Montana Kaimin

KBGA

Journalism
Homepage

University of Montana

Picking a Pollner

It takes a special kind of journalist to parachute into a J-school and
kindle the fire in students' bellies, but that's what Pollner professors do.

By Kimball Bennion
J-School Web reporter

A dozen working journalists have applied to be the visiting Pollner Professor at the University of Montana’s School of Journalism next autumn. Whoever gets the job will teach a seminar, advise the Kaimin staff and share his or her expertise with eager journalism students.

Picking a Pollner professor from among the applicants is no easy task. Unless, of course, you’re last semester’s Pollner professor, John Woestendiek.

“I would like to be my successor,” Woestendiek, a Pulitzer Prize winner, said in an e-mail interview from his home in Baltimore.

His semester as a Pollner professor restored some of his faith in the future of the profession, he said.

Each autumn a new Pollner professor arrives stranger arrives at the Journalism School. Four months later, he or she leaves as a cherished colleague and mentor, having made their mark on the next generation of Montana journalists.

The professorship is an endowment from the family of T. Anthony Pollner, a 1999 graduate from the School of Journalism who died in a motorcycle accident in 2001.

Journalism school students, faculty and Woestendiek himself all have their own ideas about what qualities make a great Pollner professor.

Carol Van Valkenburg, the print department chair, said that the school looks for distinguished journalists who can provide students with a distinctive view of the industry. Pollner professors pick what they will teach for their seminar and give their professional opinions about the Kaimin staff’s daily work.

For Van Valkenburg, the fact that these visiting professors are working journalists instead of academics is paramount. They only teach one class for a reason.

“The Pollner professor can focus entirely on mentoring students,” she said. “And I think that’s huge.”

Many students who have worked with Pollner professors said that it was valuable to learn from someone with recent real-world experience.

 “It’s a valuable tool to learn under someone who knows the business so well,” said Karen Plant, a senior in print journalism. Plant took Woestendiek’s seminar last semester.

“He really reminded me why I’m in this business,” said Sean Breslin, a senior in print journalism and the editor of the Kaimin.

One thing Woestendiek taught Breslin was that good journalists should listen.
“All of us need to shut up every once in a while and let other people talk,” Breslin said.

Pollner professors should be full of practical advice like that, students said. And many students said it is up to the students to avail themselves of the experts in their midst.

 “You have to kind of suck them dry before they leave,” said junior print major Bill Oram, a reporter for the Kaimin.

Woestendiek said he wanted to help students peer into their future as journalists. He tried to show students “the good, the bad and the ugly” sides of today’s journalism and what they could do to make it a better field to work in.

In a speech he gave on campus in October, he said that newspapers are losing readers to Web sites and blogs that give short bits of news and don’t go through the same editing and checking processes of traditional journalism.

He said too many newspapers react the wrong way to the loss of readership by using lay offs to cut costs. As a result, he said, quality suffers.

“(Students) are going to have to be majorly dedicated to things like truth, honesty, justice to overcome all the obstacles and do the job in the way it should be done,” Woestendiek said.

Woestendiek’s Pollner seminar was called Journalism with Heart. He worked with students on a multimedia project that investigated the effects the mining industry has had on the small town of Opportunity. His focus, Woestendiek said, was to pass on the importance of getting to know the people at the heart of a big story.

“I wanted to show that, however tough and grizzled a journalist might be, if he doesn’t have compassion and doesn’t gather all the facts and feelings surrounding a situation, he’s just not going to be much good,” Woestendiek said.

Woestendiek won a Pulitzer Prize in 1987 for investigative reporting on prisons and mental health institutions for the Philadelphia Inquirer. He took a leave from his job as a reporter for the Baltimore Sun in order to accept the Pollner position. He is back at the Sun now and said he is renewed by the time he spent with students, especially those on the Kaimin staff.

“They impressed the heck out of me,” he said. “Their dedication and their attitudes gave me hope for an industry that I am sort of losing hope in.”

Back to J-School main page