Adviser Update Spring 2012 | Page 3

SPRING 2012 ADVISER UPDATE LETTER Covering big issues N AT I O N A L desk, she copy edited articles on New York City and the region including the scandal involving Congressman Anthony Weiner and New York’s passage of the gay marriage act. Her political science grounding was a huge help. She traveled to the Netherlands for her senior thesis about a political party there and interviewed voters in Dutch, her mother’s native language, which she also studied at Columbia. “When I read political stories I had a sense of why I needed to check factually,” she says. Her experience covering the business impact and legal battles over Columbia University’s expansion into the Manhattanville News Fund awards $432,000 in 2012 grants The board of directors of the Dow Jones News Fund has approved $432,000 in grants and operating expenses for its 2012 programs that include professional internships this summer for college students, digital training for journalism professors and workshops for high school students. The Fund, which has been successfully promoting careers in journalism for more than a half century, expects to provide more than 70 paid internships for college juniors, seniors and graduate students in its news, sports, digital editing and business reporting programs. To prepare students for their summer jobs, it will operate six Centers for Editing Excellence on university campuses across the country and a training center in business reporting at the New York headquarters of Dow Jones & Co., a unit of News Corp. The budget also includes $42,000 for training programs in digital media for faculty at historically black colleges and universities and at institutions with large Hispanic enrollments. These will again be held at Western Kentucky University directed by Dr. Pam Johnson and at the University of Texas at El Paso under the direction of Dr. Zita Arocha. A major aim of this effort is to provide journalism professors with the skills they need to produce more and better qualified applicants for News Fund internship programs and professional news organizations. “At a time when news organi- zations are facing serious financial and technological challenges, our internship programs help ensure that the next ge