Reznet keeps rolling with $550k in grants

By Tyler Christensen
J-School Web Reporter

The University of Montana’s Reznet project just got a huge boost.

Reznet, an online newspaper written exclusively by Native American students, was started by UM’s School of Journalism in cooperation with the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education. A grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation got the project off the ground, and now another Knight grant, in the amount of $475,000, along with a $75, 000 grant from the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation, will help it continue to grow.

“It’s getting bigger and bigger and bigger every year,” said Luella Brien, a junior in print journalism at UM.

photo by Luke George

J-School student Luella Brien is a three-year veteran of Reznet

Brien, a Crow tribal member from Billings who recently transferred from Little Big Horn College in Crow Agency, wrote the first story to appear on Reznet three years ago and is still writing for it today.

In fact, the number of students working for the project has doubled since last year, from about 20 to about 40, said Denny McAuliffe, Reznet director and UM’s Native American Journalist in Residence.

Reznet was created as a way to bring together native student voices from across the country, McAuliffe said, explaining that since he couldn’t bring every native journalism student in America to UM, he wanted to set up a system in which they could still pursue a career in journalism.

“It really is a virtual newsroom,” said McAuliffe. Each student has a deadline to meet after numerous edits, and even then there is no guarantee a student’s story will make it to the Web page.

“It’s kind of like a little training ground,” agreed Brien. “Reznet, the whole thing, is like a springboard.”

Currently, the Maynard Institute in Oakland, Calif. hosts the Web site. However, McAuliffe is credited with running the entire project during its first year, from editing to posting pages to finding new students.

“He kind of recruited me,” Brien said of McAuliffe. When she was a senior in high school, Brien came to the annual Kyi-yo Powwow at UM for the Knowledge Bowl. She wrote an essay for the contest and won first place. McAuliffe was one of the judges.

Now Brien has a popular column picked up by newspapers across the country.
“Everyone was reading in the spring of 2003,” Brien said with a smile. That’s when she announced to the world that she was pregnant with twins.

The site is now averaging about 6,000 visitors and 100,000 page requests a month, said McAuliffe. He thinks native students across the country are being turned on to Reznet, and this increased readership is translating into increased interest in the Reznet program, he said.

“Not only are we helping generate all these benefits for students, we’re helping benefit our enrollment,” said McAuliffe, who noted that UM has 12 current Native American journalism students, six of whom are in the professional program.

“No other school has a larger number of Native American students in print and broadcast,” McAuliffe added.

In fact, Brien was inspired to come to UM because of Reznet, and she’s been happy with the results.

“It kind of got my name out there,” said Brien. She said she knew a national audience was seeing her stories when her grandmother, who lives in South Dakota, told her she read one of Brien’s stories that had been picked up off of Reznet by another newspaper, the Native Voice.

The Knight Foundation supports excellence in journalism worldwide. Since 1950, it has made more than $250 million in journalism grants and it currently has 140 active journalism grantees, according to a Knight Foundation press release.

Some of the Knight Foundation grant money will help pay student writers: $50 for every story or photograph the project uses.

Some of the money will likely go toward helping Reznet expand its distance-learning operations to include a writing class, said McAuliffe.

“Reznet goes out of its way to address the dilemma that there are very few Native American students in journalism,” said McAuliffe.

The lack of Native American journalists means that few native students consider journalism as a career because they don’t see any other Native Americans involved in the profession to emulate, McAuliffe said.

Curtis Cox, director of development for the J-School, who helped McAuliffe request the funding, agrees. “There has been a well-known lack of diversity in journalism,” he said. “Every voice needs to be heard.”

As proof of disparity in the newsroom, McAuliffe cited an American Society of Newspaper Editors yearly census that says that out of 54, 000 journalists nationwide, only about 300 are Native Americans.

“One of the points of driving for diversity is to get the people in the newsroom to resemble the people they cover,” McAuliffe said.

This, he believes, will result in a self-perpetuating cycle, in which more Native Americans see natives involved in the news media and begin considering careers in journalism themselves, which in turn leads to more natives involved in the news media.

Last year, Reznet won the Native American Journalists Association’s Native Media Award for Best Internet News Site. McAuliffe expects the project to continue to grow, both in terms of the number of students and in terms of excellence.

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