Not our graduation, but Prof. Sig Gissler recommends this short AP story about Pulitzer Prize-winner David McCollough’s commencement address at Boston College:
“Please, please do what you can to cure the verbal virus that seems increasingly rampant among your generation.”He said he’s particularly troubled by the “relentless, wearisome use of words” such as like, awesome and actually.”
Photo on right: Wednesday, May 21, 12:10 pm - J-schoolers at the main university ceremony, complete with Reuters-branded beach ball. PHOTO: Craig Hettich. See a year’s worth of Student Affairs photos.
The following awards were presented on May 20 and the winners were acknowledged again at the main graduation ceremony on May 21. Here’s an explanation of how the awards are selected.
PULITZER TRAVELING FELLOWSHIPS & EIBEL AWARD for the top six students in the Class of 2008 (another slideshow below):
PULITZER FELLOWSHIP WINNERS:
Eliza Browning - class valedictorian
Lam Thuy Vo
Robert Jacob Corey-Boulet
Ailsa Wei-tan Chang
Molly Anne Birnbaum
David Marcus Eibel Memorial Scholarship: Srividya Rao
The M.A. Program Prize:
Arthur Harris Award for Best M.A. Thesis: Dorian Sanae Merina
runner-up: Don James Duncan
runner-up: Jacques Solomon Menasche
Award & Winner(s):
Baker Award for Bronx Beat: Katherine Santiago & Stephen Beardsley
Baker Award for CNS: Srividya Rao
Baker Award for Magazine Workshops: Alexa Taylor Schirtzinger
Balakian Award for writing about literature: Adam Weinstein
Blood Award for reporting: Carolina Joan Astigarraga
Brown Award for history of journalism: Rachel Clare Rosenthal
runner-up: Robert Jacob Corey-Boulet
runner-up: Daniel Luzer
Criticism Prize: Ronni J. Reich
Documentary Workshop Award: Aleksandra Halina Michalska
Editing Award: Thomas Arthur McCarthy
Greer Award for financial writing: Richard John McRoskey
Hechinger Education Journalism Award : Elizabeth Cristina Berry
Hechinger Education Journalism: Sarah N. Lynch
Horgan Science 1st prize: Daye Kim
Horgan Science 2st prize: Euna Lhee
Horgan Science 3rd prize: Erin M. Carlyle
Horgan Science 3rd prize: Olga Marie Pierce
Joan Konner Award for Best Broadcast Student: Megan Courtney Chuchmach
Louis Winnick Prize for RWI Writing: Anup Kaphle & Sarah Lynch
Lynton Fellowship in Book Writing: Garin K. Hovannisian
Lynton Fellowship in Book Writing: Jennifer Miller
Mencher Award for superior reporting: Stokely Baksh & Renee Feltz
Lars Erik Nelson Award for national affairs: Ailsa Chang
Lars Erik Nelson Award for national affairs: Eliza Cooke Browning
New Media Workshop Award: Lisa M. Biagiotti
New Media Workshop Award: Anup Kaphle
Nightly News Workshop Award: Eliza Cooke Browning & Megan Chuchmach
Radio Workshop Award: Margaret Julia Messick & Ailsa Chang
Robert Harron Award (”nice guy/nice gal” prize): Alexander James Sundby
Sackett Award for Law Class: Adam Edmund Hirsch
Sander Award for social justice reporting: Alexandra Louise Haugen Horowitz
Taylor Award for best international student: Anup Kaphle
TV Magazine Workshop Award: Sharona Sarah Coutts
Weschler for international reporting: Nadja Drost
Weschler for local reporting: Casey O’Connor Lyons
Weschler for national reporting: Renee Kathrine Feltz & Stokely Baksh NOTE: Part-time students Sumi Aggarwal and Margaret Ballantyne, who are graduating this year, won awards last year.
The winners of the two awards presented by the students:
SPJ Teacher of the Year: Bruce Porter
SPJ Student of the Year: Lam Thuy Vo
List of Students Graduating with Honors
Margaret “Coco” Ballantyne
Elizabeth Berry
Molly Birnbaum
Eliza Browning
Erin Carlyle
Ailsa Chang
Megan Chuchmach
Robert Corey-Boulet
Sharona Coutts
Lawrence Delevingne
Michael Gadd
Garin Hovannisian
Jessica Leber
Thomas McCarthy
Margaret Messick
Jennifer Miller
Neilesh Munshi
Alexis Nunes
Nicholas Phillips
Benjamin Protess
Srividya Rao
Linzi Sheldon
Gregory Simmons
Susan Sipprelle
Lam Vo
More photos of our top six students. PHOTOS: Rebecca Castillo
TRANSCRIPT Commencement 2008
Remarks by Dean Nicholas Lemann
Columbia Graduate School of Journalism
There are two things everybody knows about what they teach in journalism school. One is the five W’s—who, what, where, when, why—that every story must address, and the other is that if a dog bites a man, that’s not news, but if a man bites a dog, that is news. What we teach at Columbia Journalism School sometimes gets a little more complicated than that, but, nonetheless, the old bromides have a certain timeless appeal.
The graduation-speech version of the dog bites man story is telling students who are about to receive degrees that they represent the future. In deference to journalistic standards, I shouldn’t do it here. But I can’t help myself.
This is my fifth Commencement as dean. In that short time, the mood of our profession has changed profoundly. There are a number of reasons why, but the main one is the manifold effects of the Internet. The Internet has a nearly miraculous power to put the ability to publish, and to receive, journalism into the hands of untold millions of people all over the world. For more sophisticated practitioners like many of the people in this auditorium, it gives journalists a greater variety of means of conveying information than we have ever had before. But at the same time, the Internet has clearly eroded the economic basis of at least the corner of journalism into which this school has traditionally sent the plurality of its graduates, the American big-city daily newspaper.
When Columbia Journalism School opened in 1912, most American cities had several daily papers—certainly New York did—and there was no radio or television journalism. Through the twentieth century the newspapers died one by one, casualties of competition or suburbanization or the arrival of new-media competition, but the net result in most cities was a small number of papers that looked quite secure.
The big American newspaper of the late twentieth century was, it seems now, an odd institution, a kind of museum of all the historical phases of journalism, from partisanship (on the editorial page) to pure entertainment (in the comics and horoscopes) to serious political reporting. It was the most efficient way for people to get a big packet of information in one place. Even today’s graduates will remember the days when, if you wanted to find out who had won a ball game, or when a movie was playing, or by how much someone had won an election, you naturally picked up the newspaper. And, in the realm of business, if you were an auto dealer or a department store owner, or an individual engaged in small-scale commerce, the newspaper was the best means of getting people to buy what you were selling. Remember? And, because of the immense plant, equipment, paper, printing, and delivery costs that publishing a newspaper entailed, people who were already in the business were well protected from new competition.
Well, none of that is true any more. Most of the individual aspects of a traditional newspaper are available on the Internet, for free. Newspapers are still producing great quantities of original information, thanks to the hard work of people like you, but they no longer have local quasi-monopolies as sources of information. Their audiences are now primarily on the Internet—that wasn’t the case just a few years ago. And, even more recently, on the Web the lines between the various originating media have started seriously blurring. On the front pages of newspaper Web sites, you’re starting to find what we would recently have taught as television stories—video and audio presentations a few minutes long. Television sites publish what we teach as newspaper stories—stories made up only of printed words, without images. Magazine sites publish animated cartoons. And so on. The tectonic plates underlying our profession—those traditional categorical divisions by type of news, by news medium, by geography—are palpably, and rapidly, rearranging themselves.
Today, more of you have definite plans that entail paid employment in journalism than had such plans when I first stood at this podium five years ago. How can that be? Much of the credit is due to the great work our Career Services office does, but it’s also that employers want you because you’re energetic, because you have skills that people already in newsrooms don’t have, and perhaps also because you aren’t so wedded to doing things the way they’ve always been done in journalism.
You soon-to-be graduates are a diverse lot. You come from all over the world, work in every news medium, and cover the whole range of complicated subjects–but every one of you is a reporter: You know how to gather information, primarily through in-person interviewing, and to present it accurately, fairly, and engagingly. I would urge you, however, not to take it for granted that the best way to present information is an 800-word, all-text, pyramid-style news story—a method of presentation that grew up in the nineteenth century and dominated our profession for most of the twentieth, but may not in the twenty-first. And, as you’re well advised to be creative about how to present each individual story, the news organizations you work for are going to have to be similarly creative about figuring out, in the aggregate, what package of material they are presenting. It is going to have to be something unobtainable elsewhere—a rich mix of information about a community or a subject that the news organization’s Web site puts together more powerfully and efficiently than anybody else. It is not going to look just like the package of material that populates a newspaper now.
Inventing this is your task. You can’t avoid it—the old way doesn’t work any more—but it’s a far more creative, challenging assignment than what was handed to my generation when we went to journalism. Our job was to improve on the old model. Your job is to create a new model. You shouldn’t be daunted by this: newspapers in particular, and news in general, have been changing in non-incremental ways for three centuries. Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette and Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World (the profits from which endowed this school) had almost nothing in common except that they were printed on cheap paper and distributed in cities, and neither had much in common with a big-city newspaper today. On your watch, newspapers will be primarily digital, but the primary task for you is not to switch delivery media, it’s to invent a new social compact with a community around the gathering and presentation of information.
I suppose that qualifies as a man bites dog story—but it’s still contained within a dog bites man story, which is that you are leaders who hold the future of journalism in your hands. Sorry, it’s unavoidable. Have fun with it.
- - -
And here are the remarks Dean Lemann made when he introduced the Journalism students at the main university commencement in front of all the other schools, recipients of honorary degrees, etc - the tradition is to have some fun with this introduction (over the top is the norm from the various deans):
Mr. President, surely you must wish sometimes that everybody believed in free speech as completely as you do.
Well, sir, there is an easy way to achieve that happy state of affairs: Just make sure that the entire public discourse is based on the rock-solid reporting produced by the magnificently well-trained, hard-working, brilliant company of women and men I have the honor to present to you today.
Candidates of the Faculty of Journalism.
They are global. They are Webby. They are intellectually confident. Most, or possibly all, of the world’s problems would disappear overnight if only people would give full attention to their hard-earned facts and well-reasoned interpretations.
And they have completed the nearly insuperable requirements for the degrees of Master of Science, Master of Arts, and Doctor of Philosophy.
I humbly beg you, sir, to grant them this degree along with the rights and privileges thereto attached.
o o o o o
TRANSCRIPT
Remarks by Yian Huang, J2008 Class President
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Dean Lemann, distinguished faculty, treasured guests, … and FELLOW GRADUATES OF THE CLASS OF 2008.
Graduates … Graduates … What an exciting world we are being launched into! There are so many great subjects for us to cover: Painful ones, joyful ones. There are disasters, human stories, war, peace and … perhaps even a scandal or two waiting to be discovered.
We are now a part of the best profession in the world—the one that gives us an excuse to ask people to let us into their lives and their homes; to tell us their intimate stories. And if we ask with “Joyful Entitlement,” as Professor Gissler taught us, people say yes.
We are the next generation of leaders of journalists. Right now, we look at journalists who inspire us, and we think we are merely students, or interns. But you know what, they all look at us, and they expect us to lead.
We have been so honored to have spent the last year at Columbia—the best journalism school in the world. We have reported on the diversity of New York City, a place that many say is the center of the universe.
Ok, that’s the fun bit. Now we’re going to discuss the serious part, which is about WORKING TOGETHER.
Our profession gives us a real opportunity—and thus an obligation—to change the world, by deciding what’s news, as Herbert Gans wrote.
So what do we want to change? What are our big dreams? What if we were the heads of the NY Times or CNN, or what if we had a couple of Pulitzers under our belt? What would we use our voice to say then? Look around this room. Look at the person in the seat next to you, the one in front of you blocking your view. In 20, 30 years, we as a class, we’ll have those things. What then? And then the obvious question is, why wait till then? Use our voices now. Yes, we might have to cover community board meetings starting out, but never lose sight of why we got into this in the first place.
For me, as a conflict photographer I’ve found that documenting—and almost glorifying—violence with my photos might not lead to peace, as I wish it might. News is not just about the conventional “If it bleeds, it leads.” We should strive to uncover the greater complexity of the stories we cover and challenge the established view.
So here’s the “nut” of this speech: To accomplish anything great, we need to harvest the power of the group. As individuals, we can only do so much.
So, stick together. Being unstoppable in the face of the adversities we are certain to face is so much easier with the help of our friends. We are our own best resources:
— We have:… the largest ever PhD graduating class of 6 students, who are our resources in macro trends in media.
— We have Knight Bagehot fellows who have enriched our conversations with their experience, and showed us that learning never stops.
— We have M.A. students who have given up established careers to study with us and cover Arts, Business, Politics.
— And we have the diverse and international M.S. class, who are already trailblazing new ways of telling stories.
Find a collaborator from this group. We can’t do everything ourselves. It’s more effective to work together than be the jack-of-all-trades one-man/woman-mobile-journalist/video/photographer/blogger that the industry seems to want.
Look at how the class came together when Ahmadinejad spoke on this stage last September. We got 30 reporters together to create a blog. We had print pieces, we had video, we had audio slideshows. We killed this story. And we got 165,000 visits in 48 hours.
Look at what we’ve survived together this year: the freezing basement and the horrible experience of the toilets there. We survived not having coffee for an unconscionable amount of time. And don’t get us started on the mythical Argentinean glass that’s being flown in from Paris by way of China. Last I heard, the cafe will be ready in Aug. but that’s what they told us last spring too.
PARENTS IN THE AUDIENCE, so sorry to tell you, that while it is true that this has been a tough year for us, WE ARE NOT DETERRED from this profession. Not in the slightest.
As president of the class, I have the privilege of speaking on behalf of all the students. Dean Lemann, a heartfelt Thank You to you, your faculty and staff, for all your time and teachings that you have imparted to us so very generously. May we be as generous to those coming after us.
Ms. Gross, thank you for coming. It’s a wonderful privilege for us. Since 1973, All You Did Was Ask Questions, if I may paraphrase the title of your book. We would like to ask: If you had only one person left to interview and only one question, who would it be and what would you ask?
A special shout out to adviser Rebecca Castillo and the SPJ Board, the tireless students who labored on behalf of all of us to make it a great experience for one and all. Please stand up and be recognized. Thank you.
Last, and certainly not least, we should all acknowledge our parents. I’m going to ask everyone to stand up, turn around, and show them our appreciation.
When you leave today, find something nice to say to your own parents;
(for me): Dad, for pushing me to do my best always;
and Mum, for teaching me the true meaning of love;
I am only here today because of both of you, so thank you.
