Borderzine 2014: Something tells me we’re in for something good
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Dear Borderzine friends,
As we begin 2014, I’m delighted to share with you changes and opportunities that are ‘a coming.’ They include a collaborative education-news media venture that builds on the successful McCormick funded Immigration Reporting Institute held at UTEP last fall, as well as a new look and redesign for our website and continuation of two successful grant-funded training workshops. The Dow Jones Multimedia Training Academy for journalism teachers from Hispanic serving colleges returns to the UTEP campus for a fifth year, and Borderzine will host an 11th annual Journalism in July workshop for high school journalists, also supported by the Dow Jones News Fund. We are also excited by plans for Borderzine to provide a weekend of training for local media professionals on how to use digital media production to create journalism content. Watch for details soon. McCormick Immigration Reporting Institute
Before going into more detail for 2014, I’d like to reflect on the successful Immigration Training Institute for 19 professional journalists and freelancers from the U.S. and the El Paso community. The journalists (which included two UTEP multimedia journalism students) engaged in hands-on training in how to use research tools for immigration reporting, learned the ins and outs of immigration policies and efforts at reform, took a tour with the Border Patrol and visited the border fence that divides the Anapra community near downtown El Paso. Although the training was important, to me the real impact began after the journalists left town and started writing immigration stories about their hometowns. Their articles, as well as those written by UTEP students in an investigative reporting class last fall, are being republished in Borderzine.