Cronkite Hosts Village Voice Fellows

Six college journalism students from around the country will enhance their digital media skills at Arizona State University this summer in the Village Voice Digital Media Fellowship Program.

The eight-week fellowship program, a partnership between the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication and Village Voice Media, provides real-world experience to college students, particularly those from under-represented communities, who are interested in a career in alternative media. Fellows are immersed in blogging, photography, video, audio and social media and also produce original reported material for Village Voice online publications.

The program is led by Retha Hill, director of the Cronkite School’s New Media Innovation Lab and former vice president for content for BET Interactive, the online unit of Black Entertainment Television. Instructors include top Cronkite faculty as well as the nation’s leading news, music and food writers from the Village Voice family of websites and newspapers.

“The alternative media have a long and storied history in this country,” Hill said. “It’s important to make sure the tradition continues with talented young reporters from diverse backgrounds who can write well and tell stories using all of the media available to them. The Village Voice Digital Media Fellows are outstanding journalists who will learn from some of the best editors in the business.”

The Village Voice Digital Media Fellowship Program will take place from June 17 to Aug. 10 in the Cronkite School’s state-of-the-art media complex in downtown Phoenix.

Village Voice Media is a group of 13 metropolitan newsweeklies that stretch from New York to Los Angeles, and Seattle to Miami. Highlighting long-form journalism in a magazine format, the papers mix investigative reporting, feature writing, criticism, commentary and listings. The papers reach nearly nine million readers every month and another 13 million viewers monthly online.

The Cronkite School, named in honor of the longtime CBS News anchor in 1984, prepares the next generation of journalists in both the time-honored fundamentals embraced by Cronkite and the multimedia skills necessary to thrive as journalists in the digital age. Housed in a $71 million state-of-the-art media complex in downtown Phoenix, the school is the home of the Carnegie-Knight News 21 Initiative, Cronkite News Service, Cronkite NewsWatch and the New Media Innovation Lab.

2012 Village Voice Fellows
• Uriel “Johnny” Garcia, Arizona State University
• Jason Lewis, University of Maryland
• Evelyn Ngugi, University of Texas
• Alexandra Rodriguez, Nova Southeastern University
• Lauren Saria, Arizona State University
• Mabel Suen, University of Missouri