Student from UST's high-school journalism workshop wins $1,000 Dow Jones Newspaper Fund prize
By Dave Nimmer
Professor emeritus
UST Journalism and Mass Communication Department
When Brittany Kingbird came to the St. Thomas campus last summer for the two-week journalism workshop sponsored by ThreeSixty, she was a little apprehensive. This would be the first time she spent more than two days off the Red Lake reservation.
She need not have worried. She got along with her fellow students, most from the Twin Cities. She liked her roommates. She impressed the faculty.
And the story she wrote, about higher drowning rates among children of color, just won the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund prize for best article produced at journalism workshops across the country. Brittany will receive a $1,000 scholarship.
“This camp really inspired me to write more and think more and explore the world,” said Kingbird, now a 17-year-old senior at Red Lake High School. “I know that one day journalists are going to change the world.”
Brittany said she always had a passion for journalism, for telling stories. She particularly enjoyed writing for the opinions page of her school paper.
“My writing (for the paper) are like my thoughts put on paper,” she said in her application to the ThreeSixty camp. “But they come in order, and they make more sense.”
ThreeSixty, formerly the Urban Journalism Workshop, has operated at St. Thomas since 2001. The program is designed to find high school students of color who are interested in journalism, and then train, mentor and support them as they get into college and try to find jobs in newsrooms.
