Medill’s social justice and local news partnerships: collaboration, investigation and education (CJS2022 Day 1)

9:16PM May 25, 2022

Speakers:

Stefanie Murray

Attendee

Tim Franklin

Kari Lydersen

Josh McGhee

Courtney Kueppers

Apps Mandar Bichu

Hugo Balta

Keywords:

students

collaboration

newsroom

chicago

hate crimes

pandemic

reporter

journalism

felt

project

story

success

partnerships

news

journalists

josh

people

outlets

illinois

collaborating

So, with that,

and I would like to welcome folks from my alma mater Medill at Northwestern University to talk about a conversation about a really interesting student and professional partnership that the school runs. I'll hand it over to Tim Franklin. Great.

Thank you. Thanks very much for that introduction. Can you all hear me? Okay. All right. My name is Tim Franklin. I'm the senior associate dean and the local news chair at Medill. I also run the Medill local news initiative, and the Metro Media Lab project, which we're here to talk about today. It's great to be with you. And it's great to see so many old friends in person, isn't it great to see everybody in person again. Fantastic. So we want to talk about the potential of student collaborations with professional journalists and with professional news organizations, and specifically, a program that we haven't revealed that was really all about collaboration. So with the help of a grant two years ago from the Robert R McCormick Foundation, Medill launched a project that we call the Metro Media Lab. And the lab is all about collaborating to strengthen local news, and journalism education in Chicago. We're working directly with cohorts of Chicago news organizations on consumer research, on audience engagement, experimentation for new tools, and financial strategies to bolster long term sustainability. We're also working with high school journalism educators in Chicago to grow new media programs and schools and provide training for teachers and students. It's a program we call teach for Chicago, teach for Chicago journalism. And we're connecting Medill with Chicago high schools to try to inspire folks to careers in journalism. And part of the metro Media Lab, which we're going to talk about now also includes collaborations that connect Medill students, with professional journalists on enterprise stories on major topics like drug policy, mental health and housing. These in depth solutions oriented stories provide valuable reporting experiences for our students, which we care a lot about. But they also get news outlets, stories that they might not have bandwidth to do otherwise. And Chicagoans ultimately benefit from this work, because we're shedding light on important issues. So I'm going to shut up and turn it over to our moderator. And here to lead the discussion as my Medill faculty colleague, Carrie Watterson, who heads up our social justice news Nexus, Nexus fellowship program. Before joining Medill, about nine years ago, Carrie was a staff writer in the Midwest bureau with the Washington Post. She later became a reporter for the Chicago edition of The New York Times through the Chicago news collaborative. And in addition to her teaching at McGill, and I don't know how she has time to do this, I carry also covers energy for the Midwest energy news, and writes freelance still for The Washington Post for People magazine after the PGA and Discover Magazine and others. In a side note, I would just say that Kerry's probably the most physically, that person in this room. She's a former national champion, marathon swimmer, and she still competes in in marathons and triathlons. So I would not challenge her put money in a run or a swim. So please join me in welcoming Kari Lydersen.

I didn't put that in my bio. So yeah, I mean, I've just felt really lucky I being at Medill, to work with these collaborations with students in the MFA program, and with some of the amazing local journalists and local outlets here. We got to start these collaborations about eight years ago with support from the McCormick Foundation, and then have been able to continue and build it with the solving for Chicago collaborative in the metro Media Lab. And so yeah, let me just introduce our panelists who've been part of some of the collaborations that we've done, and they're going to talk a little bit about those collaborations. And then if there's time, I have some questions for them too, or if anyone has questions. So Josh McGee, we worked with originally at the Chicago reporter, we've gotten to work with him a couple of times with students and he's a reporter for injustice watch covering the courts policing prosecution, with an emphasis on data and public records. And he's also worked for WB LN and DNA info and as I mentioned, the Chicago reporter, and coordinate Cooper's was one of our MSJ students in the social justice investigative specialization a few years ago, who I got to work with on the collaboration with Southside weekly and she's now a digital reporter and producer at WBC and has worked with WBEZ for a while even before taking on that job, and has been published in the Chicago Tribune. and the Chicago Reader and other outlets. And then apps. Nando. Erbitux is a current graduate student in the MFA program to graduate this summer in the social justice specialization. And she is doing one of these collaborations currently with Philippine Latino news with robots. Social talk a little bit about that. And ABS has done a great job covering education and other topics during her time in the program and actually was on a student reporting trip to New Orleans where she did an awesome story about the education system for Native American residents in Louisiana. And then you go balsa we're been really lucky to work with for the first time this year on one of these collaborations. He has 30 years of experience as a digital and broadcast media news executive with outlets like PBS, NBC, ABC, CBS, Telemundo, and ESPN. And he's the owner and publisher of Illinois are actually of Latino news network and Illinois Latino news. And twice the president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and also founded a not for profit organization in honor of his maternal grandmother that provides scholarships for students studying journalism. So yeah, thank you all for being here. And maybe I can ask Josh first, just to talk a little bit about the collaboration that we did. It's been three years since his collaboration, but it was a really successful fun one. So I asked him to dig into his memory and talk a little bit about that.

Yeah. So this was a project that kind of built on some of the beat reporting I was doing, I started with a pivot table of open data from the State's Attorney's Office. And basically, we looked at hate crimes, and we saw that the most likely defended were young African American men. And that didn't kind of fit with our narrative of what we thought hate crimes were. And from there, I kind of did some reporting, keeping it local, where we got this idea. Yeah, when there was a news found at the University of Illinois, and it got me thinking about my time when I was a student, I went to a school that wasn't that diverse. So it got me thinking about what how students kind of reacted to these these incidents and how they dealt with them. So basically, we were told about the class and they were looking for an opportunity we had, we had the idea to basically look at every single College in Illinois. This was a large project that I had never done something quite this big. In the scout report only had one or two reporters. Luckily, Olivia was there to organize everything for us, because otherwise this would not have been possible. But basically, we had the students come in, we wrote boilers, boilers for things like the incidents, how the schools reacted to the incidents, and their training around it. Basically, we took those where I had the students, cell for years, I hope them right, because the biggest thing about four years actually getting your boy back. So we had a lot of fun, making the phone calls, finding out who the boy was awkward sir was stalking them via the emails. And we got lots of things back, we kind of we use those to figure out what kind of focal points we should be looking in places we should be looking at. Students, they were really excited to help lawyers and public records to kind of look at, they really wanted to kind of dive into what was happening. So a lot of them may cause an interview, did interviews and gave a provide a lot of background so that we could look at the whole state of Illinois, it's very big. I think probably the best thing about having students kind of taken a project like this is they have a whole different experience than me. And they're very diverse. So they had all these other kinds of ideas of what is a hate crimes, or what should we should be looking at, and they brought that to the table. And I don't think you can really get that in a newsroom. You probably don't even have that upset. versity. And, you know, I think that was really what made this interesting was we got to look at a very vast school, I mean, their best state. And even Greece was in the class. She was at the University of Illinois when the incident happened. So we had the extra layer of student who was actually there. Um, so that was that was really

good. And that was we had, I think, seven or eight students on that team that Josh was leading. So that was a really big investigation. And he had compiled all the colleges in Illinois, I think it's like 300 or something below or more that we were looking at. So yeah, that was a pretty, pretty interesting effort. Yeah, and then Courtney had a pretty different type of collaboration compact about

Yeah, really different. Josh's is so data heavy and the series that I did, I worked with a team of Medill students last spring and we did a series for Southside weekly and nonprofit newspaper you are in Chicago, looking at secondary public health issues and neighborhoods that had been disproportionately affected by the pandemic. And this is spring 2021. And vaccines had rolled out. And we were all certain if you could remember, we were gonna have this COVID for the summer and the city was really like the tone from the city was that they were looking beyond the pandemic. But in these neighborhoods that had been disproportionately affected, it had also laid bare these preexisting things that had been there before the pandemic and the pandemic exasperated, and now the city was moving on, and they felt like they were really going to be left behind. And not only were they were behind pre pandemic, but worse. And so what we did was we looked at Green Space access in Little Village, health care access in Inglewood and food access in South Shore. And Southside weekly for people who live in Chicago will No, they did amazing data reporting throughout the pandemic, they built this tool that when vaccines were rolling out, they built this tool that showed where people were dying from COVID. And then where people in Chicago were getting vaccinated. And it just showed that the overlap was not there and really highlighted shortfalls in the city's rollout of the vaccine. But they felt like they had not had they're such a community oriented newspaper. And they felt like they have not had the opportunity as much to go out and talk to people. And so the goal of this collaboration was really to go out and tell really community focused stories and talk with a lot of folks. So that's what we did there pretty light on data, of course, incorporating the COVID data and that sellside weekly had built with these really impressive tools. But really, they were about going out and talking with people. So

thank you. And that project is actually one of the super recently this year, Courtney and the team. Yeah, and then so absent Hugo are working on a collaboration right now. So maybe, maybe Apps, you can talk about your story first. And then you can talk about sort of how that fits in with Latinos and the work you're doing.

Sounds good. So I'm currently as part of Medill, social justice news partnership working with the Chicago reporter and Illinois Latino news to investigate the enrollment gap that was caused in Latino Hispanic populations because of the pandemic. And it's very interesting, because I've never worked on a solutions journalism article before that. So my first assignment was to write an outline of the story. So I went with the typical, like, who what when approach of journalism and I wrote the issue and kind of like tacked on the solutions at the end of the outline. And Hugo was really helpful in helping me remember the four pillars of solution insurance, which is to focus on the response of the issue, which was the enrollment gap. And then what evidence has been seen and what solutions have been implemented, and so on, and so forth. And so that was something that I kept in mind when I was interviewing scholarly experts or colleges and students and asking them about what were the issues that were caused by the pandemic that caused?

That cohort, and I think it's really helpful because you can talk to all the experts that you want, and you can talk to all the professors. But it has been really enlightening to talk to the students themselves and find out their experience. And this Partnerships has been great, because I think it has given me the independence to like navigate the project on my own. But at the same time, there has been consistent communication with Hugo so I could also learn from his wisdom and expertise. So it's been really great.

She said it all right. Ditto. It's been a wonderful experience, as you could tell. It's wonderful to work with apps and certainly work with Miguel. And really collaboration is key to success for us at Illinois Latina news, which were new to this market, where we're one of five independent news outlets born in New England, where where I'm from, I moved to Chicago two years ago, and part of our part of the four pillars of our foundation is solutions journalism. And that's really kind of resetting the mindset on storytelling as a journalist, because overwhelmingly, studies show that the focus is on the problem. And if you've spent any time with regardless of the platform, listening, watching reading news, it's overwhelmingly providing a service right? You need to provide light shed light to those issues. But if that's all you're spending time Come on. Well, that's half the story. So solutions journalism proposes, let's start with what's being done about the problem, as we're talking about the problem. And in doing so, you're you're providing transparency in the process of storytelling, you're building trust with a public that, especially in the last four years in previous administration, that trust has been has been marred by a lot of misinformation. So in working with apps, it's really about drawing from the wealth of experience that she already has that she's gotten from Medill, and then applying it to other ways of storytelling. So that we're talking about engage in engagement in a way that is more bottom up, right, we're listening to what the public is looking for, as opposed to what often is a top down approach in media, where the journalists were more educating the you were going to dictate when to set the table of what you need to know. Great, thank you all.

Um, if anyone has questions, feel free to raise your hands. I have some questions for for all of them. I guess you've sort of addressed this, but I don't know if there's anything else you'd add about what are really the keys to a successful collaboration between students and professional journalists, even logistical things that might be helpful, or paper or philosophical things or anything you'd want to highlight.

I mean, with any big project, that's the most important thing is going to be organization to have the right tool or tables, usually what we use, but like, keeping it organized, and keeping all the communication together and kind of the same spot. Especially having having whatever instructions, the students are going to need handy and a Google Drive where they can easily access because you don't know when they're going to be working or when they have time. So kind of giving them the directions and things that they should be focused on in a drive where they can easily access at any time. So they can do the work when they have the time.

And that was a great learning experience. It was the first time we had used airtable working with them. And just the level of organization that Josh and his team had to keep like eight or 10 people going and organized and remembering what they were supposed to do. So that was really awesome. And a

great way that we learned from you guys.

Yeah, one thing I think I had worked before going back to grad school and being back in sort of the school environment, the thing that I liked is Medill, that has a quarter system. So these partnerships are pretty quick. They're 10 weeks, and it was, you know, it felt like every quarter, you had this 10 weeks to do a story whether it was in this partnership ship or in another capacity. But I think having that deadline on these is actually really helpful and something that you can use in your newsrooms as well. You know, we had weekly check ins, and you had to have progress week over week, and we were working towards this thing and you're trying to do something ambitious, but it's not so huge that it languishes for six months or something like that. So I think the tempo of it is actually nice, but it fits within this last framework.

I mean, I think as a student, it can be kind of intimidating when you're working in a professional setting. So what I like to do is like create a Google Doc. And so while I'm like writing, it's very helpful to kind of have you go go through the document, and then post comments and like, get like those questions to kind of ponder about the project more. And then like Courtney said, I think the weekly check ins also are super helpful when it comes to these partnerships.

The Google

Docs helps us maximize time and focus, the time that we do have together because all of us could use a little more time. So it's really important for us to to be ready to hit the ground running when we have these weekly meetings, I would add it's a relationship. And, and and I emphasize respect, too often, students are put in a position of intimidation and almost as if you're you, you should be lucky to be working in this newsroom, when they have a lot to offer the newsrooms that are too often run by by people that are disconnected to the public that they're serving. So it's it's for me as a newsroom leader, it's really like like I've said, and one of the first things that I told her was, you're in the driver's seat, my job is to help guide you, but if but what I want is to draw from what is of interest to you how you are looking at the world and specifically the assignment because we're separated by a good maybe 30 years and that I want to tap into that as much as she wants to tap into my experience. So it's a two way street relationship for the students know your self worth. You have a lot to offer for the for the newsroom leaders. Be respectful of the resource that you're getting and and be respectful of that partnership. And that's going to be key to success.

Thank you. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

So on that, on that topic, I'm wondering whether we need grace. Or whether there's some training that you have leaders to get them to kind of

really listen and accept the different perspectives that the students are bringing into the store

rather than it could be, you know, 10 years ago. Okay, you on your mentor and your mind little trainee,

I'm gonna teach you how to do journalism. So how did we, you know, change their perspective?

Yeah. How do you set up to be successful? You know, right. Now, we're in a strange time, a lot of newsrooms are still in a hybrid situation, if not remote. You know, for us, we have a we're remote. But to answer your question. And using a different example, we have a student that we're going to be working with from the zoo. And I had to go through an orientation. And I thought it was wonderful, because the students were going through their orientation, the newsroom leaders were going through one as well. And we were defining what success looks like. Some of the things some things were very basic, right? Introduce the students in the newsroom. So that one day they they're there. And then the next day, they're not right. So there's a lot that you need to think about in regards to even just basic things like introduction, and then the other ones is to really say, maximize, we've got three months with the student, let's start defining what that flight plan looks like. And tentpoles along the way, that we're going to be measuring success. And I think without without that organization, you're doomed to fail, because time goes by too quickly. So I think just what I've seen, especially in legacy media, there is a structure and how you're bringing in new employees, right, you go through orientation, you go through, you know, this is how you know, what our expectations are that same draw from that, well, in defining what success looks like for the time that you have the student so that it's clear to all and then you use that as a guide through the with the time that you have with them.

It's a good question. And from the for these partnerships, the partners we've worked with, I mean, one of the things that's so great about being based in Chicago is just all the really wonderful the whole ecosystem of you know, all the publications and organizations that are here today and a lot more. So we really, I think knew, we built these partnerships, you know, with journalists that we'd worked with before, and just tapping, like all the rich networks of connections with Medill, graduates and faculty. So you know, we really knew that we could trust our partners to really have a great, you know, collaborative, good, just good relationship with the students where they really appreciated the students being there. And but one thing that I do like about these partnerships is it's not just dropping a student in a newsroom, it is a very direct collaboration with one or two people at that newsroom. So I think that actually does a lot to avoid, like a student just being lost in the mix, or you know, dropped into a situation that they don't get, or that the newsroom doesn't get the training or guidance of how to work with the students like when you're really connecting directly with an editor or reporter or both in one newsroom and doing something collaboratively not like them giving the student orders but literally collaborating on pieces. I mean, that's about this particular program is one thing I think works really well. Yeah, feel free to raise your hand if anyone else has questions. Yeah, on the collaboration, France, I mean, obviously, collaboration is just, you know, the whole point of this summit, and so much more common and necessary these days, and that I still hear from students now. And then who are, you know, worried about someone stealing their idea or, you know, pitching an idea and getting stolen and in competition, and obviously, that is still a thing, but I think it is just really great to be teaching students in this atmosphere where collaboration between different outlets is the norm. And I know everyone here has done or at least the two journalists who've been working longer have done collaborations with other outlets in their professional roles. So I don't know if any of you could talk about you know, what makes those inter organization or inter outlet collaborations successful and, you know, maybe how students can tap into those as well.

Yeah, I

think the collaborations that work best when the communication is there, and we were doing ours, we talked a lot beforehand about what the students want to get out of it. So it wasn't just send 300 coils which I would love to help nope, sending 300 flames, but especially with the timeline and made it okay, well, we got us and the point is we get the records back so that sort of the students can can actually think about the story and where they would go with this. I think that because of that kind of process, it allowed them And to think specifically about how they could take a store away, that wasn't going to be in this project, I think gives you a lot of ideas of storytelling itself. But just kind of letting them have the space to think about what they're seeing and where they should go with it. I think that a lot of people brought different things. And they have made it kind of better, and it gave them something to take away. That wasn't just giving something to the Chicago reporter. So I feel like one of the big things is that for that communication beforehand, what are we doing? What are we trying to accomplish? Josh wants to look at hate crimes, specifically how it's going to affect the black and brown students at the schools. There's a lot of different other there's a lot of other hate crimes, there's a lot of other things that students found and saw that they could go, oh, I want to explore this deeper. I want to think about this in another arena. So I think that that was something we started with the front end like these are the things that Josh's looking for. What do you guys see what you guys want to take away? What do you want to explore? And you know, that was that was their choice? That was their choice to kind of dive in and think and dig that way. So I think that gives it so that it everyone's getting with getting something out of the experience.

Courtney, I know WBEZ obviously does a ton of collaborations. I don't know if you've been directly involved with some of those. But if you have any thoughts on what makes those successful,

Yeah, and we at WBEZ are wading our way through a big new collaboration with the Sun Times every day. So that's a work in progress. I don't have a ton of insight on that front. But I was I was going to add that. I think that as newsrooms have become more collaborative with each other, it has been a real benefit for students. I just think that newsrooms are more used to collaborating in that way that it doesn't feel as walled off for a student to collaborate with them as well, that felt a lot different from my time as an undergraduate student to a grad student in this program, it just felt a lot more accessible to work with an organization, you know, rather than being somebody who is outside and trying to pitch and never hearing back, it just it feels like it does open a lot of opportunities, hopefully to students that can be mutually beneficial. Yeah.

And even with you guys working with Illinois, Latino news, but also the Chicago reporter, even within this collaboration with that, and another student that he's working with, and that I know you have done a ton of collaborations in general,

we're collaborating with the LI BZ on on community conversations, and we're drawing from from each other. Right? The WBEZ is drawing from my experience in working with the Hispanic Latino community, on working with them on on just the resources that they have, from collecting data to also read using their platform and their brand and reaching the largest audience. And so collaboration for when I think about apps, it's about I want to expose her to as many media outlets as possible, right? Not just not just Illinois, Latino news, or Chicago reporter which I am an associate editor there, but both newsrooms are part of solving for Chicago, which is 20 plus newsrooms, and and both newsrooms are part of the Chicago Independent Media Alliance. And so those that's that's very important for her to get that exposure and develop, hopefully relationships, especially as she's thinking about what happens next. But it's also good for the public right at the core, my job is to tell stories and reach the widest audience. And I know I could do better if I collaborate with others, especially for an outlet that's new to the Chicago to area to Illinois. From a business perspective, it's a whole different story, right? Of course, there's some competition that happens in the back office. But I'm telling you, that is an antiquated way of thinking. And that is, that is that is what's dooming legacy media across the board. Collaboration is the foundation not just from a storytelling perspective and doing good for the community, but it's also a business proposition for long term systemic growth.

In the back and then there, oh, you sorry, here you're calling the back. But yeah,

Maybe to Hugo, but anybody, uh, what are you seeing as far as engagement by audiences, whether it's leadership, or something else? Or about solutions, journalism, specifically, it's more or less too early to tell.

You know, I think it's a work in progress. I think part of it is to understand it's not a it's a it's a marathon, not a sprint, but we're starting on the right foot where we are creating surveys, short surveys, and really being transparent about what we're doing. You know, we're telling the audience we want to hear I'm here. So for example, with solving for Chicago, which actually the data was great, we I think we got it in excess of maybe 500 respondents, it was very focused, right, it was about essential workers and the path forward. And what we learned was by leveraging the 20 Plus newsrooms, we really got a great response and a focus response so that then we collectively look at the data and say, Okay, we want to tell stories about essential workers in the path forward, as we continue to move away from from the pandemic. What story should we do? The audience, the publicists are helping us to find what that story should be in that focus. So I think different degrees as part of a large coalition of 20 newsrooms, absolutely, individually, I still needed some help, but different degrees of progress, but that's the path. And then you use that when when you're packaging content, you're telling the audience, this story is produced in collaboration with this larger group. And it's based on data that we collected from you. And here's the data. And this is and this is what we're doing. So being transparent, every step on the way really builds trust, as opposed to what too often happens is like, how does this story came about? You know, you're we're demystifying the process. And that's key to success.

How do you each Hi, sorry, Alison Bernstein, University of Maryland, College Park, how do you each define success in your collaborative

projects?

We give a really quick answer, but I'd love to hear from them. I think one, it's awesome. If you have a great published piece that, you know, you're really proud of, and it makes ideally make some impact and you know, gets a lot of attention. But even more importantly, is, especially from the student side, I think, is the experience like the the hate crimes piece actually hasn't been published yet. And, you know, hopefully, it'll be revived at some point. But I feel like it was such a success, because we learned so much and got other story ideas, and that the students gotten amazing, investigative education from that project. So but I'd love to hear what you all think.

Don't completion is really the always. Yeah, that's the first thing to focus on. But definitely giving people experiences that they don't have, they haven't had yet, I think, um, especially when I've been interning and learning journalism, like every outlet, I kind of learned something different, or another skill that I can take and make me a better journalist. Eventually, I think with the hate crimes project, we went downtown to the clerk's office and looked up some stuff we filed first voyeurs, we got plays back. And we looked at it, too, like giving, giving those kinds of experiences where I can take this journalism and bring it somewhere else. And I can do a bigger project that I wasn't able to do before. So just kind of those take home skills.

The project that we did was, like I had mentioned was so focused on talking to community members, and Southside weekly is really focused on their product. And so I think success for us in this project, was building those relationships and talking with people and then getting the product in their hands and going and delivering that that because that is really the focus and distribution of Southside weekly. And it meant a lot to the people that we talked to in those community members. So that felt like a real success.

I think like going into the project that was like, Okay, I want like experience and also like a publication of a piece would be really nice. But I think now talking to the students and the professors and the experts on this case, I think for me, success would be when the peace comes out, they feel like their stories and their testimonies are kind of honored and that it does justice to their experience that would be success for me.

On a personal note, it's really gratifying to listen to apps and other students, right. She's talked about a lot of aha moments. And I'm like, Yes, this is great. You know, this is exactly from as a as a journalist, and as a mentor, what I want to see, because I've experienced that I've been in apps shoes, but years ago, but I've been in those shoes and I'm, I'm the result of very selfless people. Certainly working with Modelo, it provides us resources to produce focus stories, that without that assistance, it would be very difficult for us especially as a as a startup. And then and then absolutely, it's the finished product. Right, which we won't know until later. How does that impact the community what's going to be the engagement that goes back to solutions journalism in the four pillars about focusing on response, focusing on on insights, focusing on on evidence, and then the limitations and so that's that's the long game, but there are different measures of success that that work concurrently. One summer person You know, and some are very focused on, you know, reaching audiences.

And I think the experience really is so important. I mean, if you end up with a final product product that's award winning and great, but you know, everyone hates each other at the end of it and never want to do that collaboration. Again, that hasn't happened with us. But if that did happen, you know, I wouldn't necessarily consider that a success. But just all the relationships and learning and just great experiences that have come out of all these collaborations, along with the great products, I think has, you know, it has been an awesome success. So I don't know, are we out of time? Or can we take one more question? For you? Okay. Oh, great. Okay. Yeah, thank you.

I just wanted to add on to, I think you guys are being modest about how well y'all did before the hate crimes fees. But like, also, I think one of the things that was voiced during that time, was the students felt that they were in need to be part of the group. And they definitely, like showcase that and like, the building of their constant throughout that entire time, what's really great to see, I know, he talks about self worth, but like, if you don't have a final product, you know, being able to say that, like I was able to provide peer review, or you know, edit or whatever, as a student, that really boosts your confidence, and also allows you to somewhat think of, you know, like your resume differently to, and what types of skill sets you put in there. So I think I really appreciated Josh being able to provide that space for the students to allow for them to show their skill sets from Northwestern Medill, what they were taught, that gave me was helping project manage, you know, even insights to how we could bet better, you know, our processes around the area to play a chapter and things of that nature. So your students were very, very good.

And that's valuable currency, right? Because the, for us, it's also very important to provide students real work experience, you know, you, you students are often stereotyped for having a lack of experience, but guess what? Media, we have to give them the opportunities to get the experience. So to have so for us to work with students and helping them work on their portfolio or add to their portfolio so that they, when they're when they are, you know, vying for those jobs, and they can show that they've been there. They're working has been published in, in no media, you know, Chicago reporter celebrating 50 years and all the way to start up like Illinois. That's the news. That's very important and very powerful.

Yeah, and that organization with this particular project, they crimes I talked about Olivia was a big, huge part of that, too. So I want to give her a shout out for that. And, and the way she helped the students learn. Yeah, I mean, just to build on your what you were saying about the confidence, like to see the students by employers and get denied or ignored or insulted by FOIA officers, and then to strategize with Josh and like, watch them, like figuring out how to respond and then see them go back with more confidence and knowing what to ask. And then some of these same students, you know, later on in their jobs, when they were no longer students, seeing them just being quiet masters and knowing exactly how to navigate that process. Like that is just so cool. And you could hardly get

On panels, they've been talking, you know, that's like, I know, for Josh, like, that's just like, you know, a proud dad moment, they're

being able to say that, you know, they're able to push back and whatnot, and not just recoil, but also just sort of like what they've observed, even just coming out of college and trying to get a job. You know, students are feeling very valuable because there's, they put that investment into their education. So in real time, they're really giving you more than you actually asked for, when you ask them to intern. So again, you know, kudos around the self worth, you know, comments, that's very true, and just the mutual respect because that takes it way further than just the corporation alone.

Thank you all so much. Thank you.