Ciara Bri’d Frisbie rattled off a half dozen assignments she was juggling when I bumped into the Georgia State senior in the Channel 2 Action News newsroom two weeks ago.
A class in criminal procedure was really interesting, she said, after her summer interning at Channel 2 and digging into police shootings in Georgia.
She was busy with her job as News Director for GSTV, GSU’s student TV station, and looking forward to hearing about a national scholarship award from Glamour magazine. Frisbie caught the attention of Glamour editors after she was featured in an investigative news story on Channel 2, a story she helped break for both WSB and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Her confidence and enthusiasm were a far cry from the shy young woman I first met a year ago. Journalism will do that for you.
Last year, Frisbie was part of the inaugural class of the Georgia News Lab, a year-long program in investigative reporting that culminated in summer internships at Channel 2 for her and a classmate. Two other News Lab'ers interned for the summer at the AJC.
The program helped launch each of them on promising career and educational paths, and 10 days ago, the nation’s leading online news organization recognized the groundbreaking work the News Lab is doing in the field of journalism education.
Edging out 22 other programs from around the country, and selected from nearly 200 applicants, the lab won the Online News Association’s Challenge Fund Grand Prize for the program most “likely to change either local newsgathering, journalism education or both.”
News Lab director David Armstrong, Journalist in Residence at GSU, was on hand with 2,000 other journalists Sept. 24 when the grand prize was announced at ONA’s annual convention in Los Angeles. The prize came with a $65,000 grant, and was a credit to Armstrong’s careful management of the program.
The announcement was a proud moment for News Lab students, their teacher — and the AJC and Channel 2.
The two newsrooms helped conceive the News Lab in 2013 with the twin aim of growing locally trained journalists and diversifying the field of investigative reporting, which has long been the province of white men (me included).
The program is open to the best journalism students at Morehouse College, Clark Atlanta University, Spelman College, the University of Georgia and GSU.
In 2014, the News Lab won a $35,000 challenge grant from the Online News Association, which helped the program get going. The AJC and Channel 2, with the backing of their parent entity, Cox Media Group, committed to hiring two News Lab students as summer interns in each of our newsrooms. Cox Media Group also made a separate financial commitment to the program.
The Communications Department at GSU provided classroom space, computers and a central location for students to work in downtown Atlanta.
The first year was a huge success. The students learned reporting and writing skills in investigative reporting, and produced some important work for the AJC and Channel 2.
Frisbie, then a junior, researched local campaign spending for one assignment and noticed that the amounts reported by a Fulton County commissioner just weren’t adding up.
The resulting story, reported and written with the help of AJC reporter David Wickert, revealed that the commissioner had $80,000 of unaccounted-for campaign money. The state ethics commission is now investigating that discrepancy.
Jared Loggins, a Morehouse senior, became an AJC summer intern and wrote a story with AJC reporter Craig Schneider about how Fulton had mismanaged a federal AIDS grant, crippling efforts to expand HIV testing for thousands of people.
As the AJC’s editor for the News Lab, I had fun working on these stories and watching the young reporters grow in their skills and confidence.
None of us who work with the program are naive enough to believe that all the students in the program will choose careers in investigative reporting, or even journalism.
But journalism teaches valuable skills that translate in all kinds of work. Reporters learn where to find information — about government, the legal system, the environment, politicians, you name it.
They learn how to read and analyze documents. And they learn how to ask tough, informed questions.
In August, the AJC newsroom said goodbye to Loggins and Jane Hammond, our other News Lab intern.
Loggins was off to UCLA, where he was accepted into a graduate program in public policy. After he arrived in Los Angeles in August, he sent me an excited text saying that he’d been selected for the Talent Network, a national team of freelancers who work for The Washington Post.
Hammond left for Virginia to start a reporting job at the Newport News Daily Press. If you know anything about the challenging job market for journalists these days, I don’t have to tell you how extraordinary it was for Hammond to land a full-time reporting position straight out of college.
Frisbie has two more semesters left at GSU. Taylor Carpenter, her fellow intern at Channel 2, has one more year left at UGA, where she’s in the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication.
Carpenter is the photo editor at the Red & Black, UGA’s student newspaper, and if you look closely enough during UGA home football games, you can spot her shock of red hair snapping photos from the sidelines.
This year’s News Lab class promises to be outstanding, too. New this year, the program includes two graduate students, along with 10 undergraduates from Georgia’s leading journalism programs.
On the first day of classes, I somewhat brashly welcomed the students to the best class in investigative reporting in the country.
Great news, indeed, that the nation’s leading digital journalists thought so, too.
