Back to document

Sidebar: Fellows bring distinct voices, new stories to newspapers

11.19.01

Articles by ASNE/APME Fellows range from high school football stories by Mandi Torrez at The Island Packet in Hilton Head, S.C., to sidebars from the World Trade Center by Chan-joo Moon of the Staten Island (N.Y.) Advance.

In many cases, fellows are developing stories that employ their cultural knowledge and experience and thus illustrate the reason newsrooms need a range of voices:

  • Lisa Martinez covered a news story on immigration for the Greeley (Colo.) Daily Tribune, then related poverty in Mexico to amnesty programs, writing in an op-ed piece: “If your children were starving and the only way to put clothes on their backs and food on the table was to go North, you would in a heartbeat. I know you would.”

  • Gelasia Croom wrote a column for The Wilson Daily Times in North Carolina, after the singer Aaliyah died. “Although I stopped short of actually shedding tears, my heart has been heavy … . All this sadness and heavy-heartedness for someone we don’t know? This is because we did know her.”

    • Article by Jenna Naranjo in The Santa Fe New Mexican.

  • At The Santa Fe New Mexican, Jenna Naranjo developed a story about South Americans studying Pueblo skills, including mud plaster, alternative housing and solar energy. She described the scene: “Shirtless and covered in bright, beaded jewelry, Tobi Ituana took a break from smoking the pipe that he gripped in his mouth most of the morning and plunged his hands into a wheelbarrow full of mud. Although Ituana pretended to paint his face with his mud-covered fingers, the plaster was made specifically to cover the exterior of an adobe home.”

  • Liz Mineo talked with immigrants in the Framingham, Mass., area who are returning to their native countries because of fears since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. She found the immigrants afraid of their futures in the United States. “Not willing to take any chances, they're leaving behind the place to which they came seeking a better life, fearful of the possibility of war and tighter immigration controls,” she wrote in The MetroWest Daily News.