

Chambers, an R-TV adjunct, won an Addy Award and a national Gold Award for his video spots produced for the UM Foundation’s $100 million fundraising campaign, Invest in Discovery .

He won the Montana Advertising Federation Addy for two of six video spots he submitted to the Great Falls Advertising Federation, or Ad Club.

For the first commercial, Chambers said, he “ripped it off” Bob Dylan’s music video for “Subterranean Homesick Blues.”  In the original video, Dylan stands in an alley while singing and tossing cue cards of the lyrics.

In Chambers’ ad, Monte, the UM grizzly bear mascot, stands in an alley with cue cards of the campaign’s bullet points. A “Dylanesque” version of the UM fight song, “Up with Montana,” plays in the background.

“It was just so bizarre that you had to keep looking at it,” Chambers said.

An alternative version of the Dylan video — not submitted for the contest — has UM President George Dennison standing in for Monte, wearing sunglasses and a deadpan expression and throwing cue cards willy-nilly around the alley.

In the other winning commercial, a little girl slumbers while the camera zooms out and flashes the campaign’s bullet points on the screen. The UM fight song plays like a lullaby throughout the commercial, and at the end, the camera shows the girl sleeping with a little Monte bear in her arms.

For his Admissions Advertising Gold Award in Television Advertising/Series, Chambers submitted the nine-minute video he produced to kick off the fundraising campaign. The magazine Admissions Marketing Report gives out the awards, and Chambers won the Gold Award for Group 4, which includes schools with 10,000 to 19,999 students.

- Katrin Madayag

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Student answers 'Oh Canada' call

photo by Garret W. Smith

Peter Bulger

In a way, it’s like going home.

Peter Bulger, a print journalism junior, will represent the University of Montana J-School in a study tour of Canada from March 18 to 26, joining 12 other U.S. journalism students.

“When I heard about this, I was pretty stoked,” said Bulger, although at first the stress of having to miss a week’s worth of classes and homework weighed heavily on his mind. 

After much thought, however, Bulger said he knew he had to try “whether I have to flunk out or not.”

The students will visit Montréal, Ottawa, Calgary and Vancouver, said Nathalie Belanger of the Canadian Office of Foreign Affairs in an e-mail. “Our goal is to expose the future journalists to various aspects of Canada's economy, politics and culture,” she said.

Bulger’s family ties to Canada are especially strong. His family is mostly from Great Falls, but Canada is like his “other home.”

His American grandfather grew up in Montreal and attended McGill University. Bulger’s father also attended medical school at McGill. In addition, his extended family has a 60-year tradition of spending a week at Waterton Lakes National Park in Alberta each summer.

In his application essay, Bulger described his family’s strong ties to Canada as well as his double major in history with a focus on international relations and five and a half years of studying French.

Twelve J-School students submitted essays, and professor Sharon Barrett made the decision, basing it on the students’ essays, GPA and demonstrated interest in Canada.

-Katrin Madayag

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