I am choosing to follow Nicholas Fandos this semester. He currently works for the Washington bureau and is covering the actions of Congress and the Trump presidency. He graduated from Harvard in 2015 with a B.A. in History and Literature, and served as the managing editor of the university’s newspaper, The Harvard Crimson. He began working as an intern for the New York Times in 2015, before being promoting to his present position as a beat reporter.

I am particularly interested in following Fandos because of how closely he follows Congress. If I were to enter the field of journalism, I would hope to be a beat reporter following Washington, D.C., like Fandos. From the articles I’ve read of his, I believe his coverage follows the facts objectively and presents them in a manner in which the reader is able to form their own beliefs accordingly. Additionally, I am just impressed with how advanced his is in the field for being relatively young. Finally, I believe he has one of the most important in our nation as a responsible presenter of the actions of our government.

Here are two of his recent articles:

My idea for story 5 involves the Mindful Wake program surrounding mindful meditation led by The Reverend Tim Auman, the Chaplain at Wake Forest. I definitely would interview him, as well as participants in the program, and also might include another dimension about technology and mental health.

I am particularly interested in researching a black woman notable journalist. Of my choices, I have Ida B. Wells, Ethel Lois Payne, and Dorothy Butler Gilliam. All of these were trailblazers in the field of journalism especially because they are African-American women. 

Ida B. Wells, was an African-American journalist, abolitionist, and feminist who led an anti-lynching crusade in the United States in the 1890s. In her writings, she wasn’t afraid to be controversial as she wrote about the lynchings of black people and the role of white women in interracial relations.

Ethel Lois Payne was an African-American journalist. She is often known as the “First Lady of the Black Press”, she was a columnist, lecturer, and freelance writer. She was instrumental in combining advocacy and journalism through asking questions people dared not to ask. Additionally, she helped significantly during the Civil Rights Movement.

Dorothy Butler Gilliam is an American journalist was the first African-American female reporter at The Washington Post. If being the first wasn’t already good astonishing enough, Gilliam fought to have the media look more representative America by fighting for social justice and drawing attention to race relations in the American media.

Out of all of these journalists, I think I am really interested in presenting on Dorthy Butler Gilliam considering she is still alive and I will likely find more content on her than the other selected journalist.

I’m interested in Graham because of her high profile involvement in journalism, as she oversaw the Post during Watergate. She was the first woman to reach her position, so her life is quite notable and filled with attacks from men who did not accept her. Nonetheless, she worked hard in her position and that is of interest to me and the class as a whole, as standing up to powerful people who don’t like what you have to say is an important part of good journalism. -Michael Littrell

Since the class lecture that we received on photojournalism, I think that the field is overlooked as one of the most important and compelling aspects of the job. For Tyler Hicks specifically, because his main fields are conflict and foreign affairs, the affect that he has on how news is received is astonishing. We have seen a variety of photos in class that present journalists with moral and ethical debates because of the situations they are in and I think that this is a really interesting concept to explore and I would like to dive into it further. Photojournalism is really fascinating to me in the way that it is able to captivate an audience without even having to use words at first; it can change the direction of a story and shed light on things, such as conflict that Tyler Hicks covers, that we would not otherwise have insight into. For those reasons, I think that doing a project on Tyler Hicks would be very interesting and provide me with the opportunity to look at the field of journalism from a perspective that we do not explore quite as often.