Dear Friends & Supporters of MPJI,
The McCandlish Phillips Journalism Institute stands in support of journalists doing the vital work of fact-based reporting during this current time of social unrest and put out a short statement here.
As our world has turned upside down with Covid-19 quarantines, we see the importance of fact-based reporting, writing and storytelling. And we are incredibly proud of the work our students are doing through this crisis.
We had to postpone our MPJI Lecture in March with photojournalist Gary Fong as well as a few other events we were planning. But as some programs came to a halt, we kept moving forward alongside our students. Here are some highlights.
JCS Program Graduates:
At a digital commencement on May 9, we sent off our good, brave and ready students into a future that will be brighter. Cheers to the first 10 graduates of our Journalism, Culture and Society (JCS) Major! It has been the fastest growing major at King’s these past three years and now the fourth largest major at the school and a stand-alone academic program.
We focus on developing and placing students into the field as they learn the skills to be a journalist or other media professional. And we are proud that, even amid Covid-19, all of our graduates -- Lauren Davis, Elli Esher, Jillian Cheney, Ryan Turner, Julia Roberts, Taylor Dickerson, Sydney Powell, Kassidy Vavra, Morgan Chittum and Callie Patteson – have exciting opportunities in a range of media outlets and educational institutions (more of those details below). Our team aims to serve our students the way Ivy League universities serve their students (as we experienced in graduate school). Godspeed to our graduates!
Jillian Cheney from Texarkana, Tex., received our Roberta Green Ahmanson Award, which goes to a senior for top academic and journalistic performance. Jillian has a Poynter-Koch Fellowship and will be working with ReligionUnplugged.com this coming year. She served as editor of the EST Magazine and interned at the New York Daily News and other outlets. “Jillian is a young person who demonstrates politeness to everyone she meets. She is intellectually curious. She is intelligent but not arrogant. She is tough but she is also fair. She is joyful but not sappy. She is skeptical but she is not cynical,” said Prof. Paul Glader while giving her the award on May 8.
Also, reminder that we provide 12 students with 4-year McCandlish Phillips Journalism scholarships in the JCS major. We profiled junior Shannon Mason, who is an senior JCS Major from Alaska, a member of the Native American Journalism Association, an outgoing editor in chief of The Empire State Tribune and currently an intern at Rolling Stone magazine and an NBC Virtual University fellow in 2020.
The Empire State Tribune:
The independent student news outlet at The King’s College – The Empire State Tribune – includes the EmpireStateTribune.com web site, the EST Weekly, The EST Magazine, ESTv YouTube channel, a developing podcast and related social media channels on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.
On March 13, 2020, The King’s College announced to students that in light of the escalating COVID-19 pandemic, campus would close and classes would take place remotely for the remainder of the semester. As students, staff and faculty adapted their plans to fit this new reality, the staff at King’s independent student-run newspaper, Empire State Tribune, did the same.
Over the past few months, EST has seized the opportunity to cover this historic moment and its impact on the King’s community at large, all while working and reporting remotely. The content students have produced is a testament to their own resilience and dedication to honing their journalistic craft amid these challenging circumstances. You can read at MPJI’s web site to see the roundup of work the students’ reported including stories about students and alumni (such as NY Daily News reporter Wesley Parnell) who overcame Covid-19 infections, how students approached uncertain post-grad plans and how some continued living on-campus in America’s hardest-hit city. They also offered a sense of community through a video series of faculty reading excerpts from their favorite books.
Freshman Bethany Johnson’s photo gallery depicting the eerily quiet Manhattan streets during COVID-19, “On the Streets of New York: COVID-19 Gallery,” received an honorable mention in the Society of Professional Journalists’ College Coronavirus Coverage Awards.
“As the coronavirus spread around the world, the task of reporting this story became EST’s top priority,” said Prof. Clemente Lisi, who serves as EST’s co-advisor. “Like the 9/11 attacks, this pandemic has hit New York City hard. The work EST has done over the past two months will also serve as a record of how it impacted the King’s community. It is said that journalism is the ‘first rough draft of history.’”
The unfolding of the Spring 2020 semester at The King’s College is not one to be forgotten, and thanks to the staff at EST, it won’t be. While official documents may record the administration’s announcements and the measures King’s took during the pandemic, EST continues to record the response and emotional climate of the King’s community during COVID-19, all while offering hope and connection.
Rising junior Meg Capone was named the new editor in chief of The Empire State Tribune. She interned at Brooklyn Paper this past spring and has written for the EST since she was a freshman.
NYC Semester in Journalism
Spring NYCJ class
Our NYC Semester in Journalism (NYCJ) program now has 40 partner schools including, most recently, Anderson University, Abilene Christian University, William Jessup University and MacKenzie Presbyterian University (from Brazil).
Meanwhile, the 13 students on our campus this spring in the NYCJ program from 10 different universities managed to successfully complete their internships remotely for the last 90 days of the semester, covering Covid-19. Several of them will continue to work for those outlets such as Newsweek, Bold TV and Queens Courier into the summer.
Carol Wambui from Nairobi, Kenya, was our Arne Fjeldstad scholar this spring. She interned at ReligionUnplugged.com. During the Covid-19 quarantine, the family of her classmate and roommate Amalia Arms, from Anderson University in Indiana, graciously hosted Carol and took care of her. We hear this developed positive links for journalism and churches between Kenya and Indiana. We are thankful for Amalia and her family helping Carol and her family and our program in this way.
Fjeldstad Scholar Carol Wambui from Kenya 🇰🇪 with her supervisors at ReligionUnplugged.com, managing editor Meagan Clark and executive editor Paul Glader
High School Summer Academy
Our popular one-week seminar for high school students, Summer Academy, will happen this July 26-30 entirely online and at a reduced cost of $200 per week. Wait! Your high school student can receive 1 college credit, a credential on their resume, deepened knowledge, inspiration into career paths. Yes! They can concentrate on sports journalism training with Prof. Clemente Lisi, arts and culture reporting with Prof. Glader and Prof. Mattingly. Or they can study other topics in finance, philosophy or economics from other faculty at King’s. Applications are due by July 1. Please spread the word to high school students you know who should attend.
Faculty & Staff Updates
JCS major and 2020 graduate Lauren Davis is the newly hired program assistant for the McCandlish Phillips Journalism Institute. In that role, she will assist me and the MPJI team with marketing, event planning and administrative matters of the programs from MPJI including NYC Semester in Journalism (NYCJ), Summer Academy, the JCS program and major and other research and publishing activities of MPJI.
Lauren graduated with a B.A. in Journalism, Culture, and Society with a minor in Business Administration from The King’s College. While in school, she interned with Marvel Entertainment, Philos Project, and data journalism startup Stacker. She also worked on the EST and EST magazine during her time at King’s. Lauren enjoys graphic design, walking around Central Park, and finding some of the best food spots in NYC. She is also engaged to fellow JCS 2020 graduate Ryan Turner, who also worked on the EST throughout college and is now working in public relations roles.
We have appreciated the excellent work of Susanna Loe for the past year as program assistant at MPJI. She has done a fantastic job in her role and contributed to the growth and programs of MPJI. She is taking a new role at the Manhattan Institute. We will miss her and wish her all the best.
We were delighted to have two new adjuncts teaching 3-credit classes in the JCS major this past school year. Chelsea Matiash taught visual storytelling with a focus on photojournalism this past spring semester 2021. Chelsea is a photo editor at The New York Times and has worked at The Intercept, TIME magazine and The Wall Street Journal. Stephen Kurczy taught media law and ethics in fall of 2019 and will do so again in fall of 2020. Kurczy is a journalist who has written for The Economist, Cambodia Daily, Vice News, Far Eastern Economic Review, The Christian Science Monitor, The New Yorker and The New York Times. He has an undergraduate degree in philosophy from Calvin University and a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University where he was a Knight Bagehot fellow. Kurczy is completing a non-fiction book about the national quiet zone in West Virginia.
In addition to his teaching and mentoring at TKC, Prof. Clemente Lisi continues reporting many viral stories for ReligionUnplugged.com and for soccer outlets such FanSided, USSoccerPlayers.com, Sports Card Investor and The Guardian’s These Football Times. He will be writing a screenplay adaptation of his 2012 book, The U.S. Women's Soccer Team: An American Success Story, this summer and working with Nine Thirteen, an Los Angeles-based production company that purchased the film rights to the book. In the latest issue of The Reader on the MPJI website features Prof. Lisi’s talk about his experience covering 9/11 as a young reporter at The New York Post. Prof. Lisi, Glader and team designer Peter Freeby received a $75,000 grant from Knight Foundation to build a new technology with their VettNews.com project to improve the corrections processes for newsrooms. They hired Tanooki Labs to built the product. They installed the product at the EST and ReligionUnplugged.com and are now planning further expansions and tests. The product also won honorable mention in a startup pitch contest at Montclair State University recently.
Beyond TKC and MPJI duties, Prof. Paul Glader was approved to the Fulbright specialist roster for the next four years, meaning he can teach for 14 to 40-day stints at other universities as part of the Fulbright program. He continues leading the Dow Jones News Fund business reporting program, with the problem going totally online this year. And he serves as executive editor of the award-winning site ReligionUnplugged.com and executive director of The Media Project, which took him to several places to teach and speak this past year including Bulgaria, the Czech Republic and Berlin, Germany. He broke a series of investigative stories at ReligionUnplugged in December about a secret $100 billion investment fund connected to the LDS Church. Glader’s stories were reprinted by Newsweek and ZeroHedge and followed by stories in more than 150 other media outlets including The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. The series won a SABEW award for investigative reporting and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 2019.
In addition to her work at King’s, Prof. Alissa Wilkinson continues her work as a film critic for Vox.com. She wrote a feature at Vox on how metaphors shape our perceptions and prejudices, and thus why war is an insufficient metaphor for the pandemic; and this extended conversation with media theorist Tom de Zengotita on the lack of “optionality” of the pandemic and what that means for how we’ll view reality going forward. She was elected to the National Society of Film Critics, one of the country’s oldest elite organizations of critics and is the American representative of the International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI). She remains a member of the New York Film Critics Circle as well.
Senior Fellow Terry Mattingly taught his final semester in the NYCJ program. He continues writing his weekly syndicated column On Religion (which you can find at Tmatt.net) and he continues editing the GetReligion blog, which moves from the administrative umbrella of MPJI to the Overby Center at the University of Mississippi. Watch for a forthcoming issue of The Reader from MPJI to feature a talk from Prof. Mattingly. We would like to thank Mattingly for his five years of service with our NYCJ program.
Dr. Anne Hendershott comes aboard the NYCJ team, teaching a class about New York City to all future NYCJ students and as an elective for JCS and other majors at King’s. She has written several books on politics and ethics.
Paul with students who attended his session on “God and the Newsroom” at the ACP Spring College Journalism Conference in San Francisco in February.
Student & Alumni Updates
TKC Students
Graduating senior Elli Esher is a Poynter-Koch Journalism Fellow and will be working at The Boston Guardian this coming year. Graduating senior Morgan Chittum concluded her year as managing editor of the EST and will be a Poynter-Koch Journalism Fellow at the New York Daily News this coming year. Graduating senior Taylor Dickerson will be a teacher at Great Hearts Academy in San Antonio, Tex. Graduating senior Julia Roberts aims to continue her work in fashion journalism. Graduating senior Kassidy Vavra is a reporter for The Sun of the UK, based in New York City. Graduating senior Jackson Fordyce placed 2nd in the nation in 2018-2019 for best college newspaper columnist in the CMA Pinnacle Awards for his column about technology. Fordyce, who has acted in Hollywood movies already, served as senior speaker at King’s. Graduating senior Callie Patteson completed internships at Today.com, where she wrote several viral stories that gained more than 1 million readers and served as editor of ESTv this past year. She previously interned at MSNBC.com and several other outlets. Graduating senior Mary Kathryn “Kat” Samuelsen has worked at NBC’s Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon show at NBC this past year, MSNBC and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on CBS. Rising senior Bernadette Berdychowski studied abroad in Poland last fall after completing a year as editor in chief of the Empire State Tribune. Bernadette is also now a full-time reporter at The Tampa Times in Tampa, Fla., as she finalizes her graduation from King’s. Natalie Cassese interned at American Spa magazine this past spring and works with ESTv. Lauren Bannister interned at American Spa magazine this past fall and works with the EST. Alumna Anastassia Gliadkovskaya graduates with an M.S. this May from the Columbia Journalism School and its Stabile program in investigative reporting. Wesley Parnell received a promotion at the New York Daily News this Spring. Anne Sraders was hired at Fortune magazine, where she continues to cover the stock market and economic fallout from Covid-19. Zoe Jones continues working at Newsweek’s video desk this Spring. Michael Sheetz was promoted to “space reporter” at CNBC.com and often lands viral stories on markets stories on companies such as Boeing and SpaceX. Madison Iszler continues her work at the San Antonio Express News. Jess Mathews is a reporter and editor at Financial Planning magazine in lower Manhattan. Ivan Olivo continues working at Virtue, the creative studio division of Vice Media. Leah Trouwborst, Helen Healey and Bria Sanford are all book editors and acquisition editors at Penguin / Random House. Many of our underclassmen are building experiences in internships and media outlets and landing published pieces. Meagan Clark is managing editor of ReligionUnplugged.com, an award-winning online magazine about religion that is based in the offices of MPJI. TKC alumna Kara Bettis has been hired as a features editor at ChristianityToday.
NYCJ Students
NYCJ alumna from Point Loma Nazarene University Brook Sargent was hired as a news writer at Fox 5 in San Diego after she graduated this past May. WJC alumnus and Palm Beach Atlantic alumnus Chris Moody received a Novak Fellowship for his reporting project traveling the US in a tiny house on wheels. He and his wife, Cristina, moved back to NYC in January and he took a job as a correspondent at Vice News before Covid-19 arrived and led to layoffs at Vice. Chris and Cristina are working on a book project about their journey. Chris graciously spoke to current NYJC students this semester about thriving through economic downturns and global pandemics. NYCJ alumna from Trevecca Nazarene University Maria Monteros was selected as a Dow Jones News Fund intern to work with the Nashville Business Journal this coming summer. Monteros interned at Dow Jones’ Marketwatch last summer after completing the NYCJ program, where she interned at Newsweek. Her final story about junk food culture on Instagram that she reported in Prof. Glader’s business journalism class was good enough for page one of The Wall Street Journal, where it ran as an ahed – the quirky middle column story – on Nov. 26. Bethel University alumna and NYCJ alum from 2015 Maddy Simpson graduates with her M.S. from Columbia Journalism School this month and was selected to the Dow Jones News Fund business reporting program, where she will be interning (remotely) for Employee Benefits News in lower Manhattan. NYCJ Spring 2019 alumna and Appalachian State University graduate Rachel Greenland was selected for the Dow Jones News Fund business reporting program and was set to intern at BizDen.com in Denver before Covid-19 and will be free-lancing or interning for other outlets this summer. Sonya Swink from the Fall 2016 class of NYCJ continues her studies in the Craig Newmark CUNY Graduate School of Journalism program. Taylor University and Fall 2017 NYCJ alumna Cassidy Grom works on the tech team as a developer at The Newark Star-Ledger and NJ.com this summer. Taylor University and Fall 2018 NYCJ alum Brianna Kudisch is a reporter for NJ.com. Trevecca Nazarene and Fall 2018 alumna Princess Jones has been working at The New York Post as a newsroom staffer, reporting several stories. She also interned at ReligionUnplugged in the spring of 2019. Ole Miss student and Fall 2017 alumnus Michael “Blake” Alsup is a reporter at the newspaper in Tupelo, Miss. Olivet Nazarene and Spring 2017 NYCJ alumnus Nathan DiCamillo is working at CoinDesk. Trinity Western and NYCJ Fall 2016 alumna Sarah Grochowski has been editing a newspaper in Canada and was admitted to the Craig Newmark School of Journalism this coming fall.
Thank You! To our donors and scholarship sponsors such as Roberta & Howard Ahmanson (Fieldstead & Co.), Erin Schulte Collier & Kent Collier (Good Words foundation), Frank and Susan Salinger (https://www.fssci.org) and Jaan and Sharon Vaino. We know the nation and world are navigating economic hardship. We are grateful to any friends and supporters who do wish to support MPJI with a tax-deductible donation. We are happy to discuss needs. And you can always mail a check or fill out a digital donation form here and specific a gift to MPJI: https://www.tkc.edu/donate/