American Indian Journalism Institute

American Indian students will be paid to write for their school newspaper even if their tribal colleges don't have one.

"Reznet" a new online newspaper, will hire 20 Native American college students around the country as reporters and pay them $50 a story to cover their tribal communities or colleges. "Reznet" reporters potentially can write one story per week, earning as much as $200 per month. Some of the reporters also will receive digital cameras.

Transmitting the stories and photos to the newspaper will all be done via email. In addition to salary, the "reznet" reporters will receive college credit for their work, making the project the first distance-learning journalism course available to tribal colleges.

While the intent of "reznet" is to produce more Natives entering professional journalism, project organizers also hope the newspaper will become an important, popular and crowded place for Native students to gather on the internet.

"I really believe it will make a difference," said Denny McAuliffe, "reznet" project director. The electronic newspaper's first edition should be online by May 1 and will be available at www.reznetnews.org http://www.reznetnews.org "Reznet" became a reality earlier this year when the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation funded McAuliffe's longtime idea with a $250,000, two-year grant to the University of Montana School of Journalism. McAuliffe, enrolled in Oklahoma's Osage tribe, is the University of Montana's Native American journalist in residence.

McAuliffe said he will be recruiting students for "reznet" this summer at the second annual American Indian Journalism Institute, "a journalism boot camp for Native Americans," as he calls it. The summer institute at the University of South Dakota trains American Indian students in a three-week course that covers reporting, editing and photography. The program is funded by the Freedom Forum, a foundation dedicated to diversity in newsrooms.

McAuliffe said he plans to work closely with the Native American Journalists Association (NAJA) and the American Indian Journalism Institute (AIJI) both to recruit and place "reznet" reporters: Untrained reporters would be steered to AIJI and NAJA's Native Voice, the annual conference newspaper produced by college students; graduates of AIJI and Native Voice would be hired for "reznet" so they could collect enough clips to land internships--and eventually jobs--at daily or tribal newspapers.

McAuliffe also plans to visit tribal colleges around the nation about once a month to spread the word about "reznet" and recruit interested students. For many summers, while a Foreign Desk editor at The Washington Post, McAuliffe served as a mentor at NAJA's Native Voice and he credits the experience with introducing him to many of the challenges in persuading and training Native students to become professional journalists.

"Over the years some of us [in NAJA] have been racking our brains about how to increase the number of Native Americans in [mainstream] journalism," said McAuliffe, who serves on the NAJA board of directors.

Of the 56,000 journalists working at daily newspapers in the United States, only about 300 are Native Americans, according to a recent survey by the American Society of Newspaper Editors. NAJA believes that number is inflated and there are actually only about 100, McAuliffe said.

Only about two of the nation's 31 tribal colleges have printed newspapers--Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kan., and recently Salish Kootenai College in Pablo, Mont. (Si Tanka College's newspaper, Si Tanka Vision, last year become the Cheyenne River Sioux's tribal newspaper.) A few other tribal colleges publish occasional newsletters. "Reznet" initially will hire 20 reporters -- one per tribal college - but eventually one or more from each tribal college could work for the newspaper once it grows. In this way, said McAuliffe, "reznet" will bring a newspaper to tribal colleges that don't have one.

"It is intended to be the school newspaper for these tribal colleges without a newspaper," he said. The student journalists also will be paid. "In order to show [students] that journalism is a viable profession,"said McAuliffe, "we've got to pay them."

Ultimately, the publication will provide aspiring Native journalists with clips, which can help them get internships that will help them get jobs, he said. McAuliffe will be chief editor of the online publication, teaching student journalists from a distance via email. Before stories are published in the newspaper, he said, they will be subjected to thorough editing.

The give-and-take of the editing process over email or the telephone is where the teaching of journalism will transpire, said McAuliffe. In fact, 3reznet2 will become a distance-learning course, with credit provided by the University of Montana, and it will be the first distance learning journalism course offered to tribal colleges.

UM School of Journalism Dean Jerry Brown, co-author of the 3reznet2 grant, said students can learn as much from their fellow students if not more as from their professors. "This project involves technology that will allow us to reach across vast geographic distance," Brown said. "Students can see their own work and the work of their counterparts across the country." The actual "reznet" Web site will reside in Oakland, Calif., at the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, a non-profit corporation working to expand opportunities for minorities in journalism.

Anyone interested in working for "reznet" or in obtaining more information should call McAuliffe at 406-243-2191, or email him at mcauliff@selway.umt.edu