Village Voice Offers Fellowships at Cronkite

Village Voice Media is partnering with the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication to offer summer fellowships in digital media for college journalism students from underrepresented groups. Six students will be chosen for the 10-week, paid summer fellowships at Arizona State University in Phoenix, near Village Voice Media headquarters. The fellows will work with newspaper professionals and Cronkite faculty to build their skills in reporting and writing, photography, video, audio and social media. They will produce original reported material for Village Voice online publications. “We’re looking for the very best underrepresented journalism students from colleges across the country for this full-immersion, hands-on program,” said Cronkite Associate Dean Kristin Gilger. “This is a unique opportunity for them to learn the very latest in multimedia skills and be mentored by some of the nation’s best teachers, writers and editors.” Program instructors will include top Cronkite faculty as well as leading news, music and food writers from Village Voice’s family of 18 websites and newspapers. Funding the partnership with the Cronkite School is part of a long-standing commitment on the part of Village Voice Media to developing underrepresented talent. “Village Voice Media is proud to renew our commitment to training students from underrepresented groups for journalism careers,” said Michael Lacey, the executive editor of the company, which publishes alternative newspapers across the country. “For over a decade, we’ve worked with underrepresented students in a more traditional setting at Northwestern University, but today we are proudly partnering with Arizona State University, a national leader in digital journalism, to more fully integrate Web training.” The Village Voice Media Digital Fellowship runs from June 1 to Aug. 6, 2011, at Cronkite’s state-of-the-art journalism school on ASU’s Downtown Phoenix campus. Fellows will be paid and housing will be provided. The program is open to students who are within one year of graduation as well as graduate students and post grads. The Village Voice program is the second fellowship for students from underrepresented groups sponsored by the Cronkite School. The school hosts a week-long fellowship program each January for top underrepresented broadcast students from around the country. The program is in partnership with the Meredith Corporation and its Phoenix television station KPHO CBS 5. Village Voice’s family of websites draw about 60 million page views per month, about a quarter of them unique. The company also distributes a total of 1.3 million newspapers per week in 14 major American cities, including 91,000 per week in Phoenix. The application for the Village Voice Media Digital Fellowship is available on the Cronkite School’s website. The deadline for applications is Feb. 8, 2011. For more information, contact email Catalina Monsalve at catalina.monsalve@asu.edu.