CNHI, based in Birmingham, Ala., began the Elite Reporting Fellowship program in 2006. Bill Ketter, a former editor at The Eagle-Tribune (an Andover, Mass., paper which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2003 on his watch) and CNHI's current vice president of news, runs the program from his Massachusetts office. Each year, the program selects 10 fellows, who are assigned a national reporting project and given training (and equipment) to create multimedia reports for the entire chain. During that time, about four to six weeks, fellows are freed from their daily newsroom duties to focus on the project.
"We felt very strongly that good journalism is good business," Ketter, a former president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, told Tilitz. "There's been so much negative publicity in our craft about the demise of in-depth journalism, and this more vigorous journalism has almost been eliminated. [The fellowship] creates a regular flow of high public service journalism."
In addition to the quality stories produced by the program, Tilitz notes that the added equipment and expertise have transformed papers such as the Ottumwa Courier in Iowa (circ. 14,000). The fellowship experience of one of its reporters "has ushered in a new era of multimedia and live blogging, a technique the paper has used to cover a local murder trial and election campaigns," Tilitz writes. (Read more)
Here are some examples of program's projects:
- America's Highway: Pride and Peril, which looks at the Interstate Highway System's past and future
- Hooked on Gambling, which looks at the effects of the expansion of legalized gambling
- Playing Hurt, which looks at youth athletic injuries
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