Let’s have a round of applause for NMC student Taryn Luna!

Seriously, with so much bad news swirling around these days I am thrilled to share the wonderful news that NMC junior Taryn Luna — fresh off her stint with the New York Times Journalism Institute –(http://www.nytimes-institute.com/miami09/)– is doing us proud, once again. Actually, twice again: In one week!
The first honor for Ms. Luna, a member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, is that she is a finalist for UWIRE 100’s Top Collegiate Journalists, described on their website as “the 100 most promising college journalists. They are already the best and brightest and are making their mark as they hone their skills with an eye toward becoming tomorrow’s top professionals.”
Check it out: http://www.uwire.com/UWIRE100/uwire100.html
The second piece of big news announced last night is that Ms. Luna was selected for a Snowden Internship at the Gresham Outlook this summer. Pete Peterson, who runs the Snowden program out of the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication, told me they had 57 applicants and conducted 29 interviews, and that Taryn was an excellent candidate they were thrilled to select.
The highly respected Snowden internship — named for and funded by the family of famed Oregon newspaper editor Charles Snowden — is a 10-week, paid internship placing top Oregon journalism/media students in newspapers around the state.
http://jcomm.uoregon.edu/~tbivins/SnowdenWeb/web-content/Links/internship.html
I’d love to see us promote, publicize and support Ms. Luna’s extraordinary run of success in all possible ways.
Besides all of this great news, the reason I so deeply admire Taryn is that without any fanfare, just pure hard work and a tremendous empathy and nose for news, she has been walking the walk of journalistic diversity by telling the stories in The Barometer of a wide range of students of color on campus whose lives and complexities had otherwise remained silenced. It is for this kind of crucial reporting, storytelling and interviewing prowess, that I am most proud.
Here are two recent examples of such stories:

http://media.barometer.orst.edu/media/storage/paper854/news/2009/02/26/News/Riley.Makes.Name.For.Himself.At.Osu-3649495.shtml

http://media.barometer.orst.edu/media/storage/paper854/news/2009/02/19/News/very-Outspoken.Warren.A.Leader.Through.Involvement-3637883.shtml

Here she is in a video interview for The New York Times Student Journalism Institute:

www.nytimes-institute.com


I hope you’ll join me in congratulating Taryn for her excellent work, her many successes, and her consistent ability to use new media tools to rise to what remains a very old, still noble calling.
–Pam

L